Otis Redding apparently used to say that he knew a song was done when he couldn't stop moving his shoulders.  Totally makes sense to me.

The thing is, I never knew he was talking about classical music.

I saw Osmo Vänskä, The Minnesota Orchestra, and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra all together to play some Stravinsky tonight, with the final piece being Rite of Spring.  (They needed both orchestras to fulfill the size demands of the score.) 

I've got an excellent recording of Rite of Spring (Leonard Bernstein with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra - I'm listening to it right now), but I've never heard it live before.  From the first note of the opening Bassoon feature, they had me.  I always take off my glasses and close my eyes when at the Orchestra, so as to better focus on the sound, and today, they had my mind, body, and emotions completely in their control.  For the first half of the show (Jeu de Cartes, and a Chamber piece called Danses concertantes, along with a really wonderful version of The Star Spangled Banner Stravinsky arranged), my mind was wandering a bit - the music was wonderful, but it just wasn't distracting me from my recent projects.  But with Rite, I had no such problem.  I don't know if my mind could have wandered if I wanted it too. 

Afterward, my niece told me I had been dancing in my seat the whole time.  I honestly didn't even notice.  So, I guess Otis was right - you know a song is right when you can't stop moving your shoulders.  She also claims that The Rite of Spring was actually about 32 minutes long, but you'll never convince me.  It felt more like ten minutes.  That oboe just draws you into it's stark complexity, and then the horns start drawing the tension, pulling your mind into their scene.  By the time the strings start thrashing away on that poly-chord, you are stuck in the music.  The dynamics push and pull, and by the time the second movement starts I feel like I haven't had a breath in over an hour.  And then, all too soon, its over, and you feel this grand disappointment that they aren't going to play it all over again.  I think that's what caused the riot when Rite was premiered - the audience didn't want it to end!  And in one 32 minute piece, you all of a sudden understand where most of the 20th century's classical music came from.  Certainly, you can draw a line at 1913 - music before The Rite of Spring, and music after.

Damn that was great!!!!

I've been watching a couple different versions of Cyrano de Bergerac from Netflix latly, and it has just reminded me how incredibly good that story is.  It almost doesn't matter how badly it is performed (though Jenifer Garner's Roxanne made me wonder why Cyrano or Christian would bother - she may have been beautiful, but she was vacuous and awful as a person!), the story gets to me every time.  Especially at the end, durring Cyrano's monolog and duel with death -

You take everything, the laurel and the rose, too! Go on, take them!
But, in spite of you, one thing goes with me now
And tonight, when I, at last, God behold
My salute will sweep his blue threshold with something spotless --
A diamond in the ash which I take in spite of you --
And that’s
My panache.

But of course, the best line in the whole thing, possibly in all of literature (as far as I'm concerned), right after Roxanne tells him she loves Christian -

Roxanne: 100 men - so brave!
Cyrano: I've done better since.

It makes me wish I could speak French well enough to understand the original version. 

And somewhat shockingly, Steve Martin's version, Roxanne, is a extremely good translation!