The Mozart Experience

February 25, 2006 - 2006 marks the 250th anniversary of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's birth. All around the world, there have been concerts, performances and musical tributes to the classical composer. While I would like to be in Salzburg to check out the Mozart Festival (and hopefully I'll get to do that if I do decide to go to Europe in the fall), the best I could do for now is to take advantage of the local orchestras and performances - and that was what I did. Tonight, I went to my first Mozart concert in a long time.

My sister bought tickets to go see the Tafelmusik Orchestra's "Mozart at the Piano" concert at the Trinity-St. Paul's Centre. The concert featured two key pieces of Mozart's: Concerto for fortepiano no. 24 in C Minor, and Symphony no. 31 in D Major. Now even though I took music all the way through school, I must admit that much of what I had learned (including my ability to play the violin) have pretty much been forgotten. So throughout the concert, I had to ask my sister what specific things mean, such as: what's the difference between allegro, larghetto, and allegretto?

The concert itself was pretty cool - I got to see the fortepiano for the first time (which is really like a normal piano, except the white keys are black and the black keys are white). The pianist was really really good. Seeing him move his fingers was impressive enough. One thing that I really liked about the concert was this "improvised" section. The pianist asked the audience to submit bars of music during the intermission, and afterwards, selected 4 submissions randomly and created a piece out of it. It was amazing because: 1) he was able to link individual bars together that do not even seem to link up at all; 2) the audience was quite knowledgeable about music - one of the submissions was from these two 12 year old girls!

So overall, it was a neat experience. I wasn't bored at all - I was actually pretty awestruck just watching the bows of the first violins go up and down (for the record, I played 2nd violin in high school). It was fun and entertaining =) definitely have to thank my sister for asking me to go with her...

Funny story: I seriously have to work on my parallel parking! It has been awhile since I have driven downtown and needless to say, I had major problems parking my car along the sidestreets. It was actually quite embarrassing when I got stuck and all these cars were behind me waiting for me to either park or pull out. I blame the snow though of course =)