Mozart, Beethoven, etc.

A couple weeks ago we all headed into the Kennedy Center to hear the NSO play Mozart's Jupiter" and last Thursday Katka and I returned to hear them do Beethoven's "Eroica." Two great symphonies!

And the orchestra did a fine job with both (though better with the Beethoven than with the Mozart). The violin section usually needs the first 10 minutes of a piece before it gets in sync -- until then, they're all playing the right notes but unfortunately they're all playing them at almost the right time. (I blogged about this sort of thing once before. This kind of playing is what some people describe as "lush"; it strikes me as fuzzy and muddy and annoying.) Anyway, I didn't hear any of it in the "Eroica" performance. It was lovely from beginning to end.

A performance of Schumann's first piano concerto, performed by Ingrid Fliter, was on the same bill with Mozart. Lovely music, very well played, though I remember that at the time it seemed to me that the conductor and the soloist had different notions about the tempi. When soloist and orchestra played together, they accommodated each other, but when the soloist um, er, soloed the pace seemed to change -- and for the better, I might add.

On the same bill with Beethoven was Richard Strauss's "Metamorphosen." I'd never heard it before; I thought it was very good.

We're all going back in next week to hear Shostakovich and Bruckner.

So, all this concert going must mean that we've got money to burn, right? Well, no. What we've got is a way to get half-price tickets (through goldstar.com). To make an outing even less expensive, there's meter parking for $2 on E Street, a 5 minute walk from the concert hall, so we don't have to pay the outrageous $20 that the Kennedy Center charges.

And the half-price tickets usually get us pretty good seats. Last thursday, for example, Katka and I were on the "orchestra" level, in row Z -- maybe two-thirds of the way back, and off to the side -- the red dot in the picture:

As I say, pretty good seats. But while we were waiting for the performance to begin, I noticed a lot of empty seats in front of us, so we approached the head usher: "Hi, we're in row Z and we notice there are a lot of empty seats up closer, . . . " And the head usher replied: "This is you're lucky night" and he wrote us new tickets on the spot, so we were able to enjoy the concert from M!

(When we moved, Katka said to her new neighbor, "Wow, these are wonderful seats!" and he replied, "Well, you get what you pay for." Little did he know, that sometimes you get way more than you pay for.)