My Belated Musical Education

I've been around music my entire life (my mom is a pianist, my dad sings in a choral society, and my brother can play whatever instrument he picks up), but somehow I didn't get the gene. Or at least for me it showed itself in my love of ballet and other dance, rather than an interest purely in music. As a result, I've heard live classical music more times that I can count at various dance performances, but I'd never been to the symphony.

Over the holidays, my dad and I made plans to see the Boston Symphony. We chose a program based as much on our schedules as on our interests, and ended up with tickets to hear Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 2 and Rachmaninoff's Symphony No. 2. Both pieces were excellent, although I think I preferred the former. For one thing, the pianist, Emanuel Ax, was phenomenal.

The stage set for the first half of the program: Beethoven's Second Piano Concerto

One thing that really struck me was how human a symphony performance is. When you go to the theatre, the actors aim to disappear into their roles. At the ballet, the dancers seek perfection, trying to make the most difficult movements look perfectly natural. But at the symphony, the perfection the performers are seeking is entirely aural, so they sit on stage looking entirely human. The performers were all ages, in professional but individual dress (at least the women), with mostly casual and everyday hairstyles. Occasionally, after an especially rigorous section, even the first violinists would drop their arms to shake out the tension. This was hard work, done by real people, though obviously real people with extraordinary talent. 

Now, I still know embarrassingly little about classical music, so the day after the concert I went out to buy copies of both pieces on CD. I'm hoping to make this a tradition, and to slowly build a classical music library of pieces I've heard live. Seems like as good a way to educate myself as anything.