After a lifetime slumming, I've been up to my eyebones in culture lately. On Christmas Eve, as I wrote about in my Christmas Day post, we took a field trip to the Seoul Arts Center to see the exhibit of great paintings from the Philadelphia Museum of Art. (Show me the Monet!)
This past Saturday evening was the school's biennial performance night, sort of a talent show with no judging. There were a dance group, a variety of instrumental performances, several one-act plays, and a short movie. Considering what a small talent pool we have (fewer than 80 kids), they did themselves proud.
But I'd have to say the performances were maybe even a little better last evening. The school was one of the sponsors of the Gangnam Symphony Orchestra's New Year concert and offered us free tickets. Several of us braved the tundra to make our way back to the aforementioned Seoul Arts Center, arriving precisely on time to hear my favorite piece of classical music, Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man. (I gots that one on my iPod.) They followed with some Tchaikovsky, a little Liszt (which they didn't check twice), a can of iced coffee at intermission-- wait, that was just me-- and Dvorak's New World Symphony. As an encore they did Rossini's William Tell Overture and then... um, something that wasn't Rossini's William Tell Overture; I think it was about Tonto.
I'm not much more of a commonsewer of classical music than I am of art. I do like a lot of the stuff I recognize, though that isn't much. I knew the Copland, some of the Dvorak (the part that goes "bom bom bom BOM bom bom bom bom bombom BOM") and the Rossini. Oh, and I can pronounce "Dvorak".
I'm glad I went; I've seen Baryshnikov dance, I've been to the Louvre (and the loo), I've seen the RSC do Romeo in Stratford-Upon-Avon, but I'd never been to a classical concert before. The sound quality was excellent, as far as I could tell the musicians were very fine, the pianist had ludicrously long fingers, and the soloist on the cello sure was purty. Oh, and every time the orchestra stopped playing I knew not to clap until everybody else did. What more could I have asked?
Oh, and... what do you call a band of orcs?
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an orc-estra!
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