When I said I was catching up I meant on things that I should've posted.
I got half-season tickets for the Phoenix Symphony this year, which means tickets for 7 concerts plus 1 voucher. I'm still not sure what I want to do with the voucher, there are far too many worthy options. For example I want to go to the all-Tchaikovsky special concert Thanksgiving weekend but traditionally I am out of town camping with family. I also am almost certainly going to see Mozart's Requiem (with his 25th symphony) in November and another Chamber Orchestra concert which includes Schoenberg's Verklarte Nacht and maybe the Mahler 7th in March - but all that'd be 4 vouchers.
At any rate here was the first concert (in my half season):
Guest Conductor: Giancarlo Guerrero
Jennifer Higdon: Machine
Robert Schumann: Piano Concerto (with Benedetto Lupo, piano)
Wolfgang Mozart: Symphony 36 "Linz"
Franz Liszt: Les Preludes
Hermann Michael (who I'll see week 10 for some Mozart and Brahms) is now Conductor Laureate and they have no Prinicpal Conductor which means I'll see 7 different conductors in the 7 concerts I have tickets to.
I'm a little embarassed to admit that of those pieces I only knew the Mozart. I know Schumann's symphonies but I don't know that I'd even heard the Piano Concerto before the concert, though I enjoyed it more than the Linz. Machine was good and short (3 minutes) but it was the Liszt that surprised me. I don't much care for most of the Liszt that I've heard and was suprised that they were ending with Les Preludes. It turned out to be a good closer, with the conductor jumping up and down on the podium as it reached it's climax.
Intersting side note on Liszt: I went out and bought A Faust Symphony after reading something from Richard Strauss on how wonderful of a symphonist he was (I forget the actual superlative phrase) and didn't like it at all but this taught me something important: I don't realy have to take musical recommendations from composers I don't like in the first place (I was in a very expansive phase, trying to hear new artists; Liszt was one of the few I didn't take to.)
The next concert is in two and a half weeks. (Though this doesn't seem to be a permanent link, which is why there was no link for the 1st concert in my half-season.)
