This past Friday the show was great for a lot of reasons. First, the conductor for the evening was named Osmo, which I spent the better portion of the performance thinking was the same name as that funny little floating guy in the He-Man cartoon from my childhood, but it turns out that was Orko.
Another great thing about the evening was that Alexander Barantschik, an SF symphony regular who Eric and I refer to affectionately as the "Russian bear," was playing a Mendelssohn violin concerto on the actual violin of the guy who is was written for all that time ago (it turns out that's the violin he plays all the time, on loan from a museum).
And a third neat thing about the evening was that one of the three performances was a world premiere of a work commissioned by the SF symphony. We couldn't help but giggle a little bit when we noticed on the list of instruments a few unexpected items: metal foil, sandpaper blocks, light paper, and "jingles." It immediately made me think that perhaps this was Iron Composer, the symphony equivalent of the Iron Chef in which a serious composer must write a brilliant piece of work using an orchestra plus some crazy random stuff someone picked up out of the dumpster down the block. In spite of rolling my eyes when I saw it had been written in 2010 (myself, I am not your biggest fan of the atonal cacophony car crash know as modern music) I actually quite enjoyed it.
One review of the piece commented: "The sound was never overpowering, even when two of the trombone players hit their instruments with sticks."
Eric and I exchanged a meaningful glance when the sandpaper blocks were employed to great effect during the piece.
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