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Spiffy Virginia Symphony Orchestra (VSO) concert tonight!

Tonight, the balcony (where Jason and I sit with our cheap tickets [he is Jewish] was jam packed, which is unusual — the VSO apparently gave free tickets to students from several local youth orchestras.

Overall they were very well behaved (minus the one kid who kept waving a 4ft baton he made out of five stuck-together straws), but being in orchestras themselves, is it too much to expect that they’d goddamned know when the appropriate time to applaud was? [hint: not after each movement, no matter how good it is] Well, I guess everyone can’t have a hot composer at their side, ready to smack hands about to inappropriately applaud.

(You +10 points for clicking on the ‘Read the rest of this entry’ link. Yes, I’m keeping track!)

The first piece was called “Short Ride in a Fast Machine” and it rocked (which means it had lots of brass and percussion… being surrounded by old people and hearing mostly string just doesn’t do it for me).

The second piece (Paganini Violin Concerto No. 1) should have been called “Very Long, Slow ride in a HRT Trolley Bus”. Yawn! It did feature a guest solo violinist, and my hats off to the shrewd audience who knew that if they kept clapping long enough, her ass would have to come out and do an encore. That bitch was expensive to book, so yay for getting our moneys worth.

“Symphony Fantastique” was the final piece, and kudos to VSO for doing some cool shit with it, like when the oboe-ist walked off the stage (ruh-row Shaggy) only to appear a few minutes later in the balcony, where she played a duet with another oboe back down on the stage. (Who said that balcony seats suck?) They also did some other cool sounds off stage, which sounded neat (that’s my technical term for it).