Last Thursday I got on the subway very ready to listen to some music. It had been a busy, appointment-filled day -- largely administrative meetings rather than wrestling with conceptual problems -- and while those days leave me tired out, my brain isn't "full" in the way it can feel after a long afternoon reading Arendt or Horace. Also, we had bumped into Esa-Pekka Salonen on the plane from Chicago last Sunday (though I didn't approach him to say how happy I was that he was conducting in New York, since he had that harried, Sunday-evening-flight look on his face that I know intimately from the mirror), so there was a small touch of close-brush-with-celebrity excitement in play as well. I've liked Esa-Pekka for years, mainly because he has always struck me as the real thing, not only a strong conductor with an ambitious vision and good taste who, as I understand it, helped make the LA Philharmonic a great hall but an accomplished composer and (always important for me, I confess) an attractive, charismatic presence on stage.
While I was anticipating a satisfying evening, my expectations were overturned -- not the moment the concert began, with Haydn's sixth Symphony (
Le Matin), which the orchestra played perfectly well -- but with the opening chords and bangs of Ligeti's Piano Concerto. I didn't know a thing about modern music when I was young, but now I can't imagine life without it, and the gloriously well-constructed yet explosive hotch-potch of ideas and sounds in the Ligeti reminded me how much I have come to rely on musical experiences to reveal something important about the modern world.
The concert ended with Bartok's Concert for Orchestra, more familiar than Ligeti, rousingly played, the waves of passionate sound produced by the massive string sections at some points just grazing a resemblance to the best possible film music. (That's a compliment, in this case. I'm not talking about Howard Shore!)
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