Another Excellent Concert

Now that I'm a little less busy, I have a little time to relive another wonderful musical experience I had recently. It took place about 10 days ago. I attended the concert by San Francisco Symphony Orchestra under Michael Tilson Thomas, a Los Angeles native who first conducted the orchestra in 1974 and has been its musical director since 1995.
 
The concert was suitably divided into two parts. The first part gave us a taste of the creative vitality of the American West Coast. We were introduced to the works of two very talented composers, none of whom I had previously heard. Lou Harrison and Henry Cowell . We had some pieces taken from what's called Pacifika Rondo by Harrison: The Family of the Court. It's a very Western interpretation of Korean courtly music: full of solemn and sonorous percussive sound with some very oriental type of musical motifs. Then we had Music 1957, which Cowell composed for the Minnesota Orchestra and its then musical director Antal Dorati. The second piece was a piece of music which explored the 4 opening notes of the piece 22 times with different variation by different musical instruments. Both composers share something in common: they are explorers of musical traditions of the East and the countries on the Pacific Rim and it shows in their music. Cowell in particular is very much into tone clusters which he uses to great effect. Of course, their music is not the type that concert goers of the more traditional "classical" music are used to and it does require some adjustment of their expectations of what music "should" be like to be able to appreciate their adventures  into possibilities of the richness of musical sounds. It's not as unpalatable as some of the other more "contemporary" musical compositions and it does open up my mind.

Then in the second part of the concert. we had one of the happiest of Mahler's symphony, his No. 5 in C-sharp minor in 5 movements. This is a familiar piece and needs little introduction. What I'd say is that under the baton of Michael Tilson Thomas, I was able to hear some of the details of the piece which I hadn't noticed before although I don't know how many times I had heard that favourite of Mahler before. The structure of the music by different sections and different musical instruments came out much more clearly without being intrusive. It's as if I was hearing Celibadache conducting! Needless to say, the applause was long, in fact so long that the conductor has to literally drag the concert master away at the last time he re-appeared at the stage to acknowledge them. 

The following is not what I heard but it would give some idea of the kind of sound that I heard that evening from Lou Harrison.

Again this is not something I heard that evening and put in the video for the same purpose