If you like your symphonies full bodied you should have been in Ann Arbor last night when the Ann Arbor Symphony did Mahler’s Symphony No. 6.  With just under 100 musicians the stage was packed.  And every one of those musicians played their hearts out.

The 6th is relentless…full…lush spellbinding.  It could be…should be…the score for a movie.  That would be something wouldn’t it…to make a movie…perhaps a silent movie (the better to enjoy the music).. to fit  the drama of Mahler’s 6th.  It has everything an epic movie should have; marching armies, intimate battles, galloping horses, angst, star crossed lovers, mothers tenderly watching their children who grow up to march in armies heading off to battle, gentle love scenes, peaceful pastoral settings…more marching armies.  Life.  Death.

The musicians played 80 minutes and there were very few of those minutes that allowed any of them to rest.  Those of us in the audience sat still for 80 minutes, only letting our breaths out for the few seconds between each of the four movements.

We enjoyed fantastic woodwinds, royal trumpets and stunning horns. The strings played as one, the harps were ethereal, the percussion added a sense of drama alternating with humor.  The music swelled and lifted us in ever tighter revolutions, higher and higher into rarefied air and then let us down gently onto a moss strewn forest floor where we luxuriated in sunshine and harmony until the music swept us up on the next wave of emotion again.  Over and over we raced high above earth and then floated back.

Mahler wrote about this piece as he was composing it.  He said it was going to be like nothing the world had heard before.  Last night it often seemed bigger than the world, as if it could touch every corner of our planet.  The sound was bigger, brighter, more luminous than words can describe.  You had to be there.  You should have been there.

Finally the whole piece came down to the last measures, measures as soft and delicate as a final breath.   They gave me goose bumps.  And as the musicians let that last note go, as the conductor stood still with his hands in the air as if to hold on for one more moment, as the audience held it’s breath, my eyes filled with tears.

Profound.

Last night husband and I went to see the local high school production of Beauty and the Beast.  Several members of the community band I play with were either playing in the pit, singing and dancing on the stage or working lights from the booth.  What a treat.  So many talented kids.  Wonderful music, great costumes and sets merged with joyous laughter, thunderous applause and standing ovations.  Love poured from the group on stage to the audience and was tossed right back to the performers.

You see the best in a community when you watch an event like this.  The coordinated effort of students and adults creating something fine and good.  It was wonderful to watch.  And what of our favorite door?

She was adorable.

Tuesday night was our first band practice since our Christmas concert mid-December.  Though it was nice to have the time off, we were all eager to get back to playing again.  We are getting ready for a community band festival held at the end of February.  This of course makes us more nervous because the audience will be filled with our peers – other community bands, people that know music and will be listening with more critical ears than our family and friends.  So we want to have our stuff together.   We have six weeks.

On of the pieces we will be playing is “Danzon #2” by Marquez.  I had never heard it before, but our director sent an email out during the break letting us know, and telling us that we should go find it online and listen.  You can hear it here.  It’s almost 10 minutes long but worth the listen/watch.  This particular version is done by an orchestra, but we’ll be doing a version for a concert band.  I followed along in my music and our version is almost exactly like this one, with a few minor orchestration differences.

Tuesday night it took us 45 minutes to get from the beginning to the end of the piece.  We stopped and started a lot but some sections sounded pretty good even on the first attempt.   And there was a long duet between our first chair clarinet and an oboe player who just happens to be his 10th grade daughter.  They sounded so wonderful, the two of them together, that the rest of us, the entire band, forgot to keep counting and none of us came in after the 14 or so measures of their solo.  The director laughed and lowered her baton,  voicing what we were all thinking; what a wonderful opportunity for this father/daughter duo to play something so beautiful together.  To create something breathlessly beautiful with her Dad…it will be a memory she remembers forever.

That is the beauty of playing in a group like this.  There are several parent/teenager duos in the band and I think they all enjoy the experience of doing something like this together.  I know we enjoy having them with us.  We would not be the group we are without the support of many local musically talented kids.  They fill in our gaps, cover our mistakes and generally don’t treat us like the old farts we are.  Sometimes they remind us of how old we are just by their intense youthfulness.  But generally it’s just fun to have them around.

So, time to get back to the daily practicing.  Don’t want those young whippersnappers to outshine us more experienced players.  They get to play in their high school bands every day.  We have two hours a week.  But then we have less homework to do at night so it all balances out.

I hope.