Bach Around the Clock in the Frank Lloyd Wrong Auditorium

 

Today my "Irish Word of the Day" was "sneachta," which means snow, and the sentence was, "Ta se ag cur sneachta," which literally means "is it putting snow," but you'd translate it, "It is snowing." And it was snowing outside! (The verb coming first doesn't make it a question like it would in English - it always comes first in Irish. They would have a whole different form of the verb for a question.) The "ag" is basically "-ing" in English, in case you were curious about its function. It was snowing during my morning walk and during my lunchtime walk, but by my afternoon walk it had stopped. 

This evening Jilly Moose and I went to a Bach Around the Clock concert at First Unitarian. The concert was in the Landmark Auditorium, which I thought was the big concert hall I'd been to many times, so Jilly Moose and I went in that end of the compound and were bewildered by the very un-Lenten spread of brownies in front of us. I knew they were having a birthday party for Bach, but I had been expecting champagne and a sheet cake. We sat down, and a guy got up and started talking about the documentary we were about to watch, and I realized we must have been in the wrong place. We snuck out, and a guy in the hallway said the concert was in the Frank Lloyd Wrong area of the compound, so we went to get our coats, and he said, "You're going the wrong way!" We had to tell him three times we were getting our coats, and then he followed us all the way to the Landmark Auditorium, as if he thought we wouldn't make it across the parking lot. Fortunately, a woman had been talking the whole time, so the music hadn't started yet. If you look at the windows, they look a little like a face.

The first part of the concert was inventions in many of the keys, but not all of them. The performer played them on a piano tuned in equal temperament, and I wondered what they would have sounded like on a harpsichord tuned the way Bach's was when he wrote them. I suppose that's why some of the keys were missing, like E flat minor and B major, because they probably sounded horrible in the temperament Bach used. In modern tuning, it just seems random to leave some keys out. 

The second part of the concert was a concerto where the pianist was joined by a string quartet, and that I really enjoyed. Even the slow movement, which was a Siciliana and so not as boring as the slow movements of Baroque concerti often are. Afterwards there was a party for Bach's birthday, but we just had sparkling water instead of Prosecco, since we had to drive home. Tomorrow there are more free concerts for Bach Around the Clock, and also the free International Festival at the Overture Center, so I'm not sure which to choose. Also, I have to go to a meeting at 3:45, so I can't spend all day at either festival like I have in the past. Watch for my next blog post to see which I choose to attend.

Famous Hat