The Vienna Philharmonic

Yesterday we got ready to head to Salzburg. We had made reservations for the Vienna Philharmonic concert playing in the Grosses Festspielhaus (large Festival Hall) in Salzburg for the annual Salzburg Music Festival. The conductor was Valery Gergiev, a Moscow born conductor associated with the Mariinsky theater of Russia. He had won the Herbert von Karajan conducting competition in Berlin at the age of 24! Frankly, I was not sure what to expect as I had never been to a full blown western classical concert before. R's excitement in seeing the combination of a great philharmonic and a great conductor was definitely rubbing off.


The concert begins

But truly, nothing could have prepared me for the concert, it was absolutely stunning. It started off with Rachmaninoff's Die Toteninsel (The Isle of Dead) followed by Toshio Hosokawa's Circulating Ocean (this piece was written in 2004-05 to a commission from the Salzburg Festival for Vienna Philharmonic) and closed off with Sheherazade by Nikolai Rimsky Korasakov based on the Arabic fairy tales of The Thousand and One Nights. To me, the highlight was definitely Sheherazade, a 50 minute piece that just blew me away with the peaks and the crescendos. It definitely made me wonder if I could appreciate it even more if I understood classical music :-(. Circulating Ocean was also a beautiful piece which combined Japanese musical elements with western classical. This piece was also welcomed with thunderous applause when the composer himself made his appearance on stage.


The Finale

Thanks R for exposing me to this wonderful experience!! On a side note, it was definitely a lot of fun people watching too. All the women in their fancy evening wear, some even in dirndls (a traditional Bavarian and Austrian dress) at 11 in the morning! I think the next time I go to a concert, I am gonna "kick it up a notch" with a fancy sari or a ghaghra. That should definitely match the glitterati...