sleigh rides

On Sunday afternoon I went with my family to hear the DuPage Symphony Orchestra play their holiday concert. I love going to these kinds of concerts - I enjoy the experience of listening to music live. There is a quality of sound, of life, to the music that one just does not get from even the best recordings. It transports me into another zone - I am just barely aware of my surroundings as the music wraps itself around me. Unfortunately this also has the effect of lulling me to sleep with the longer pieces and it ends up with me struggling to stay awake, therefore removing me a little from the experience. With the shorter pieces it's easier to become engaged with the pieces before the soporific effect takes hold, especially when they're livelier.

The first half of the program was a symphony by Tchaikovsky. Whenever I hear this composer's work I visualise the harsher environment of Russia with the bleak tundra and the snow. I also think of the research I found when I was researching Uncle Vanya, a play by Anton Chekov (who lived more less at the same time), for one of my scene designs in college. I have an incredible visual of boards placed in village streets to keep people off the muddy paths. Everything in the pictures I found were just so dirty with the incredible contrast of the wooden boards against the mud. I used these visuals for my design, which was one of the last ones I did before I graduated. The irony of this design was that for the first time since I had started the program, I truly felt I connected with the material and that my design was a true opening of my artistic mind, as a designer. The sad thing is that I had pretty much decided that I didn't want to do theatre as a career by that point. I was burned out and disappointed with my program and most of my professors. I look at Uncle Vanya and Russia with a slight sadness now, of what might have been.

The second half of the program was a lot of fun. In addition to a Christmas polonaise by another Russian composer, they had a series of shorter pieces that were "sleigh ride pieces" from around Europe. One of my favourites was the Amadeus Mozart piece, "Die Schlittenfahrt." There is so much fun and joy in the piece. There were more but I don't have the program in front of me. I enjoyed these because they really evoke the feeling of moving on snow with the jingling of horses' harnesses and the occasional crack of a whip (case in point, the famous Leroy Anderson Sleigh Ride piece that everyone knows).