Saturday, October 06, 2007

Saturday Night: Concert

The Leeds International Concert Season had started a few weeks ago, and I decided that this year I would again go to concerts in the Leeds Town Hall, as I had done during my first year here in Leeds. This Saturday, the Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra of Moscow Radio under Vladimir Fedoseyev played Elgar's Serenade for Strings (in my view a pleasant but rather predictable piece), Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto #2 (one of the great "concert war horses"), and Rimsky-Korsakov's Shererazade (in my opinion the most impressive of the 3 works - with its colorful instrumentation and its defiance of stricl classical form). I especially admire about Rimsky-Korsakov (and for that matter Borodin) that he was basically an amateur, not trained in composition and music. This is phantastic and gives some hope to amateur composers everywhere and through the ages.

After the concert, it is quite amazing to see the Leeds night life in the streets on Saturday night. Lots of young people stroll around, most of them probbaly students, a few of them drunk, but most (still) more or less dry. Most of them "glamed up" for the night, forming lines outside of bars and clubs. It seems that the roads are more busy now around midnight than they are during the day.

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