Recent Concerts You've Enjoyed

matakana said:

No photos allowed, however I sneaked this one before they started, BTW the food was very good there too.

Click to expand...

The quietest food is fishcakes and chips. Both delicious. I take the tube because the cocktails are very good. You can take photos at the end, or get your wife to do it for you. I don't go as much as I should because I'd just rack up a hefty bar bill.

ssfas said:

The quietest food is fishcakes and chips. Both delicious. I take the tube because the cocktails are very good. You can take photos at the end, or get your wife to do it for you. I don't go as much as I should because I'd just rack up a hefty bar bill.
View attachment 119527

Click to expand...

It was quite amusing watching the guys in the audience at the front nodding their heads just like the nodding scooby doo toy you put on the back of your car window .shelf.

matakana said:

Christian Mcbride at Ronnie Scott’s, mesmerising , and the quickest 1 1/2 hrs this year.
Christian McBride, eight-time Grammy award winning jazz bassist, will perform his latest project 'New jawn' along with a stellar line up of musicians, Marcus Strickland on tenor sax, Josh Evans on trumpet and Nasheet Waits on drums.

Click to expand...

Damn - meant to go to that!

Ezra Collective at the Royal Albert Hall last night were incredible - hard to put into words just how good they were. The venue was sold out almost immediately tickets were released (no doubt due to winning the Mercury prize) but we managed to get a couple of seats in one of the boxes. The crowd was the most eclectic I've ever seen at the RAH as befits the genre-bending sounds of EC - from jazz heads to rap aficionados, all were present and bouncing around for 2 hours of spellbinding sounds.
They started with the trumpet and sax players up in the gods and finished with a load of London school kids dancing and playing both in the crowd and on stage. In between there were guest vocal slots (Emeli Sandé in first picture, Loyle Corner in second, also Kojey Radical, Zara McFarlane and a few more). This one will live long in the memory.

Ravel and Ades
Los Angeles Philharmonic
Thomas Ades conducting

This is the first time I've ever seen a "piano concerto for the left hand."

Ron Resnick said:

View attachment 125091

Ravel and Ades
Los Angeles Philharmonic
Thomas Ades conducting

This is the first time I've ever seen a "piano concerto for the left hand."

Click to expand...

What a beautiful venue.

Ron Resnick said:

View attachment 125091

Ravel and Ades
Los Angeles Philharmonic
Thomas Ades conducting

This is the first time I've ever seen a "piano concerto for the left hand."

Click to expand...

Seeing it being performed would be possibly a bit jarring I imagine.

For those unfamiliar with the story it was written by Ravel as a commission from an Austrian concert pianist Wittgenstein who had lost his right arm in World War 1 just shortly after starting his concert career…and if you are just listening to a recording without knowing the title and don’t see the performance you’d have little idea the piano was being performed with just one hand… Ravel was a fairly amazing orchestrator.

It is a kind of a dark work though in its overall mood, theres not much light in it which may really be understandable given the context of the piece coming out of the damage that war brings. Maybe that also comes out of Ravel being reminded again of a war that killed many friends and how they both (composer and pianist) not long before had been on the front on opposite sides in a war against each other. Writing it and performing it could be a dark thing. Ravel and Wittgenstein (like most I imagine) had both been reshaped and traumatised by their time at war and all they probably experienced up at the battle front.

Yesterday Shostakovich 5 performed brilliantly by the BBC symphony orchestra at Barbican, and heard Mravinsky perform it with the Leningrad in Vienna today on the Goto/Altec system

Xmas was nutcracker at royal opera house. I don’t like it, but Angela wanted it for Xmassy stuff.

December 15th was Schubert 9th at Sheldonian. Sucks that Janine Jansen pulled out of performing the Mendelssohn concerto that day due to illness.

mxk116 said:

What a beautiful venue.

Click to expand...

Note that there are no parallel walls anywhere. I know nothing about the acoustics of concert halls, but the place sounds awfully good to me.

Ron Resnick said:

View attachment 125091

Ravel and Ades
Los Angeles Philharmonic
Thomas Ades conducting

This is the first time I've ever seen a "piano concerto for the left hand."

Click to expand...

I like the perspective of the orchestra from your seats. How does the sound compare to other seats you've had at Disney?

Ron Resnick said:

View attachment 125091

Ravel and Ades
Los Angeles Philharmonic
Thomas Ades conducting

This is the first time I've ever seen a "piano concerto for the left hand."

Click to expand...

The left hand makes or breaks it for me with keyboard players, a lazy left hand and I am out.

Oscar Peterson in later life had a stroke and became a one handed performer mostly with his right hand. Didn't seem to slow him down much.

