2010 October 9

Today is my grandmother Yoneko's 95th birthday.  Happy Birthday Grandma.

We went to the Saskatoon Symphony's opening concert for the season tonight.  The concert opened with Michael Swan's own composition.  Then they played Brahms' D minor piano concerto with Angela Cheng as soloist.  I counted 54 musicians in all, so it was more like a chamber orchestra.  The Bechstein grand projected very well.  I didn't notice very much difference as far as balance between piano and orchrestra - usually recordings have the piano balanced quite forward.  However, since there were very few violins (18 in all), I think that's why it sounded like the piano was more dominant than when I remembered from the only other live performance I've been to from my high school days.  Ivan Moravec played it with the Calgary Philharmonic (that was back in 1985 or so).  I have at least 15 different CDs of this concerto which I fell in love with in grade 10 when my Decca CD of Ashkenazy with Haitink and the Concertegebouw Orchestra arrived from Templar Records in London.  I've since come to prefer Fleisher, Pollini and Freire's recordings of this work.  I tend to prefer faster tempos for this work and Cheng is in that camp too.  Elisha was quite drawn to everything except the slow movement.  Samuel wasn't as interested, but still listened to the entire concert. The horns weren't in good shape for the concerto today.  Angela Cheng was very capable in this very difficult piano concerto.  The concert closed with Dvorak's 6th symphony.  As conductor Victor Sawa noted, it was all very listenable music.

I've not been to a SSO concert since Angela Hewitt came to play the Schumann Piano Concerto.  I think a colleague gave me the ticket to that one (over 10 years ago).  Live music can be expensive, but I remember Perlman's Brahms Violin Concerto with the TSO (1998), Sarah Chang playing a Paganini Concerto with the TSO when I was a student and Maria João Pires playing the Mozart Jeunehomme concerto with the TSO when I was a UofT student.  The same day student tickets back then (mid 1980s) were only $10.  It was sad I didn't go to more concerts than the two I went to.  Someday, I hope I can hear the Berliner Philharmoniker with a favorite soloist.