Wednesday, August 25, 2021

Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra

Today is a travel day so I don't have time to do a review of last night's concert. I might not get to it for a couple of days. But there will be a Friday Miscellanea. I will just say that I got caught by another program change. I pick which concerts I want to attend based largely on the works being played--I suspect this is not the norm for most concert goers. So when my local chamber music organization advertises a concert including a "String Quartet by Joseph Haydn" I want to say, "hey, he wrote 80 string quartets, which one is on the program?" I will say something rather similar even if they say "String Quartet in C major by Joseph Haydn." But what has caught me twice in concerts at this festival is a change in repertoire that I was unaware of until I got to the concert. Sometime between when I originally requested tickets back in December 2020 and when they issued my my tickets in May 2021, the repertoire for last night's concert was changed from Wagner and Shostakovich (as I recall, it was the Symphony No. 10) to Wagner and Beethoven. The Wagner was the Sigfried Idyll and the Wesendonck lieder and the Beethoven Symphony No. 7. Yes, a perfectly decent program and one I largely enjoyed, but it is not one I would have particularly sought out. I would have chosen a different one instead. I just didn't get any notice that they were changing programs. My own fault for not checking, I suppose. There are lots of tricks to attending a big music festival!

So, for an envoi, here is the Shostakovich Symphony No. 10 with the Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre conducted by Valery Gergiev:



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