Well, ok, so it’s been a few months since I was last here. That was not planned. Not even this post was planned. Not really, anyway.

I was going to write about the Queensland Symphony Orchestra performance I attended a couple of weeks ago, but then I realised that I hadn’t blogged since March, so I was thinking that maybe some kind of “more general recap” was in order.

But first, the QSO.

I’d been to a few of their performances before but only the “cinematic” ones where they play music from movies, and one where they played the music of a Star Wars film while you watched the film projected above the orchestra. The one I went to a fortnight ago was the first professional classical music concert I’ve attended (that I remember?)

The main reason we went was because Ray Chen was playing Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto. A world class violinist playing a concerto by one of history’s greatest composers? How could we not? With such a headline act, I actually didn’t realise there was a second part of the evening — an entire symphony, in fact — until the day of the concert.

After a brief intermission, the QSO played Shostakovich’s Symphony No.8, which I knew next to nothing about until the pre-concert talk. 

I don’t know if it’s common for other orchestras to do this, but there was a pre-concert talk in which someone (I think she was a violinist who may or may not have played with the orchestra that night) explained the historical context of the music we were going to hear, as well as pointing out key elements of the music, and talking about what it all represents. I think this pre-concert talk really made a huge difference to my experience of the actual concert. 

I didn’t know much about Shostakovich before that night. I’d heard his name before, and it’s extremely likely I’ve heard his music played on the radio, but nothing ever really stood out about him or his music (in either a good or bad way). I didn’t even know that he lived in the 1900s, in Stalin’s Russia. I just assumed he was around in Tchaikovsky’s time, not that I had any particular reason to think that or otherwise.

What I remember from the pre-concert talk was that Shostakovich wrote his Symphony No.8 because he was sad about all the people Hitler was killing, but equally sad about all the people Stalin was killing. We overheard another patron summarise it aptly in the foyer: “Hitler killed all his enemies. Stalin killed everyone.”

The tricky thing for Shostakovich was that he essentially risked his life by composing something that might be deemed unpatriotic or un-Russian. If it seemed like he was opposing the government of the time by having anti-war sentiments in his music, he could have been prosecuted. 

But he did it.

And he disguised it and made up excuses for it (or something like that — I forget the finer details of the talk).

As for the actual performances, Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto was brilliant, but I was absolutely captivated by Shostakovich’s symphony. The percussion was a highlight for me, but I also thoroughly enjoyed watching each section in turn.

The whole experience certainly piqued my interest in music history, and hopefully I’ll be able to find time to learn more about the historical context of the music I listen to. I have to get back into a more consistent practising schedule first though. It’s been hard, what with being tired from work, and then going away on holiday for two weeks, and then coming back to more long days at work.

Is that sufficient for a “more general recap”? Perhaps I’ll write a separate post for the two-week holiday. That was fun. 

Oh, and I’m still trying to read Ulysses. There’s that too.