My Personal Musical Event of the Year 2010

[Peter1953]

What is your personal memorable musical event of the year? Attending a CD recording? Listening to an opera in a concert hall? The first listening of a totally unknown musical gem? A new discovered unsung composer? Playing an instrument together with friends for an audience? A meeting with a very renown singer or soloist?
It's probably a lesser interesting topic, but nevertheless, please let eachother know.

My personal event this year is visiting the house of Chopin's birth in Żelazowa Wola, and listening to a piano concert given in the room where Chopin was born. Unforgettable.

[Alan Howe]

For me it would be a toss-up between Zandonai's Francesca da Rimini at Opera Holland Park, London and Cilea's Adriana Lecouvreur at Covent Garden. If forced to choose, it'd be the former because my daughter works there and was so proud to be our hostess for the evening among the moneyed patrons...

Outside the concert hall, it'd be meeting Giandrea Noseda and watching him record Rufinatscha 6. Unforgettable.

[thalbergmad]

Mine is not so impressive.

Visiting Elgar's House and playing me new Plectrum Banjo.

How the hell did Elgar ever play a round of golf with those clubs???

Thal

[Alan Howe]

Mine is not so impressive. Visiting Elgar's House...

Oh I don't know. I've never been there...

[eschiss1]

... if I'd been in Brisbane etc. I expect I know what mine would be (after the 22nd of the month.)  As things stand, since I don't get out much lately, my answer is comparatively low-key I think - being introduced to the music of Jan Zimmer (Slovak, b 1926), and the symphonies of Robert Hermann (other works come to mind but those especially offhand just this last year).

[Pengelli]

Me too,eschiss1! And they wouldn't process my passport in time,would they?
As to meeting,Noseda. I'm impressed! I 'met' Sir Geraint Evans,the welsh opera singer,when I was a teenager. Not formally,though! He was performing at my school,and I was waiting outside in the car park for my father,in his Renault 4; a terrible rust bucket with a hole in the floor,(you could see the road through it). There was this big Rolls Royce parked next to it,and Geraint Evans came out to the car. I looked at him,he looked at me,then smiled and said,'Oh,I'm sorry,I thought you were waiting for me',and hopped into his Roller!
  Hope this doesn't cut across your thread!

[Alan Howe]

Meeting Noseda didn't seem a big deal. He simply came into the recording studio from where I was watching the recording. He's the opposite of a prima donna, was on first-name terms with his recording team and was easy to talk to. No wonder the BBC Philharmonic love him...

[petershott@btinternet.com]

Apologies - once again way off thread, but Pengelli's lovely anecdote made me recall in incident in my adolescent years. When I was 16 I'd already decided that Brahms was infinitely preferable to Gerry and the Pacemakers (remember them?!) I used to roam all over the place to attend concerts (far less expensive in those days and properly supported by public funds). Not yet being 17 I was not eligible to sit the driving test and thus able to borrow my father's car. So roaming to concerts was undertaken on my motorbike.

Now motorbikes in winter call for heavy padded jackets, great gauntlets, leather leggings, goggles etc in addition to a statutory crash helmet. I journeyed to Wolverhampton (eeekks) Civic Hall to hear Adrian Boult conduct Brahms 4. Glorious. After the concert, and all togged up and probably having the appearance of a mindless thug straight out of Clockwork Orange, I took a short cut to the car park, known to me but not to most of the audience, down a small corridor behind the stage area. Galloping around a corner, head still full of music, I ran straight into the then quite frail and elderly Sir Adrian. Such was the sudden shock at coming face to face with one of my idols I did not have the wit to apologise. Poor, poor man: he had such a look of sheer fright and probably thought he was about to be mugged by some lumbering oaf. Always feel very uncomfortable when I think of it!

Couldn't resist the story - and now back to the thread!

Peter

[mbhaub]

As an audience member: going to Dallas and here them give a passionate reading of Schmidt's 4th symphony.
As a cd collector: getting to know the music of Pancho Vladigerov (thanks CPO!)
As a performer: getting to play the contrabassoon solos on Ravel's Mother Goose and Dukas' Sorcerer's Apprentice on the same concert -- and not screwing up once!

[giwro]

Hmmm....

I'd have to say

As an audience member: Hearing Paul Paray's Mass this summer at the Washington National Cathedral (part of the 2010 American Guild of Organists Convention).  It was 30 minutes of High calorie romantic/impressionist feast/lush harmonies..... it ends on a ppp unison "amen" Sheer magic.
As a performer: Finally mustering the courage to play for my peers in a members recital... I felt like I played well and I really wasn't nervous
As a composer: Beginning work on an imposing set of pieces (numerically speaking) and feeling greater inspiration than I ever have before.
As a collector: Visiting the Library of Congress in Washington DC and getting to see and photograph several rare and unpublished scores.

IMHO one of my more memorable years musically...

- G

[Pengelli]

'Petershott'. Think yourself lucky you didn't give Sir Adrian a cardiac!

[jerfilm]

Two things for me.  A most wonderful performance of the Bruckner 7th at Orchestr Hall in Minneapolis.  The 7th was the first exposure I ever had to Bruckner, about 40 years agp in old Northrup Auditoreum on the University of Minnesota campus.  A terrible venue that held upwards of 5000 and had the acoustics of the Grand Canyon.  Or worse.  What I never forgot was the number of patrons that walked out in the middle of that performance.  And I remember thinking that I was hearing one of the most beautiful pieces that I'd ever heard the orchestra play and how could these idiots be walking out??  And now, in 2010, the hall is packed for a Bruckner symphony.......

The second is just the plethora of wonderful CDs of unsung composers.  We are so very fortunate to live in the time that we do.  And that there are enough of us interested to make it at least marginally financially possible to record all of these wonderful works.

[eschiss1]

I do regret that even before I was born (1969) the performance of Mahler's and Bruckner's symphonies had apparently long ceased to become the typical classical musicgoer's event of the season or, at least, anything out of the ordinary- indeed, perhaps, commonplace in several too many senses (well, maybe not by 1969, with more than one or two conductors still alive who could still get very un-common performances of these works out of orchestras- again, so I gather.)
Apologies for interruption.

(I heard a Michigan college orchestra perform Mahler 5 in 2009 on the local university campus, I think, and that may have been my classical musical event of that year, or one of three at most- I think Hamelin came to Ithaca earlier that year too, trying to remember, and since I was fortunate enough to catch him playing the Alkan symphony here, that would have to count too.)

(Actually, on re-thinking, my musical event of 2010 was a musical- hearing/seeing A Little Night Music on Broadway in early September.  I was restricting myself too unreasonably to classical-broadly-speaking music- though of course Sondheim chose that title for several reasons...)

[chill319]

Hearing a run-through of a richly dramatic new opera by Curtis Bryant, "An Anarchist," based on the Joseph Conrad story of the same name. Like Bryant's other works, it is tonal. It is slated for production in Atlanta in the 2012-13 season.

[edurban]

Ambroise Thomas' Hamlet at the Metropolitan opera (and subsequently on tv several times.)  Great cast, in this most successful French synthesis of drama, character, and the structural demands of the 5 act French Grand Opera.  The most successful synthesis of those structures and qualities by any composer--French or not--is, of course, Verdi's Don Carlos, but Thomas comes much closer to that masterwork than his reputation would suggest possible.  A galvanizing night of theatre, with Simon Keenlyside unforgettable in the title role...

David