"No, the punching happened at a Boston Pops concert," we told everyone who wished us a fistfight on Thursday. "The audience was riled up by that popular music. This is the Boston Symphony Orchestra. There's a difference." This Bostonist is a savage who can't articulate that difference, but we tricked a musically-literate friend who was under the impression that we were taking her out for her birthday—let's call her Fancy McCulture-Pants—to accompany us to the BSO's all-Ravel opening night program. We, on the other hand, felt qualified to bask in the anthropological joys of the cocktail reception: bow ties, shawls, reluctant children, hors d’œuvres scooped up in little endive shovels, morsels of conversation ("We live in Nantucket now, just across the pond"). A bar on the mezzanine supplied us with a lovely Manhattan, and we escorted it down the grand stair.
The concert got off to a jaunty start, with Ravel's "Alborada del gracioso" shifting deftly between moments of almost comedic bombast and thickets of delicately textured quiet. "Utterly amazing as an alborada," Fancy jotted to me on her program booklet (where it explained that this genre of "dawn songs" was usually more sentimental than the fanciful romp we were treated to). "Spunky."
And then Susan Graham strode onstage in a rainbow sherbet concoction of a dress, like a fruit salad attacked by a Bedazzler, to provide her gorgeous mezzo-soprano for "Shéhérazade," in which the music cleaved closely to the French text: Graham's enchanting vibrato was matched by the flute's in "La Flûte Enchantée." The poems' heroine demanded to see roses and blood, and Ravel obliged her with incredible crescendoes. Dreamily trilling harp sounds, the sort that Bostonist associates with soft-focus alien ladies on vintage Star Trek planets, accompanied a laundry list of picturesque orientalisms: violet sails, unjust decapitations, slender minarets, a variety of fabrics ("turbans de soie," "vêtements de velours") and skin colors ("visages noirs aux dents claires," "peaux jaunes comme des oranges").
Fancy, a former flautist, was delighted by the woodwind solos that embellished the prettily accessible "Piano Concerto in G," which was also adorned with unexpected bits of trombone and the pianist's rakishly unbuttoned collar. (Changing between his performance and the final bows, Jean-Yves Thibaudet later upped the ante with a black shirt and burgundy velvet smoking jacket.)
"Daphnis et Chloé" picked up the fantastical themes of the evening and ran with them: the ballet score managed to set up a mythical woodland and abduct us to a pirate camp without the help of tutued sylphs or dancing buccaneers. As the drama built to a dizzying finish, pink and grey James Levine was a joy to behold from our orchestra seats. To be honest, Bostonist kind of missed our usual, vertiginous "cheap" seats: being high up in the back of that cavernous venue underscores the sensation that we're on the inside of an enormous amplifier. But down in the thick of things, we could see a violinist glancing at a too-loud turning of pages in the audience, a fellow in a t-shirt bumping past spaghetti-strapped shoulders to find his seat, and Levine's foot rocking against the lower rung of his red-velvet perch.
As the throngs exited to waiting trolley-shaped buses, Bostonist ducked into the ladies' room, where a young woman in a flowing black gown was scrutinizing herself in the mirror. A silver-haired woman glanced her way and remarked that "Youth is lovely to behold." In the Symphony T stop, a surreally friendly MBTA employee (who must've been supplied for the purpose of soothing patrons of the arts) cheerfully regaled a couple of Englishwomen with the origins of "Charlie." Bostonist couldn't help but wonder if they didn't realize that this was not the natural order of things. We might have to do this again sometime.
Top: Outside Symphony Hall. Bottom: No fisticuffs, and no cell phones.
Fancy McCulture-Pants contributed invaluable insights to this post.
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