a. being someone i knew from high school, another player in the youth orchestra we'd both been part of. and in retrospect, wow he was right. that piece stood out then and it stands out now, the symphony we played nearly perfectly at a festival five years before.
looking back now: there are a few pieces of ensemble music that're still burned in my memory —
a year or two before the disaster-concert, there was johan de meij's "lord of the rings" symphony for wind band. ambitious, difficult, beautiful, it's one of my favourite pieces. we pulled together, and we pulled it off.
back two more years. my first year of university, we played colin mcphee's "concerto for wind orchestra". mcphee was a canadian composer whose music was heavily influenced by balinese gamelan music, and this concerto feels like midwinter night driving on the highway with snow drifting dangerously and hypnotically.
and then the year before that, the great kalinnikov, he who died sick and in obscurity, his first symphony in g minor my favourite of his two. we played it nearly flawlessly in a dark theatre somewhere near the st lawrence. we got a standing O, the outsiders, the anglo orchestra from out west. i'll never forget it. our conductor told us once how, after decades and decades, he was still searching for a perfect performance. i feel like, for me, our performance of this is the closest i'm ever going to get.