Well, wasn’t I wrong about last night’s concert.

At the NaNo meet yesterday afternoon, a friend told me that he regretfully wouldn’t be able to make it to that evening’s memorial concert for my orchestra’s conductor Andres Gutmanis, who died in an accident three months ago. “That’s okay,” I said without thinking about my words, “no one else is going.” My words had a visible effect; he looked chagrined. I attempted a casual explanation including the weather, the travel time to the West Island (which is usually an issue to which I am ruthlessly unsympathetic; I lived there for years, and it is, in fact, ridiculously easy to get there, and not as time-consuming as people seem to think), and the fact that I myself wasn’t very hyped for it. So, if there were a concert of mine to miss, this would be the one.

I was very, very wrong.

Two of my friends showed up after all, one who I had known was going to try to make it, another who was a very pleasant surprise. (You have my heartfelt thanks, Nika and MLG, and coffeeing afterwards was lovely too!) They were treated to an absolutely phenomenal evening of music, an evening which surprised even me.

We opened with the Albinoni Adagio, which I usually find maudlin in any recording and unmoving when we play it, but which was so perfect in last night’s performance that it moved me to tears. (It takes two hands to play the cello; wiping tears away is difficult.) There was a guest trio which played selections from Stravinsky�s Pulcinella suite, and they were incredibly talented. Then we played the Mendelssohn, and glory be, we sounded good; I almost enjoyed it. There were more guests performing single songs, vocalists and violinists and George Doxas, Andres’ fellow music teacher from LPHS. To draw the first half to a close we then played the terribly, terribly dramatic Handel Prelude and Fugue, and again, we were impressed ourselves by the precision and the sweeping drama of it all.

After the intermission — oh, this was part of the treat. George Doxas had brought along his twenty-five piece big band, and they proceeded to play swing and jazz for half an hour. It changed the mood and galvanized the orchestra, sitting in the first couple of rows of the audience, into a very correct, dead-on rendition of the old-world folk song The Lonely Maiden, played in Andres’ own arrangement. It’s a slightly creepy traditional Eastern European melody, and utilises a particularly odd technique called col legno, which means hitting the string with the stick of the bow instead of drawing the rosined hair across it to produce vibration. The result is a muted, clipped, percussive sound that most people have never heard. The problem with it is that it’s practically impossible to get thirty people to hit the string simultaneously, to achieve a clear unified note. Last night, we did it.

And the finale was an encore presentation of the first movement of Beethoven’s Symphony no. 1, which was our most successful piece performed at the Canada Day concert last July. Under Nancy’s direction, we had refined it to a precise yet wild machine that couldn’t be stopped once it had begun. Again, it was the best performance we had given of the work to date.

So we began with a show-stopping number, and we ended with one as well, which, as I have been taught in essay-writing and speech-giving, is the best way to ensure that your audience will remember you. My husband tells me that it has been the best show we’ve done so far, and he’s been to all four I’ve played with this group. So evidently I was wrong when I said that this would be the concert to miss. It was, in fact, one of the best presentations of musicians from all over the island of Montreal.

I don’t know what our conductor-status is at the moment, but if Nancy were to remain as our leader, I would be more than happy. She’s fantastic in rehearsals, and she was clear and focused during performance. It would be a shame to pull her out of the viola section – the gods know violists are in short supply, and good violists are even harder to find! – but she’s terrific up there on the podium. I won’t know for another two weeks; I have the next two Wednesdays nights off. That’s nice, but after such a successful concert I’m even more enthusiastic about orchestra than usual, and almost three weeks is an awfully long time to wait to get back into the swing of things. And even then, it’s only for one night before we break for Christmas. Ah well. I shall go to Archambault to purchase new music to keep me busy during the time off.