My wife and I just returned from a performance of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, with Thierry Fischer conducting the Utah Symphony Orchestra.
It’s a powerful and varied piece.
I’m grateful that Utah has a high quality symphony orchestra. It’s another thing to appreciate in my adopted state.
Incidentally, it occurs to me how fortunate we are to live in an age of excellent recording technology. Mahler’s Ninth requires quite a large orchestra. Fortunately, by the time it came along — it debuted in 1912 — recordings were beginning to be made and would rapidly increase in quality. And now, I think, it’s been recorded over one hundred times.
So we can listen to it any time we want. We can study it, play it back again, repeat portions, and so forth. We don’t need to assemble a large orchestra in order to hear it.
But think of those in earlier times. If they were fortunate enough to attend a symphony by Mozart, they might hear it only once. They couldn’t simply slap it into the CD player or summon it at will from iTunes.
We’re very fortunate. If I want listen to the Beatles, or the Incredible String Band, or Jackson Browne, or Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, or Pentangle, or Nanci Griffith, I can do it. Anytime of the day or night. If I want to listen to the Berlin Philharmonic or the Vienna Philharmonic, I don’t even have to be in Europe.
Fabulous.
We shouldn’t take such things for granted. We’re a privileged bunch.
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