This is the time of the year when things get busy, musically. Tonight is the second and final performance of Beethoven 9 and Chris Brubeck's new piece "Music Is the Power." Last night we had tickets to the big Dave Brubeck concert at the Conservatory as part of the annual Brubeck Festival. Thursday evening was the first Beethoven/Brubeck concert and the three previous evenings were spent in rehearsal for them. Tomorrow evening is the final Sunday regular rehearsal for the all-Brahms concert with the Master Chorale, and rehearsals for the final concert of the big Chorale resume on Monday. Did I say it was busy, musically?

An update to the last Beethoven post: it's quite a different piece when you're inside a performance of 300+ singers and instrumentalists. The choral section is still shouty and screamy, and Beethoven still isn't a vocal composer, but it's hard not to be impressed by the aesthetic experience of actually performing the Ninth.

Brubeck the Younger has also written a good work, and it gets the difficult job of opening for the Ninth. Well, someone's got to do it. You can read more about Brubeck and his new work in the preview article.

Last night's concert by Brubeck the Elder was quite nice. Dave and the Brubeck Quartet opened with over an hour of music. He's 87 and pretty frail, but it's pretty amazing to see that he's still 100% there rhetorically and in terms of his interactions with the other guys in the group. About halfway through, the quartet was joined by vocalist Roberta Gambarini. She sang a few very old Brubeck songs quite nicely, as well as doing some scat singing during other numbers (such as the venerable "Take Five"). Not a fan of scat singing, and that's all I'll say. After intermission we were treated to a wonderful performance of "Cannery Row," a very recent work by Dave (and lyrics by Iola). Brubeck the Younger sang in it and played bass guitar and bass trombone, while two of the Beethoven soloists also performed. It's basically a song suite, unstaged though there were basic costumes. It's very short and there isn't any drama or story, just four or five vignettes on the characters in Steinbeck's novel. Still, it was great.

Ok. Enough for now. It's Saturday and I get to wallow on Saturdays. Bye.