November 5, 2023

The skeptical pre-concert selfie notwithstanding, my first PSO concert of the new season was wonderful. The program consisted of three chestnuts from the orchestral repertoire: Mozart's final symphony ("Jupiter"), Tchaikovsky's violin concerto, and Ravel's "La valse." I have to be in the right head space to appreciate music from the "classical" period, including Mozart's, and I wasn't quite there today, but even so the final movement of the "Jupiter" symphony was pretty exhilarating. I've really warmed up to Tchaikovsky in recent years, and the guest soloist, Bomsori Kim, made it easy to like this piece. (I was reminded again how magical witnessing true virtuosity is.) I think it always helps to have at least a little historical and/or biographical context for a piece, and knowing that Tchaikovsky composed this piece in the aftermath of the dissolution of a train wreck of a marriage (it lasted just three months) and a suicide attempt added a lot of resonance to its passion. This point about context was even more a propos where the Ravel piece was concerned. It's a pretty effing amazing piece of music considered simply as a product of the modernist period, but knowing that it was conceived as a tribute to Johann Strauss and the Vienna of the later 19th and early 20th centuries ("valse" = "waltz"), but wasn't composed until right after WWI, turns the piece into a musical depiction of the cataclysmic collapse of an entire world -- a real revelation! It was by far the shortest of the three pieces on the program at just c. 13 minutes, but to my ear, the most impactful.