Brahms-Schoenberg !

Last Thursday I had the great good fortune to escort two lovely ladies to a terrific NSO performance of Schoenberg's orchestrated version of Brahms's Piano Quartet.  Fun and exciting!  When it was finished, my cheeks were sore from smiling so broadly for so long!  (You can get a glimmer of the fun in this snippet by the Berlin Philharmonic.)

The experience was all the more enjoyable for being so unexpected.  In the past, I'd found a lot of Brahms to be "nice," but not much more than that.  As for Schoenberg, I knew him only by his twelve-tone work, which, with a single exception, I'd always found to be unlistenable.*  The two of them together, however, were wonderful!

The Brahms/Schoenberg was also the more enjoyable because the two pieces that preceded it on the program were such disappointments:

• Haydn's Symphony 72 was pleasant, and it spotlighted half a dozen excellent soloists (which surprised me because I didn't realize Haydn -- or, indeed, any of the classical composers -- used soloists in symphonic pieces).  But really, now, we expect a lot more than "pleasant" from Haydn, don't we?
• Schumann's cello concerto was positively unpleasant. Much as I love the sound of a cello, and much as I enjoy virtually everything else I ever heard by Schumann, this piece just seemed to ramble on and on and never get anywhere -- rather like Sibelius (whom I can't stand).  And the soloist was fabulously annoying with his over-the-top dramatics: hand over heart, eyes to the heavens, tossing his long hair this way and that in time to the music, et cetera. Ugh!

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* My spell checker objects to "unlistenable."  Too bad.  If it's not a word, it should be. [Update: I guess it is a word.]