Life of Wry

What a lovely evening we just had.

It’s a real testament to greatness, that a person who does not know much at all about classical music, and less about the violin, can feel like she’s floating out of a concert hall after two hours of classical violin music. It is certain that I got less out of tonight’s concert than a person who knows what to listen for, but: I/we got to hear “the world’s reigning virtuoso” of the violin; I was moved — at one point to tears — by the beauty of his music and his obvious joy in playing it; and I will always have Itzhak Perlman as a reference point when listing to violin music from here on out.

He played with a pianist, Rohan De Silva, accomplished/famous in his own right. The two together: gorgeous. My comment to Jim as we walked home was, “how does so much music come out of two instruments?” Honest to god, if I’d closed my eyes and you asked me how many musicians were on that stage, I might have guessed 4-6? I can’t say too much more about the whole thing, other than it was beautiful. Though we had pretty great seats in the orchestra section, I was glad to have binoculars so I could really see his expressions and watch his fingers. It was mesmerizing and moving. For me, the piece that stuck out — completely because it was familiar and haunting — was John Williams’s theme from Schindler’s List. (That was the part where I teared up.)

They did not want photos taken while they played, but I got a quick one when he addressed the audience during the final 5-6 short pieces (which were not on the program). He looks a bit older than his program head shot, but was as charming as people say he is.

I enjoyed the whole damn thing. Was so glad we went and hope Jim enjoyed it too. Can’t wait to talk to Peter and Maya about it; they saw him a couple months ago in Ann Arbor.

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We got lucky with weather tonight. It rained most of the day — sometimes incredibly hard — but stopped for the time it took to walk to dinner and also for our walk home. We ran into some folks we knew at Bernardo’s who were also going to the concert and since it was raining cats and dogs as we finished dinner, they offered us a ride to the Mondavi. How ’bout that.

We saw photos on Facebook this afternoon of Putah Creek significantly overflowing its banks, so (of course) we walked home via Putah Creek.. but by tonight the water was back down to normal flow (“flow”… it’s not actually a creek at all, it’s a very long lake). There were some pockets of standing water, but nothing we couldn’t easily avoid. T’was a nice walk home.