The main reason for this is Ciaran's current fascination with guitars and the fact that this was billed with Sean Shibe on guitar.
Like many people I'm really not that well educated about music. I know what I like, quite often don't know what it is or simply know it from TV use. I do have a number of classical albums which I will listen to, and one of my favourite pieces is Pachelbel's Canon. My (limited) interest started when Marillion released a live album back in '88 called The Thieving Magpie which has them play a bit of Rossini's La Gaza Ladra. I then found a copy of Rossini Overtures in HMV which had this track. That's when you realise how much classical music is out there. One of the tracks is "Guglielmo Tell" which contains the Lone Ranger theme. Its also go the music they use in cartoons when there a bad storm and giant waves. Its funny how much was familiar, and how good it sounded.
Last night was different.
I'm not saying it wasn't good, but it was different. Almost all of the new 'classical' music I would hear now is on film score and I think my mind now tunes into that - the idea that the TV can be on in the background and you just hear it.
The first piece last night was a new Scottish composition getting its first performance. There were 3 movements and the story was included in the programme, which I didn't read until after the first movement. The first one started off and I felt it was quite jarring. I felt it was quite similar in style to the music from Ghost, and suddenly I was getting an image of that sort of scene. The second movement started with percussion sounding like drips in a cave. I connected that since the piece was titled 'Cave'. In this piece I got an image of old 50's B&W drama movies, maybe just continuing the Ghost image from earlier. The final movement had a battle which was easier to distinguish once I had read the programme.
The piece was interesting and full of sound but all three of us didn't think it was great.
The main reason we were there was the second piece was from Rodrigo. Think Spanish guitars. I was thinking spaghetti western. Again technically brilliant but really making no connection to me.
After the interval was came back to the final 2 pieces both by Mozart.
The first was a re-arrangement of a piece for the glass harmonica. Since this instrument is so rare these fays it was re-arranged for woodwind with violins to give the resonance. I though this was a beautiful piece. I've since spent some time on wiki reading about the glass harmonica and listening to the sample piece there. This is one fantastic sounding instrument!
The final piece was all of Symphony 41. This was amazing. I didn't have any images of films while listening - I was just captivated by the music. The sound just filled the room, building upon itself. It all fitted together and I think this was the greatest difference between the brand new modern piece and this 225 year old piece. There was no jarring - it all fitted together.
Knowing nothing about music (much to Ciaran's disgust at times) you could hear why after all this time Mozart is still popular.
