Narrator, Chorus and Orchestra

Yesterday evening James, Ally, Davie and I went to the Royal Concert Hall to hear Beethoven's "Ode to Joy"; Symphony No.9 in D minor. James had booked the tickets ages ago and was really looking forward to it, he even took us to the pre-concert talk by Michael Tumelty of The Herald which was interesting and gave a bit of the history of it, apparently it was really ground-breaking at the time and had a huge influence on later composers like Wagner and Mendelssohn. He pointed out that its first performance was 187 years ago on 7th May so it was an anniversary. Before that however the first half was a piece of music called "On the Transmigration of Souls" by John Adams. It was about the people who died in the attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001. It was a combination of orchestra, choir and speech, mainly the things said by and about the victims. It was a bit too discordant for me, I didn't really like it. Alasdair and David felt the same way, in fact Alasdair said "I didn't realise that such a dark day in history could be made any worse!" I was thinking afterwards about how I would have tried to commemorate the people (that's if I had any musical ability, which I don't). I would have liked to create something more haunting and tuneful - more memorable. But I don't know much about music and it could be that I just didn't really understand it. Beethoven was splendid, we all really enjoyed it. I liked the third movement but of course the finale was great, the combination of orchestra and voices was glorious. This evening we went to visit Ewan in hospital and were pleased to see him looking well, although of course after such a big operation he has pain which he says comes and goes. His leg frame looks very technical, the surgeon must be very skilled to know just where to place it for the required effect. He is looking forward to getting home, hopefully tomorrow. I had forgotten that Heather's 10k was today; she said she got a similar time to last year, I really admire her fitness. We all had a good chat. Home and had a meeting with Gary, we had a useful discussion about the extension but I was more interested to discover that he is extremely knowledgable about Art, which he collects; he is a friend of Peter Howson and also of another artist he mentioned called Alec Thomson. He also loves music and when we were talking about the concert last night he mentioned a piece about the Warsaw Ghetto by a composer called Arnold Schonberg, which sounds similar in some ways to "On the Transmigration of Souls". Maybe I should listen to it.