First I was going to go to this concert on Friday. But that was Garden of Memory. Then I switched it to Saturday. But then I decided to attend the Rainbow Symphony. That left the Sunday matinee.
The reason I was so eager to go is that EPS would be conducting Bruckner's Fourth. It turned out to be very worthwhile. He had sure control over the shape and flow of the music, knowing just when to let a pause linger a bit and when to build up the intensity. It wandered a bit on the large scale but was under firm control moment by moment. He found previously unsuspected reservoirs of graciousness in the scherzo's trio section.
Only the sound quality was slightly imperfect. The full-orchestra fortes were overloud and a bit coarse, while the pianissimos could get too quiet. The brass chorales were played ideally enough, but the sound was a bit thin and slightly grainy.
And to fill out the program, Schumann's Piano Concerto played by the frequent visitor Yefim Bronfman, a big bear of a man with a gentle, caressing way at the keyboard. The clarity and beauty of it was a delight.
Slight amusement value in the lobby beforehand, listening to two ladies seated near me reading the program notes for the Schumann and trying to figure out who Florestan and Eusebius were. (They were personas for the different sides of Schumann's personality whom he invented as mouthpieces for his music reviews, and they're often taken by program-note writers as the composers of the contrasting moods in his own music.)
Slight difficulty getting home. I entered the BART station just after a train had left, but after 15 minutes of the next train being 9 minutes out, I deduced it was not going to arrive, so I left the station - the gate charged me $2.80 for the privilege of not being able to take a train, and that's the senior discount - and took the city bus ($1.25, senior discount), rattle and bang on the badly-paved streets, all the way out to the distant BART station at which I'd parked.
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