We had a big night out at the Silver Anniversary Gala to celebrate Music Director Gerard Schwartz's 25 years with the Seattle Symphony. Our regular season tickets are for Sunday afternoons, but John always picks some extra interesting concerts when they first go on sale in the spring. He's also great at nabbing the very best seats in the "cheap" sections, so for about the price of a movie and popcorn, we often hear something truly remarkable.
We were in the second row last night when John Lill played two monster piano concertos in the same program: Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1, and Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3. Playing both astonishingly difficult concertos and making it look (almost) easy seemed super-human! Next year will be Gerard Schwartz's last before he retires. So the symphony will have a new Maestro someday, although everything in Seattle seems to take forever. The Symphony Board of Directors will have to find a talented and internationally known person to replace Schwartz, who is also willing to live in our little lumber jack corner of the country.
To top the evening off, it was a beautiful night in Seattle and still almost 70 at 9:30 PM. Downtown was just starting to hop when we drove home, but we left it to the young folks.
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