Im looking forward to the 5th more, but in the past ive always really enjoyed anything with the Chorus in it so we will see.

Its interesting, there is bad economic times yet teh CSO are doing around 12 Beethoven shows over the next three weeks and they are all either sold out or scattered single tickets left, the only reason for that apparantly is people not wanting to miss the Blackhawks in the Stanley cup final !! and turning tickets back in.

Listened to 8 & 5 last night.

8 is very good, it seems like a mistreated peice of music. However when we get to 5 things change altogether, i went to the pre concert lecture where a music guy explains the peice and its structure for an hour. Now this will sound very naive but i didnt know how much of a genius and visionary Beethoven actually was. This peice has reoccuring themes all the way through that i knew from listening to but never really understood.

The thing that really stood out was this is the first concert i have been to that i was listening to a peice i knew intimately and that the novelty and awe of the CSO has diminished to a point that im focusing more on the music than the experience. As im educating myself to listen it was sledgehammer obvious to me that no hifi ive ever heard gives even a hint of the complexities and genius of this peice, the depth and complexity of sound of hearing it played by a great orchestra with Haitink conducting was mind blowing. The initial dah dah dah DAHH intro seems so unimportant when you hear it live, its the overall complexity and flow of the music, its just incredible. Watching the violin section playing was amazing, they worked so hard. One thing that i have observed watching live music is the harder the violon section works the better the structure of the music seems to be, i have no training to say that its just based purely on watching the CSO, its like teh violins are the engine room of the orchestra, im not sure if that is right, just my observation.

So as a live peice this goes up there with Pictures and Mahler 2 as the greatest classical musical performances ive ever seen. I still dont know if they compete with some of teh great rock performances but thats an apples and oranges thing.

Alan