Well, it was a fabulous evening. I got to Schermerhorn Symphony Center just before the red carpet arrivals started at 5 p.m. I hung around to watch that process for a while — my next post, after I get through uploading my photos, will include a photo of a celebrity I saw on the red carpet (and you will never guess whom it is).
The hall is gorgeous and the acoustics are just as good as advertised. The symphony’s program, which Maestro Kenneth Schermerhorn had already been working on before his death, was just tremendous:
- Shostakovich, Festival Overture
- Triple Concerto for Banjo, Double Bass and Tabla, a work commissioned for this event, written and performed with the symphony by Bela Fleck, Zakir Hussain and Edgar Meyer
- Barber, Essay No. 2, Opus 17
- Mahler, Resurrection Symphony, with Frederica von Stade, mezzo-soprano, Janice Chandler-Eteme, soprano, and the Nashville Symphony Chorus
It all sounded wonderful, especially the Mahler piece, which was wonderfully dramatic.
After the concert, I went to the press dinner. The press was not invited to the $2,500 gala dinner held outside under a tent rented from (swear to God) Elton John. But we had a fine dinner of our own, with lobster ravioli, beef, salmon and other delights.
During the dinner, the symphony’s floor was being switched out from sloped theatre seating to a flat floor. This process takes only two hours, due to some clever mechanics which roll the theatre seats forward on carts and lower them into the basement. Dessert, champagne and dancing were supposed to begin on the flat floor at 10:30. I wandered downstairs from the press dinner at the appointed time, but they weren’t quite ready yet. Food service was still setting up the room, and the paying guests hadn’t yet walked back across the street from their tent.
Meanwhile, I discovered that I had lost the button from the jacket of my rental tuxedo. I hadn’t planned to stay very long for the dessert and dancing, since I don’t really know how to dance and had no one to dance with anyhow, and so I decided to go ahead and hit the road. I got back to Shelbyville at midnight. The only thing I really miss was seeing the flat floor.