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Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5
Friday, June 15 2012
This evening Gretchen and I made a date of going across the Hudson and attending a concert at Bard College. It was entitled "Music of Three Bachs and Villa Lobos," and Gretchen was particularly excited to see a performance of Villa Lobos' "Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5." The show was part of the Aston Magna Festival, which aims to perform music using "period instruments." (This aim would be a bit clouded today given that Villa Lobos is a 20th Century composer and did not write for lutes and baroque violins.) We showed up late, having run our dogs around in a parking lot on the edge of one of Bard's several campus marshlands. When we arrived, one of the evening's musicians was giving a lecture about lutes, showing an instrument with an eight foot long neck (strings made of cat gut cannot be made very thick, so to get a deep note one has to use a long string).
At our age, it's not often that Gretchen and I are the youngest people in an auditorium. But the fans of classical music are an aging and dying population, so we were probably the only people there younger than fifty. It wasn't just that most of them were bald or grey; a clear majority were also wearing eyeglasses. And maybe only a quarter or third of the 400 seats were occupied (by, in some cases, let's be frank, Depends-wearing behinds).
I'm not quite the fan of classical music that Gretchen is, and I hadn't expected to enjoy the music as much as I did. It helped that most of it was Bach and therefore highly melodic. But the Villa Lobos was also delightful, introducing the sort of dissonance I have come to crave without compromising on melody. (As I said to Gretchen tonight, "Without melody, what's the point?" And that, of course, is the problem with most modern "classical" music. Just because something sounds terrible doesn't make it art.) For the Villa Lobos and the German-language Bach arias there was a vocalist, a handsome hunk of a woman named Kristen Watson who came equipped with an astounding vocal system. She was subbing for Dominique Labelle, who was ill (or perhaps just not in top form, a probable requirement for singing "Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5".)
After the concert, we returned to our side of the Hudson and went to the Mall. It was too late to get dinner at most conventional restaurants, but the kitchen at Rolling Rock is open late and we love the veggie burgers and fries there. The bartender was the same guy as we'd seen the last two other times we'd eaten there, and he seems hipper than the sort of bartenders one normally finds at a mall. Here is the evidence: he doesn't need any explanation of what a vegan is, Gretchen had seen him last Thursday at the Stockade in Uptown, and he knows his way around Snapper McGee's (Kingston's most notorious dive bar).
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