History of May Day | 05/01/04
Happy May Day! Jamie and I got an early 7:30am jump on the morning to go garage saling. She made a master list of all the estate sales around town. There were five hits, in each corner of the Tallahassee Pentagon but I foolishly spent my money at the first one. My eBay sales finished at $85, which was the amount I spent on new stuff. I know what you're thinking--but Mike, you have no room left to put stuff. Ah, but I do! I avoided buying books and other general clutter and instead bought a replacement leather chair (seen to your left) for $40. I also bought some new places to replace my old, chipped Target plates. It will be weird to have a matched set. I feel like Chris with my matching salad bowl and salad-dispensing-ware. I also came away with 20 CDs, as espresso set and a couple movies. This guy's house was being taken care off by his just-in-from-German sisters, since he had died. He was young (judging from his music) but old enough to have really, really nice things. If we had gotten there earlier I think we would have left with even more stuff. Jamie bought a couple movies and a set of pots and pans (with lids) for $2. We drove by a storage-center-sale, where I picked up a much needed metal filing cabinet for $5. We ate lunch at the Tally Grill, where some lawyer was stabbed to death about a month ago. The breakfast food was ok but no Ma Fischer's. We then headed to Beethoven & Overcharge since I hadn't been there for a while. I immediately went to the Dover scores, which are already marked in price by Dover, to avoid having to explain my outcry over $65 for a four-page Varése score. I bought a copy of the Rite of Spring and the Ravel & Debussy String Quartets but had to put back Dvorak 9 and something else nice that I can't remember currently. I spent the afternoon working on the second draft of Soca Chompy, which, you'll be pleased to know, is going to be smashing. Jamie woke up from her name and went to hear Michael play with the Tallahassee Symphony Orchestra. The first piece was really quite terrible, although they did play it well. The second piece, one of my favorite violin concerti, the 3rd Mendelssohn, was ruined by the 17-year old soloist. I know I'm being harsh on a 17-year old girl but she shouldn't have been up there. I'd rather hear an adult play it well than a kid who can play most of it. To her credit, her accuracy was decent, except on sixteenth-note passages, where the middle notes were blurred together but the fact of the matter is that she looked like she was some sort of violinist-marionette being controlled by the marionette master's new apprentice (who suffers from debilitating seizures). This girl was flying around the stage and couldn't have looked more indignant when she wasn't playing if I had offered a pony-tail extension. She actually left the ground in a few places--it was like watching a 17-girl version of Matt Flynn and extremely distracting from the music. The first movement was pretty good but things slowly deteriorated due to the fact she has no concept of how to play musically. Admittedly, this comes with age and maturity---so LET HER WAIT UNTIL SHE HAS AGE AND MATURITY TO PLAY. I admit, I fell asleep because her performance was so uninteresting. And, while I'm complaining, the conductor--what sort of time-displacing hallucinogen was he on? As if violin-girl couldn't keep time enough as it is, David Hoos kept pushing the orchestra in the other direction, causing huge gaps in the beat plane. The ended with the Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique, one of my favorite pieces and, aside from it lacking a little energy, it was still awesome. I can't get over how much better the brass section has become--they used to be terrible and now, dare I say, they sound good. The strings sounded good, but they always have. This was my first TSO concert in three years (not that I attend religiously) that there were no obvious fracted notes in the brass section. Anyway, the Berlioz kicked ass--it's one of those pieces that when people get dragged to the symphony by their wives they can actually get into because Berlioz does such a great job of painting his ideas musically. To TSO's credit, they captured all of these techniques really well. After the concert we went to On The Border for some post-concert snacking and gossip. Then, sadly, it was nap-time.
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