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Oct. 9th, 2008 01:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivkaYesterday I chaperoned Alex's nursery school class to a performance of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. My expectations were pretty low. It was a special concert aimed at children aged 6 and under, and the title of the show was "Goldilocks and Other Fairy Tales." I thought the kids would find it exciting to be at a concert and see orchestra instruments, but I wasn't anticipating any enjoyment for myself.
I was pleasantly surprised.
In the 45-minute program, there was only one piece that I considered to be musical pandering: a subset of the brass and percussion sections of the orchestra performed "Under the Sea," from the Disney movie The Little Mermaid. Otherwise, it was all real orchestral music: a dashing, exciting Rimsky-Korsakov piece called "The Snow Maiden," a piece from the Tchaikovsky ballet Sleeping Beauty and another from the the opera Hansel and Gretel, and "In the Hall of the Mountain King" from Peer Gynt. There was a sort of a tone poem based on the fable "The Tortoise and the Hare" and accompanied by a storyteller, and a ballet of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" written by a modern composer whose name I didn't catch.
A pair of adult ballet dancers appeared during the Tchaikovsky piece, and students at the Baltimore School for the Arts performed the Goldilocks ballet. The bit from Hansel and Gretel was sung and danced. All in all, there was a nice mix of visual elements with purely symphonic experiences.
The program had a narrator, who used a brief and (I thought) very effective script. For "In the Hall of the Mountain King," in a few sentences she evoked a vivid picture of Peer Gynt tiptoeing into a cave, the goblins circling and creeping around him, and the mad final chase. Alex kept returning to that afterward, wanting to relate the story again and again. The narrator also deftly introduced basic orchestral and musical concepts without sounding like she was lecturing: tuning, the roles of the concertmaster and conductor, the definitions of "opera" and "ballet," and the idea of a musical motif. Before "The Tortoise and the Hare," she explained that the contrabassoon would play music for the tortoise and the clarinet would play for the hare, and had the musicians play a bar or two of each to help the children pick the motifs out later.
The entire row of Alex's 3- and 4-year-old classmates sat captivated throughout the concert. (The 4- and 5-year-olds sitting behind us were less rapt and more inclined to talk.) During "In the Hall of the Mountain King" I wound up with two little girls in my lap, but they thoroughly enjoyed the "scary" music.
But I really knew the concert had been a success that evening. Michael and Alex were together in the playroom, when Alex came running in and asked me to be their conductor. I came in and discovered that she had lined up all the chairs and couches from her dollhouse in rows. A tiny plastic animal was perched on each one. Alex and Michael were ready to make music by banging blocks together - they were only waiting for me to conduct. Michael told me afterward that she had organized the audience of animals completely of her own volition, telling him that "they came to watch some music." Yay.
I was pleasantly surprised.
In the 45-minute program, there was only one piece that I considered to be musical pandering: a subset of the brass and percussion sections of the orchestra performed "Under the Sea," from the Disney movie The Little Mermaid. Otherwise, it was all real orchestral music: a dashing, exciting Rimsky-Korsakov piece called "The Snow Maiden," a piece from the Tchaikovsky ballet Sleeping Beauty and another from the the opera Hansel and Gretel, and "In the Hall of the Mountain King" from Peer Gynt. There was a sort of a tone poem based on the fable "The Tortoise and the Hare" and accompanied by a storyteller, and a ballet of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" written by a modern composer whose name I didn't catch.
A pair of adult ballet dancers appeared during the Tchaikovsky piece, and students at the Baltimore School for the Arts performed the Goldilocks ballet. The bit from Hansel and Gretel was sung and danced. All in all, there was a nice mix of visual elements with purely symphonic experiences.
The program had a narrator, who used a brief and (I thought) very effective script. For "In the Hall of the Mountain King," in a few sentences she evoked a vivid picture of Peer Gynt tiptoeing into a cave, the goblins circling and creeping around him, and the mad final chase. Alex kept returning to that afterward, wanting to relate the story again and again. The narrator also deftly introduced basic orchestral and musical concepts without sounding like she was lecturing: tuning, the roles of the concertmaster and conductor, the definitions of "opera" and "ballet," and the idea of a musical motif. Before "The Tortoise and the Hare," she explained that the contrabassoon would play music for the tortoise and the clarinet would play for the hare, and had the musicians play a bar or two of each to help the children pick the motifs out later.
The entire row of Alex's 3- and 4-year-old classmates sat captivated throughout the concert. (The 4- and 5-year-olds sitting behind us were less rapt and more inclined to talk.) During "In the Hall of the Mountain King" I wound up with two little girls in my lap, but they thoroughly enjoyed the "scary" music.
But I really knew the concert had been a success that evening. Michael and Alex were together in the playroom, when Alex came running in and asked me to be their conductor. I came in and discovered that she had lined up all the chairs and couches from her dollhouse in rows. A tiny plastic animal was perched on each one. Alex and Michael were ready to make music by banging blocks together - they were only waiting for me to conduct. Michael told me afterward that she had organized the audience of animals completely of her own volition, telling him that "they came to watch some music." Yay.
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Date: 2008-10-09 08:45 pm (UTC)