NEW BEGINNINGS: If Music Be the Food of Love — Crank It Up to 11
A visit to the Pasadena Symphony
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We are going to get through this, and when we do, music will be everywhere.
Spilling out onto sidewalks, playing over loud speakers. New songs will be written to document these times. We are the generation that will defeat fascism, again.
The ugly rhetoric of criminals will be replaced with glorious new music and a return to decency and truth.
We won’t have to doomscroll anymore.
My heart is still full from Saturday at the Pasadena Symphony, as they debuted their new musical director, Brett Mitchell, on opening night of the new 2024/2025 season.
They went big: they performed Mahler and Korngold. I can’t type without crying because it was so beautiful.
Erich Korngold’s Violin Concerto in D as performed by Akiko Suwanai, and Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, “Titan.” In the video clip above, Mitchell gets a standing ovation, and I’m cheering like I’m at a Slayer concert (lol).
I have every note of Korngold’s Violin Concerto etched into memory. The Austrian composer fled Europe to the United States in 1938 to escape the rise of Nazism. He became a film music composer and his passion is apparent.
Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 — the restraint and thunder — you just have to listen to it.
For the opener at the Ambassador Auditorium, Mitchell chose New Beginnings by Pasadena composer Peter Boyer, and it was buoyant and lovely.
New Beginnings was the theme of the night.
New beginnings is the theme in this moment.
I am praying for new beginnings.
Music everywhere.
As we endure.
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Related:
Forever Young: Reflections on Bob Dylan at 80
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Begin each day with a grateful heart.
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More standing ovations, for Brett Mitchell, Akiko Suwanai, and the Pasadena Symphony.
Can’t imagine being engulfed by the 4th & concluding moment of the Mahler symphony … and being able to move for at least a half hour afterward …. and conversely… can’t imagine being able to resist the “inner Baryshnikov” and not dancing in the aisles during the concluding movement of the Korngold concerto. What a lovely, joyful evening!!