waltondammerung

My, Mickey, what big ears you have

Josh and I had the privilege of attending a Los Angeles Philharmonic concert last night, with tickets from work, as always. (Hey, you can knock my mundane job all you want, but I've gotten tickets to some great concerts, and I got to see Frank Gehry in person. Oh, and Leonard Nimoy. All because of my boring market research job.) I say privilege because it was the first concert we've attended in the new Walt Disney Concert Hall. It was the most incredible concert I've ever experienced. I don't usually give standing ovations, but last night I joined the entire audience in a very enthusiastic standing O. It was not because I thought the LA Phil did an exceptional job (They are almost always superb. If they got a standing ovation at all of their good concerts, it would cease to mean anything. Not that it really means anything anymore anway. But I digress. Which is why this is in parentheses. And stuff. Anyway...), but because the hall brought every nuance, every reverberation, small and large, to my ears like no other place I've ever been. I'd heard that the acoustics at the hall were good, but I had no idea how good. It was like listening to a CD for the first time when you're used to phonographs.

You may or may not know that when you lift your fingers off of a stringed instrument after pressing the strings down very hard, the strings resonate a bit. In one very quiet moment of the piece, I heard just that sound coming from a viola. Wow! If any orchestra of less than excellent quality played in that hall, listening would be torture.

The man sitting next to me had season tickets, and leaned over before the concert began to tell me we had the best seats in the house. He'd traded tickets a few times so he could experience all areas of the hall, even behind the orchestra. I said I'd heard the sound is magnificent no matter where you sit. He concurred, but added that our seats had the most leg room. I guess I won't hestitate to buy the cheap tickets when I have to pay for my own. :)

Anyway, I plan to go back as often as I can while we live here. Thank God for rich people like the Disney family who have the wherewithal and the inclination to pump money into such an extravagant project when everyone else has all but abandoned it.