November 14, 2022

Two contrasting programs this weekend: Mozart's Marriage of Figaro Friday night at the Benedum, and Tchaikovsky's Pathétique symphony at Heinz Hall yesterday afternoon. I'd seen Figaro before, and will see it again if the opportunity presents itself, cuz LOLing multiple times at an opera is pretty bloody rare. I'd never heard the Tchaikovsky symphony; and while I'm normally not a yuge fan of big gushy Romanticism, I found this work really moving, perhaps because it was impossible not to hear it in the context of the composer's looming death. The passage from the melancholy of the first movement to the the levity of the second, the jubilation of the third, and the bleakness of the fourth, with the dying pulse of the double basses at the very end, suggested a dying man raising himself for one last celebration, then succumbing in the end. Just wow. (NB: The first of the two pix is actually from Figaro. It's dark because I thought to take it just as the lights were dimming at the end of the intermission. Whoops.)