Excellent ado about a huge nothing. Brno wins!

Last night: brilliant performance by Brno Philharmonic of Mahler's least spectacular symphony, his 7th. It had its premiere in Prague in 1908, conducted by the composer. And shortly after in Munich and Holland. It confused the public and critics alike then. And me now. I had been wondering why I hadn't heard it before, as 1 2 3 4 5 and 6 are amongst my favourites of the entire repertoire. Everyone else in the world loves 8 except me. But 7 is much ado about nothing - almost down there with Bruckner.

The orchestra was outstanding. What a noise they made. And quite beautifully phrased and everything. But for what? One of the violinists told me afterwards that it took a whole week of rehearsals and this second performance before she felt it made any sense to her at all.

The audience on Thursday night roared and stamped and cheered. The audience last night stood and applauded at great length. Aleksander Markovich, our resident conductor, appeared deeply moved by the reception.  And well he might.

Does it not declare the sophistication of a city? That two full houses pay quite a lot for tickets to a concert with one long work only, and are moved to express such appreciation. This speaks very loudly for mature society.

Zinc

An extraordinary love scene - making love

I was watching Bent, a rather stark chamber piece with some beautiful dialogue - reminded me of Waiting for Godot at times. The music is by Phillip Glass - reminded me of everything else he's written. The cast - well this Clive Owen ain't bad, and Lothar Bouteau, Mick Jagger, Ian McKellan and Jude Law. I don't know how Ewan McGregor missed out on this film - tis right up his street.

There was a scene that reminded me of an encounter I once had, and the lad concerned happened to be online, so we chatted briefly, and he told me about this extraordinary online scoring software, Noteflight, which I am now using to create a piece I'm calling Zinc as I was just reading Wikipedia about this metal more as a "vitamin" since my trainer recommend I take 15 mg a day which started yesterday. To hear Zinc, click the little black and red play button at the top left.




Yep, it's not much, but it was fun to learn the software, and composing a wee something after 20 years was its own fun. Kept me out of trouble on a Saturday night, what's more!

Multi-tasking

From the Wikipedia article on testosterone, comes this:

There are some differences in a male and female brain (the result of different testosterone levels). A clear difference is the size: the male human brain is, on average, larger; however, in females (who generally do not have as high testosterone levels the corpus callosum is proportionally larger. This means that the effect of testosterone is a greater overall brain volume, but a decreased connection between the hemispheres.

One wonders if the connection between the hemispheres relates to women being better multi-taskers, allegedly.