Impulse Purchase

     Tonight I went into Boston on pretty much the spur of the moment. This noon I happened to hear an interview with the Ricardo Chailly, the conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, on the radio. They were in town to give a concert this evening. The program was to be all Beethoven, including one of my favorites, the "Emperor" Piano Concerto. So I went on line this afternoon and bought a ticket.

     The performance of the concerto was unspectacular, but the music itself is so good that it was worth hearing anyway. And after several "curtain calls" the pianist gave an encore, which I did not recognize, but it sounded like something Beethoven could have written. After intermission, the orchestra played Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. It ends loud and fast, so it is pretty much a "standing O" producing machine, and it didn't fail this time. And after prolonged applause, the orchestra gave an encore. Beethoven's Overture to "The Creatures of Prometheus." I thought it was their best playing of the evening.

     I had thought that there might be an encore after the concerto, because the program was kind of short. But the second encore, at the end of the evening was a real surprise. Boston Symphony Orchestra concerts almost never have encores — which is probably a good thing since without any they last about as long as tonight's did with the encores.

     It has been stormy today, and on my way home I came across work crews in three different locations clearing away fallen tree branches in the road.