Boston Pops

This week has been a quiet one, by which I mean I've only been to two concerts and two rehearsals, bought a keyboard (not for me: for the Gilbert and Sullivan Players!), had a meeting with one of MIT's leaders in battery technology, said goodbye to my research supervisor for three months, arranged a trip to Montreal, finished a zeroth draft of a paper on my research...

For now, the first concert: Boston Pops. MIT students can obtain free tickets to many Boston Symphony shows through the college card program, and on Wednesday night I went to a concert of the Boston Pops Orchestra. The Boston Pops is essentially the BSO minus the principals (and the principles?). The main seating section had table and chair seating, and my free ticket was on the second balcony. The view was fine, and the sound was great when the horns were playing, and only a small step short of great in the softer string sections.

The BSO has recently begun a program-reuse project, so I can't tell you exactly what they played (I could have brought a program home had I wished, but I didn't). They began with nothing astonishing, which I guess is the goal. They then moved on to my favourite, which was some folk fiddle music. Next was a Beatles singalong. To assist the audience, they had a Rock Band-style karaoke display projected above the orchestra. The problem was that, not being electronically linked to the display, they were not always in time. I would have been impressed had the conductor been able to keep the orchestra synchronised with the scrolling, but it was not to be. My main problem was not knowing the tunes (I'm not sure that I really knew that Sergeant Peppers'... was a song title as well as the album title): they gave a line that moved up and down, but I would have been happier with sheet music! It seemed that, like me, many of the audience were more familiar with Yellow Submarine, and, to some extent, Twist and Shout, than some of the others. I did enjoy singing when I could, though.

In the second half, they played with the Dave Brubeck quartet. He was playing well for his 90 years, and it was a polished performance of a number of his works. Nothing to draw my preference away from the classical repertoire of the BSO, though!

The concert ended, as usual, with Stars and Stripes Forever. They brought on a major benefactor of the Pops to "conduct". That felt very odd to me - and very American! I remember looking at the huge stars projected on the wall, and the very different place philanthropy has in the American culture, and feeling particularly Australian.