Yes, yes, I'm still alive.

Last night my husband and I went to the symphony. We have been four times, and going by our last three visits we average about once a year (the first time was several years ago). Last night we saw Grieg's Peer Gynt, John Williams' The Five Sacred Trees (a bassoon concerto), and Schumann's Symphony No. 1 in B-flat major. Peer Gynt was outstanding, I was really enthralled by it. I was unimpressed and bored by The Five Sacred Trees, though there were some good parts in the second movement. Honestly I believe that a large part of my feelings toward it are because it is modern (1993); I don't care for a lot of modern classical music. Schumann's symphony was good, but it didn't "speak to me" like some music does (Beethoven's Ninth, for example, or Mozart's Requiem). I am really glad that I got to hear Peer Gynt performed but I went away feeling a little disappointed that the rest of the concert wasn't as good.

These all were led by a guest conductor, Arild Remmereit, and I thought he was really good. He was very animated and seemed very good-natured - I saw him wiggling his eyebrows at several musicians before the concert started - and I was impressed that he only used a score for the bassoon concerto.

The baby is definitly reacting to sound now; after that first cymbal crash in Peer Gynt he woke up and started jumping around.

Last year for Christmas we were given a Seattle Symphony gift certificate and we used part of that to buy tickets to see the Cowboy Junkies in April. I'm really looking forward to that, and we still have a balance left so we'll get to go see another concert as well.

I had a really good, really long blog post written up in my head last night but unfortunately this is all you get....