Here's another reason that I love working at a University with a broad spectrum of activity, in an exciting and diverse city. You get the most wonderful connections between different segments of your life:
After an extraordinarily exhausting week, Friday evening came and I jumped on the Brompton and cycled up Figueroa the 37 blocks to the heart of downtown, where you can find the music centre, and the wonderful Disney Hall. My errand was to somehow obtain tickets for an extremely popular concert. The box office, once I got there, had only a few returned ones, at $120 and $90 each. I could not bring myself to pay that much without exploring other avenues (I've several expenditures to worry about) and so I thought I would wait in case anyone turned in orchestra seats (those are more like $35), or to see if the price would drop nearer the concert start, or (my main hope) to see if someone showed up with an extra ticket (maybe a friend could not make it) and would just sell it to me right there near the box office. So I stood there for over an hour, watching the world go by, most of it looking curiously at my bike in half-fold position. It dawned on me at some point that I'd no really reliable way of discovering who might have tickets to sell or not. This became especially clear after a group of people who came well after me and were hanging around managed to get a ticket in this manner. So after a while I began to learn who had "the look" of maybe having a ticket to sell, and with about ten minutes to go before the concert (and after a long conversation about the bike which made me miss at least one more sale) I managed to negotiate an $82 ticket down to $50 (I could have done better, but it seemed fair), folded up and popped my bike off in the coat check area and emerged (appropriately attired) for an evening of a bit of relaxing to some Mozart.
I came because I had three students (Joesph Benson, Kyle Patterson and David Reese) in my Physics 151 tell me that they had to miss some parts of a few Thursday lectures because they had to go and rehearse for a concert. Of course, I asked what concert it was, and it turned out that they (as part of the USC Thornton Choral Artists) would be performing Mozart's Requiem with the LA Philharmoic at Disney Hall over three nights! Of course I had to find a way to go!
The first 30 minutes was a performance (Andreas Haefliger, piano) of Mozart's piano concerto number 27 (K 525), which was fine. I listened to endless amounts of Mozart concertos when I was a teenager, and so much of what he does is simply brilliant, but eventually they began to strike me as (brilliant of course) essays by a master, and I began to learn to recognize his stlye and voice all to well, predict many of the standard Mozart phrases to come a few bars ahead of their arrival, etc. That was time (back then in my youth) to seek out greater works, and other composers and voices, and I left most of Mozart's piano concertos alone for a while. So occasionally it is lovely to hear one, and recall how beautifully constructed they are, and how flawless and bright they are, almost to the point where those latter features themselves limit the overall beauty of the piece, in a way I cannot fully explain. But I do like them a lot. Of course, they do remind me so much of my late teenage years, getting up early to listen to and make tape recordings of bits of BBC Radio 3's "morning concert" programme. This was around the same time I was consuming a lot of new concepts in mathematics from classes and books and just loving it so much. Eventually, though, one discovers Mozart's Requiem (K 626), and one really grows up. There are no simple beautiful pretty things to be found easily here like in (most of - not all) the piano concertos, but instead the richer beauty that comes from a transcendent mixture of joy, passion, pain, sorrow, wonder, etc. This was not a mere essay from the master, but a true...masterpiece, in every sense of the word. One of the true "great works".
.....The Philharmonic was good (Christoph Von Dohnanyi conducting) and the soloists were also (Barbara Bonney, Ruxandra Donose, Eric Cutler, Alfred Reiter), but my focus tonight was on the USC students. They were wonderful! I still can't get over it. There are wonderful chords that the chorus is given (some of my favourite chords, in fact) which they rendered excellently, never once getting lost inside them, as could probably be easily done. While I dozed a touch during the piano concerto (end of a horribly busy week, as I said, with not enough sleep), I was at the edge of my seat for the entire 55 mintutes of the Requiem. It was really quite a perfect evening to end the week. So it turns out that these three students are not music majors. No, they just do this because they want to. They are freshmen in Engineering, who happen to sing. Really sing. -cvj
