Namedropper!!!

In the spring of 2000 some friends of mine and I decided that, rather than go somewhere sunny and warm, we were going to have a "cultured" spring break and headed to the Windy City for a week. We did all the things you're supposed to do when you visit Chicago. We went to the Sears Tower, the Chicago Art Institute (could've spent days in there), Navy Pier (it always rains the day I go to Navy Pier), the Field Museum of Natural History, Pizzeria Uno (duh...you can't go to Chi-town without getting great pizza), did lots of shopping (mostly at the Virgin Megastore, which I preferred at the time to refer to as the Virgin Meccastore), and pretended to be German when approached by homeless people.

But...

For me the absolute highlight of the week, though, was attending the Chicago Symphony's American premiere(?) of Krzysztof Penderecki's Seven Gates of Jerusalem. This hour-long work is amazing with truly incredible performing forces as well. It calls for doubled wind/brass/percussion sections on stage. This group of winds and brass is doubled again at the back of the concert hall as an antiphonal group. The percussion section also has in it two sets of giant PVC pipes that are cut to different lengths and struck on the end with fly swatter-type things. Then there's a 200-voice choir that is, at one point, split into 3 mixed choirs. Then there are 6 soloists; a lyric soprano, a dramatic soprano, mezzo-soprano, tenor, bass and cantor.

The work itself is in 7 movements. All of the text is taken from the Old Testament and performed in Latin except the 5th movement which is intoned by the cantor in Hebrew. This is probably the most striking of the seven movements because of the Hebrew cantor and the conspicuous use of bass trumpet (awesome!) which Penderecki uses to symbolize the voice of God (as a trumpet player I'm not going to disagree). Mr. Penderecki was the guest conductor for the evening as well and the other work on the program was Schubert's Symphony no. 9 "The Great". Let's just say this about his conducting; anyone who has watched Howard Shore conduct on the extra features on the Lord of the Rings dvds will understand what kind of conductor Mr. Penderecki is. He has one conducting "dynamic" which is a rather huge window. And he conducts left-handed. While this isn't a bad thing, it's quite distracting.

Seven Gates of Jerusalem is the piece that really got me turned on to Penderecki's music. After that I went on this buying spree where I picked up a whole bunch of Penderecki recordings which ultimately led me to many other composers of Eastern Europe and the Baltic Region (you may have noticed).

And the second greatest part of the evening (after the music) was the shot above. That's yours truly with Penderecki. Mercifully my hair and sense of style has changed since then. I hope.