Gratuitous Musickal Posting (TM)

I quite plainly heard the sound of crickets generated by my Monteverdi posting yesterday, but don't worry, this won't be quite so dry.

The Missus and I are off to a real live concert this evening, the first one I can remember our having been to in a looooooong time. Granted, it's only the local community orchestra, but what the hey - music is music.

The program seems to center on Romeo & Juliet and features selections on the theme by Berlioz and Prokofiev. I won't mind this at all. While I'm not much of a student of Berlioz, I've always enjoyed what I've heard. And if you pointed a gun at my head and made me choose a 20th Century composer, I could come up with a legion of worse choices than Prokofiev and not many better.

I also see that they're doing (or at least attempting - the piece goes hell-for-leather) the Ruslan & Lyudmila Overture by Mikhail Ivonovich Glinka (1804-1857). This piece has a childhood association for me about on a par with my discovery that the early Roadrunner and Coyote cartoons used the "Dance of the Comedians" from The Bartered Bride by Bedrich Smetana.

You see, when I was in second grade, I was fascinated by meteorology. I knew all the different cloud names, had an elemental grasp of the way pressure systems worked and could describe the path of a water molocule through a thunderhead. That spring, one of the local tee vee nooz stations offered a li'l weather hounds educational kit. It consisted of a big CONUS map ringed with smaller pictures explaining various weather phenomena. It also came with a record. (For those of you who don't know what this is, it was a flat disc made of vinyl that people used to use for sound recordings. You put it on a turntable, where a needle on a swing arm would travel through grooves on the surface of the record, thereby reproducing the recorded sounds.)

This particular record contained a story to go along with the map. In it, a NOAA meteorologist was supposed to be giving a lecture to a tour group at a local weather station somewhere in the Midwest on a threatening day. He went right round the little boxes on the edge of the map, and we li'l weather hounds were supposed to follow along. The climax of the story came when a tornado suddenly appeared and everybody had to scramble for the 'frady-hole. The weather station was destroyed but nobody got hurt and the meteorologist got to wind up with some ponderous words on the savage fury of Nature.

It just so happened that I was both fascinated with and petrified of tornadoes in those days. (I feared them so much I always had to skip the first fifteen minutes of The Wizard of Oz.) At first, I was so scared of the record that I could barely make myself listen to it. Indeed, when I did a classroom presentation on it, I practically ducked under a desk when the big moment came.

For those of you on the verge of saying, "Dammit Cartman, what the hell are you talking about?" let me now make the link: It also just so happens that the music accompanying this story was none other than the Glinka overture we're hearing tonight. The intensity of associations meant that this music was burned into my brain long before I knew what it actually was. And now every time I hear it, I still think of that story and the moment somebody yells, "Tornado!" off stage.

I'll let you know how the concert goes. I've never heard these people so have no idea how good they might be.

(Oh, we're also going to a post-concert party put on by the orchestra's board. I was intensely amused to note that the invitation spelled out that the party is "by invitation only - guest list at the door".

You know, because we have such a terrible problem with community orchestra party gate-crashers 'round here. Pretentious? Moi?)