Stravinsky on the Ice Cream Truck Bells

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George, Christo, and I went to the San Francisco Symphony's free concert in Dolores Park today. It started at 2pm, but we decided to arrive late because the earlier bits on the program were kind of boring.

They started out with Glinka's "Overture to Ruslan and Ludmila," then Greig's "Piano Concerto in A minor, Opus 16" with the talented Yundi Li on piano. We arrived halfway through the Grieg, and found a seat not too far from the stage.

Unfortunately, we were very close to a flotilla of ice-cream trucks (little hand-pushed ones, not full-sized), so the entire program was accompanied by the tinkling of the bells every few seconds.

After the Grieg there was a 15-minute intermission, then they started up with Borodin's "Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor," which was actually quite charming and accessible. Unfortunately, somebody made the supremely bad decision to put Stravinsky's "Firebird Suite" at the end of the program. In an outdoor concert, playing a piece that starts out very quiet and slow is a bad move. I suggested to Christo that they put it there to encourage peope to leave slowly at the end of the concert, instead of all at once, because people began to file out when they realized they would never get to hear the whole thing.

Afterwards, we walked back up to Christo and George's house, then had dinner at La Mediterranee. It was only 6:50 when we finished dinner, but I felt sleepy (I got up at 6:30am) and still had two chapters of law homework to do, so I excused myself.

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This page contains a single entry by Ayse published on July 11, 2004 9:02 PM.

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