What happens when you take the full choir of the San Francisco Chorus, add in the San Francisco Girls Chorus and the Pacific BoyChoir, arrange seven(!) soloists around the conductor with another placed elsewhere in the concert hall, fill the stage with musicians of extraordinary calibre and the rest of them, equally talented, behind the audience in "the gods" and stir it with the verve and vigor of an MTT?
You get Mahler's 8th Symphony, the Symphony of a Thousand, and you get transported for something under two hours to a place of beauty. And it stays with you.
As it turns out, the concert was recorded and will be released as part of the Mahler cycle that the San Francisco Symphony has been producing over the past few years. I look forward to sometime next fall being able to buy it. That said, even with the music system we have, reproducing the experience of Friday evening will be impossible.
Dick had not been well earlier in the week so we drove to the City, parking in the Performing Arts parking lot - on the level adorned with pink Viking Helmets! Made me feel quite at home.
...
I continue with the novel I am wearing out the nib of my fountain pen on. If I look at the number of words I have written and the number of words I should have written by now, I could become discouraged. But, I have fewer to write than I have already written to reach the 50,000. And the 33,000+ I have already written is far more than I have ever written in such a short space of time. So, everything is possible.
I'm even enjoying the story.
...
May his memory be eternal. So goes the prayer of the Eastern Catholic Churches. Eternal may be difficult but a good, long while yet, that I can manage.
Four years ago Saturday Dad died, on a trip to New York from Dublin - the town by the wattle ford near the black pool. So goes its full name. It was he who taught me that. Other things he would have taught me but listening was, then, not something I was good at.
We learned that together later.
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