So last night marked the second and final time April and I would head to Tanglewood this year, located in beautiful Lenox, MA. Tanglewood is the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Boston Pops. We went to see the Boston Pops Esplanade Orchestra doing their annual "Film Night at Tanglewood," in which they perform film scores from a particular director that they're paying tribute to. With John Williams (yes, THAT John Williams--the very same composer who did all the music for Star Wars, Indiana Jones, the first 3 Harry Potter movies, and so on) conducting, this was gonna be a damn good show. This year, they paid tribute to director David Lean, who I never heard of, but I did hear of some movies he'd directed (Dr. Zhivago, Lawrence of Arabia). The first half of the show consisted of various works from some of his movies. Some of them were played to series of clips from whatever movie the excerpts came from. It was like watching a fan-made video on YouTube, but with much better sound quality.
After intermission, we were treated to a suite of music from the Harry Potter series (as composed by Williams himself) as the second half of the program. It must be extremely gratifying to perform your own work, knowing that you contributed to a huge cultural phenomenon. Regardless, I wasn't disappointed. It was an outstanding performance, all in all. At performance's start, there was a full lawn and a nearly packed Shed, but as it was getting closer to the end of the program, I watched as people began to leave, simply to beat the traffic that would ensue at show's end, which always pisses me off. I find it so rude to leave in the middle of the show--you paid for those tickets, you should show respect to the performers and stay for the entire show.
Besides, they missed the encore, in which Williams came back on stage and performed a work that the entire audience knew, a piece from Indiana Jones. And yes, getting out was insanity, but April and I had some food in our cooler--we ate, and then made the 1-hour journey home.
Great show. And now I own a credit card, which I intend to hardly ever use, but now that means I can get tickets to shows instead of waiting on pay days to do it. Which is what I intend to do--SPAMALOT is coming to Proctor's Theatre right here in Schenectady during January of '08. If anyone wants to go, tickets are on sale now at the Proctor's web site: www.proctors.org
And that's it, really. A great night. Dan H will be up here in a few hours. RENFAIRE IN A WEEK!
Contest resumes tonight.
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