Phonies at the Symphony

Last Friday night, by the graces of the god of free tickets, I got the opportunity to go see the Dallas Symphony Orchestra with a friend of mine. This was a fairly classy event, so the following review will be about as high brow as I get. Unless we're talking about Stephen Colbert.

Anyway, we took the DART train downtown to the Meyerson Symphony Center, which I recommend doing if you're into irony of the class-based variety. The other symphony attendees were about as ostentatiously middle to upper-middle class as you get for a Friday evening, but I was surprised by the number of younger people there. Not only those of junior high, high school age- I imagine someone had arranged a class trip- but also 20-something couples and groups. I guess I shouldn't discount my own age group for taking part in such white collar festivities. Especially as I WAS there myself...

The program for the evening began with the Shostakovich Violin Concerto #1 (the proper phrasing for which can be found in the liner notes, not in my expertise of wording pieces of classical music) and ended with Tchaikovsky's 5th Symphony. Now I'm not an expert in classical tunes, but I will say this- those old Russian composers, damn; they're just amazing. No one channels suffering and angst into an art form quite like they do. I've been a conscious fan of Tchaikovsky since I was a little kid prancing around to the Nutcracker Suite, and the pieces I heard Friday really hit that home for me. The melodrama that these guys conjure up, it's breath taking. Literally; there were points where I noticed I was holding my breath. So the score one for the scores; the musical selection was top notch.

With that in mind, you might say that blasting ol' Shasta and Pyotr Ilyich from my stereo might be just as soul-shaking as listening to it in a concert hall. There are a couple reasons you'd be wrong. First, and this is by no means restricted to Friday evening's events, the people at the symphony- they must be emo. Maybe they were getting into the music in their own heads, but physically, there was nary a demonstration that they were enjoying what they were hearing until the applause. No head bobbing or foot tapping; no jumping at shows, I tell you! I was struggling to keep from dancing in my seat, and after a drink at intermission, this was no easy task. I know it isn't appropriate to get into it that much in such a setting, but I have to ask- isn't that a touch ridiculous? Classical music is like the most respected art in the (western) world, so would it be a stretch to say that it's among the best art? Wouldn't that mean the most moving, by some definition? I know I'm jumping around a bit here, but you get my point- art is supposed to move you and it's completely backwards to perform it in a setting where being moved in certain ways is not proper. So from this point of view, listening to these pieces out of a symphony hall would facilitate a superior experience because it would allow lots of flailing and jumping around to the music. And that is my digression.

On the other hand, watching musicians perform can add something to the experience of a piece, and this was absolutely the case on Friday. The DSO has recently come under new conductorship (conduction? conductor-ing?)- Jaap Van Zweden. This guy was such a blast to watch; all the stuff I just said about symphony patrons above applies in NO WAY to our tiny Belgian leader of the band. He was all over the place, stomping and waving kinda goofily, like I might have, had I been in the comfort of my own living room. And he gets away with it BECAUSE he's the conductor- you see how this works? Not fair! Still, it was great to watch him do his thing.

Funnily enough, all of my training in the Classical arts (if you wanna call them that) was in ballet, and reading back over this, I notice that I'm thinking about this experience in terms of movement and the body. So there's some continuity for ya, where maybe you expected an informed point of view?