The Philistine

It is one of those moments in time when if I am objective enough to step back and look at myself objectively I find revealed the classic middle class philistine, whom you will always find at the concert hall, in the theater, on the list of donors printed in the program, sometimes baffled by what he hears, sometimes feeling his inner heart swell with the beauty he perceives in the notes he hears, sometimes puzzled and put off by the sounds.  This weekend on Saturday night I went with a friend to hear a very special performance of Anton Bruckner's Pierrot Lunaire played and sung lovingly by a group who has made this thirty odd minute piece their specialty.  It thoroughly repelled me, the screeching notes from the instrument, the screaming of the soprano voice.  I tried, I tried, I tried to assimilate it in some way of another, finally just surrendering and thinking to myself: well, this is happening.  Sunday at the matinee of the Sarasota Symphony we were treated to Beethoven's Egmont Overture as a Vorspeise, then Mendelsohn's famous Violin Concerto, which is lushly beautiful, and sweepingly romantic--what's not to love?  After the intermission Anu Talli, the conductor led a very crisp Sacré du Printemps, which Stravinksy had performed in a debut performance in 1913 just a year after that shrill piece by Bruckner.  It was from another world, although I know that as its first hearing it was shocking and outrageous in the extreme.  I listened to these pieces, just sounds to me, able to notice chords, and melodies, and progressions in the Mendelsohn piece, but mostly just thinking it's pretty, and the Beethoven Overture is pleasing because so familiar from eighty odd years of hearing it.  The Stravinsky is compelling because of the sharp and compelling rhythms, because of the associations with the ballet for which it was composed, for the anecdotes of scandal attached to it.  I was lost in it, sunk into a non intellectual animal appreciation of its rhythms and noises.  That's as far as I can go.  Tonight we go to the opera, Donizetti's "Don Pasquale," a treat if only because finally, thank god, the conductor has finished his decade long Verdi cycle.  Donizetti, isn't he "bel canto"? won't that make me swoon like bel canto usually does?  Well, there you have it folks, the inner workings of the mind and spirit of a typical senior citizen who used to listen to the Met every Saturday afternoon and the New York Symphony every Sunday, a member of America's cultured classes.  By chance Tomasssini, the Times premier music critic wrote a piece for the Sunday edition about how contemporary music is left out in the cold while modern art and the rest of the avant garde is let in the door.  Don't blame the persons who shut the door say I.  I vote with my ear. I try and try John Adams, Cage, Crumb, on and on.  "Eat your broccoli" is the inner command I hear.  The gorge rises in my throat.