Preservation Hall Jazz Band at Kentucky Performing Arts Center, Christmas show, it was amazing. Heard the most amazing and funny version of O Christmas Tree ever, brought the house down.
These guys and gals are amazing and doing their part to keep Nawlins Jazz alive.

Ok this is a story with a concert involved but also a dad being a good dad, and also involves Taylor Swift. I AM IN NO WAY A SWIFTY, DONT LIKE ANY OF HER PRODUCT.

Unbeknownst to me I had no idea that my 37 year old daughter was a Swifty and she asks if we can watch the Eros concert video in our theater...ugh...ok, sure. Pay the $40 i think it was, make the popcorn and sit down for the EXTENDED version of this show. Yes I said extended, 4 HOURS straight in a row of Tay Tay doing her thing. For fours hours this 37 year old woman gushed like a 13 year old, informing us of every little tidbit of the lif and times of Tay Tay, it was amusing, made us laugh.

That being said, I am here to tell you TS has the ultimate marketing/production team in existence today bar none. This show, all four hours of it was an amazing watchable production, even for those that don't care (me). It is so well done its very entertaining. Her band is top notch and the visuals are very well done. The behind the scenes crew are equal performers in this show even though you never see them. The amount of precision team work is out of this world, one mis-step and the whole thing could have gone awry. The audio was amazing, the visual was amazing and the scripting of of the show was perfect.

Still don't like any of her product but she is the one to beat at this moment in time. Very entertaining to watch on a 12 foot screen, spending time with our daughter and grand kids, they sat still through it. Good times were had by all.

Now the actual concert part...

So in my previous post about the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, I saw that my daughter liked it on Fakebook and asked her if she wanted to go. Neither one of us had ever heard of them before but thought it would be fun and it was amazing.

Flash forward a couple weeks and she ask me if I want to go to this concert by candlelight gig that is going around right now. I look it up and looks very cool and I look it up and see Brahms and stuff and say cool hell yes.

Sooooooooo its the night of the show and we go to their house and drop off the wife to watch the grandkids while we go to the show and as we are walking out the door my wife says enjoy the TAY TAY music...

Whaaaaaaaat, I have been bamboozled into a candlelit concert with a quartet playing Taylor Swift music!!! Damn! There was no backing out at this point so off we went. I was a very cool experience, thousands of candles lit all through out the venue, string quartet live music. I just enjoyed it for what it was, good live music, time with my daughter and a thousand Swiftys doing their thing.

These candle light concerts that seem to be a thing right now are very very cool, if they are in your area and are performing music you actually like I highly recommend it.

Ron Resnick said:

Note that there are no parallel walls anywhere. I know nothing about the acoustics of concert halls, but the place sounds awfully good to me.

Click to expand...

The aesthetics of the interior are as remarkable the Gehry exterior. While the interior has many of Gehry's signature elements, it also shows the hand of others. I read that Gehry collaborated with a Japanese acoustician on the concert hall proper. Good to learn that the acoustics affirm the venue's visual beauty. A sublime combination.

Enjoyed the Cleveland Orchestra at Steinmetz Hall, Orlando past weekend. The program was conducted by
Karina Canellakis
THE PROGRAM:
CHOPIN — Piano Concerto No. 2 and Seong-Jin Cho started the performance and provided an inspired performance. After a small break the entire orchestra soared under Canellakis direction as they played
RACHMANINOV — Symphonic Dances.
This recently opened hall in the Dr Phillips Center has amazing acoustics. Having grown up in Cleveland and enjoying the orchestra under Szell and Lois Lane I it always fun to hear them today.

drrsutliff said:

Enjoyed the Cleveland Orchestra at Steinmetz Hall, Orlando past weekend. The program was conducted by
Karina Canellakis
THE PROGRAM:
CHOPIN — Piano Concerto No. 2 and Seong-Jin Cho started the performance and provided an inspired performance. After a small break the entire orchestra soared under Canellakis direction as they played
RACHMANINOV — Symphonic Dances.
This recently opened hall in the Dr Phillips Center has amazing acoustics. Having grown up in Cleveland and enjoying the orchestra under Szell and Lois Lane I it always fun to hear them today.

Click to expand...

While I did not grow up in Cleveland, I raised my family there. Lived in the same house for 38 years and enjoyed the magnificent Cleveland Orchestra as often as I could. I still miss Severance Hall and Blossom Music Center, the orchestra's summer home.

R Johnson said:

I like the perspective of the orchestra from your seats. How does the sound compare to other seats you've had at Disney?

Click to expand...

I prefer these seats, in the middle to rear of the orchestra section, over the front row of the orchestra and over the last row in the hall.

Ron Resnick said:

I prefer these seats, in the middle to rear of the orchestra section, over the front row of the orchestra and over the last row in the hall.

Click to expand...

i prefer middle too, or front of centre