I have been thinking all day about the music we heard in Thursday and Friday's Atlanta Symphony Musicians' concerts. I'm not sure who was responsible for setting the program, but the more I think about it -- and consider the circumstances under which these concerts took place -- the more brilliant I consider the selection of music to have been.
The first item ... Rossini's Overture to The Barber of Seville ... bristles with cartoonish energy: OMG! The symphony is locked out! What do we do?! Run away! Run away!
The centerpiece of the program, Bach's Concerto for Two Violins, Strings, and Continuo, is about conversations ... three of them, to be precise. The first movement with its wonderful leaps is a display of respective style and strength: William Pu's slim elegant lines, in dialog with David Coucheron's robust assertiveness. All I can say about the second movement is: violins exist because they can sound like that. The last movement was a bit like eavesdropping on virtuoso trash-talk. Frankly, I could have listened to these two world-class violinists throw down all night, and I'm guessing that the idea of 'give and take' was one reason to include this work: two sides with something important to say ... each player speaks, then gives the other player room to speak.
The last work, Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 in C-Minor may have been the most obvious choice. But there isn't another composer who reaches as deeply into the core of the human condition. When I was young, I wore out my RCA recordings of the 5th. Last night, the memory of listening over and over to the bridge between the 3rd and 4th movements rose up and reminded me why I wanted to be a musician.
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