The elderly woman seated next to me at the Youth Orchestra concert Sunday afternoon said she didn’t know anyone in the orchestra. She had come to a YO concert before and discovered what a fine group of musicians they were. She treated herself to a box seat ($12 for the YO concerts), because she had always wanted to sit in one. She loved the view over on the left side loge.
She loved the music too. After the opening work -- Sibelius Karelia Suite, with its sweet shapeliness, silences, and the perpetual immanence of a Baltic storm -- she turned to me and sighed, “Wasn’t that just lovely?” And it was, especially an English horn solo by Heather Baxter, so calm, sure and elegant from beginning to end. From that moment, we were hooked.
The trombones opened the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1 with those incautious minor chords, and soloist Choo Choo Hu, in a stunning ice-blue gown, gave her powerful reply on the keyboard and we were off on a thrilling musical ride from start to finish.
Somewhere during the adagio of the Dvořák Eighth Symphony, as I watched all these attractive, young musicians work very hard to make such exquisite sound -- and to appear to be enjoying themselves in the process -- I thought of how much I wanted them to remember this moment, to somehow hold it, not just the memory of the time and place and who was there, but the feeling of the moment, the scary exhilaration, the pleasure of the sound they were creating, the too-short magnificence of it. Which is what we wish for youth -- acknowledging how sentimental that wish is -- watching from outside.
And swiftly the Dvořák came to its close. The lobby filled with parents and siblings and aunts and uncles and grandparents and boyfriends and girlfriends waiting for hugs and kisses and congratulations. Outside was early evening still brightly sunlit, an open sky.
