I hope everyone has a happy and healthy New Year in 2006!

I am new and wish happiness to all!

With all my heart I wish everyone on this forum the happiness, love and attention you need. Strive for the best and avoid darkness of your soul. Let ballet be a light on your travels as it is for me. I am happy to be part of this community.
Walboi :rolleyes:

2006: The 250th anniversary of the birth of Mozart and the 100th anniversary of the birth of Shostakovich!

Both are being celebrated by the Seattle Symphony over the next couple of months. (Hopefully, the Shostakovich celebration will continue in the 2006-7 season, as his birthday is 25 September.) A few weekends ago, Vladimir Feltsman gave a recitial celebrating both composers. He opened the recital with Mozart's Piano Sonata No. 10 and later was joined by Maria Larianoff, acting concertmaster and the Symphony's Amos Yang (cello) and Mara Gearman (viola) in the Mozart Piano Quartet in G major.

In the second half of the program, Feltsman, Larianoff, and Yang gave a sublime performance of Shostakovich's Piano Trio No. 2 in E minor. During the ovation, Feltsman retrieved the score from the piano, and pointed to it, in tribute to the composer.

Last week Seattle Symphony's Mozart Celebration featured a program with three very different pieces: two tributes and one by the master himself.

*Richard Strauss' Quartet and Finale from Mozart's Idomeneo, which features a Straussian orchestration of the vocal quartet, intended to re-popularize Mozart, who had been out of vogue for much of the 19th century.

*Tchaikovsky's Suite No. 4 in G major, Op. 61 "Mozartiana" in its original order: Gigue, Minuet, Prayer, and Theme and Variations. I had images of Farrell, Andersen, and Castelli throughout the piece.

*Mozart's Mass in C minor.

Tonight's concert didn't have Mozart, but it did have Carl Maria von Weber's "Overture to Oberon," which made me think of our oberon, and violinist Nikolaj Znaider. He's well over 6 feet tall -- he towered over acting concertmaster Maria Larianoff, and while she's not tall, she was wearing at least three-inch heels -- and is a beautiful guy in the Polish-Israeli-raised-in-Denmark-trained-at-Julliard-boy-next-door kind of way (one of the better aspects of globalization). When I turned to see who was doing all of the "woofing" in my section, they all had grey hair! I thought I was going to have to call an ambulance to revive the swooning twenty-somethings to my left.

Oh, did I mention he played the Beethoven Violin Concerto like a celestial choir?