Last evening I attended a performance of the SH Elementary All-Star Crash & Burn String Orchestra, in which the eldest gel is amongst the most junior of the second violins.

The hundred-odd kids were presided over by a magnificent woman of obvious Irish extraction who could whistle through her teeth at them and who, despite the fact that she was wearing the velvet glove of performance night poise, made abundantly clear that underneath she carried the iron fist of the regimental sar’n-major.

The program started with a round of solos, which ranged in quality from the painful to the pretty-durn-good.   The first chair first violin, a 4th grade Vunderkind, played some Bartok and Paganini with genuine aplomb, while a 5th grader did some excellent bass work despite the fact that the instrument was about twice his size.

As for the ensemble pieces, for a pack of 5th graders the orchestra sounded quite nice.  (I have a theory that with enough instruments, any orchestra can saturate the target note it is seeking, rayther in the manner of regimental volley-fire.)  Among other pieces, they did some kind of “Goblin Dance” very effectively, and their treatment of Haydn’s “St. Anthony Chorale” (the theme on which Brahms based his “Haydn Variations”) was good enough that one could stop fretting about the performance and actually enjoy the music.  Alas, they finished up with the Pachelbel “Canon”.  The magnificent conductor lady came down in my estimation somewhat by gushing about how wonderful a piece it is before they started, and as it was late and they’d been playing for the better part of an hour, they seemed to lose their focus about halfway through.

(I may have mentioned it before, but the gel told me that her conductor instructed everyone that if they ever got lost in a piece, just to keep playing an open D-string until they could pick it up again.  For some reason, I find this intensely amusing.)

I must confess that it has been some years since I last attended a live orchestral performance.  This one reminded me again how infinitely more rewarding the real deal is than a recording, and rekindled my enthusiasm to start haunting such performances again.  What with budget restraints and astronomical prices, big venue concerts are probably out of the question, but it doesn’t take much digging in a place like Dee Cee to come up with smaller scale concerts and recitals, many of which are quite inexpensive or even free of charge.

I also plan to take our budding violinist with me.  She’s old enough now that I believe she would appreciate the exposure, and might even gain some inspiration as well.