Rex takes me to the concert, where a puffin flies over the orchestra, and moose, too

Just as I said I would, I ate breakfast at Mat-Su Valley Family Restaurant and so did this couple. I did a number of other things throughout the day and took pictures of various subjects, ranging from mountains to airplanes to a dog running directly in front of the car going in the same direction as me, but I've got to get to the concert, so I will skip all that.

Rex bought a couple of tickets to the Saturday night performance of the Anchorage Symphony and invited me to join him. So I drove into town, parked the car and walked over to the Alaska Center for the Performing Arts, where I saw a family who identified themselves as the Barnes passing by on the sidewalk.

Other people were looking at the ice sculptures that adorn the plaza adjacent to the Performing Arts center. I heard a story on NPR this afternoon that explained why the Lower 48 and the mid-latitudes of Europe and Asia have experienced such cold weather this winter while the Arctic - even the North Pole - has been unseasonably warm.

It is not just because of El Niño, as I had suspected, but because of the Arctic Oscillation. Normally, the air pressure at the pole is lower than elsewhere and so the cold not only forms, but settles in. This year, there has been a shift in the air pressure, which has been higher on the pole than normal and lower to the south and so the cold air that would normally linger in the north has moved to the south.

The guy said that the odds of it happening this way are about the same as being given one draw from a deck of cards to pull out the Ace of Diamonds, and then you pull out the Ace of Diamonds.

I went into the lobby and soon Rex showed up with the tickets. 

After we entered the auditorium and found our seats, I snuck up to the front real quick so I could get a shot of the bass players as they limbered up their fingers and tuned their instruments.

I returned to my seat as the crowd poured in.

Here I am with Rex, waiting for the concert to start. Rex told me that part of what he has done to cope with Stephanie's abandonment is to start attending concerts and such, so that he could hear music that he had heard growing up in our house and remember it.

A guy in front of us looks at his watch. He needn't worry. The concert will start on time.

The concert opened with Bach's Brandenburg Concerto #2. The fellow playing the trumpet is Linn Weeda. BBC#2 requires the trumpeter to blow his instrument up an extra octave from its normal range and, if what I was taught in college is true, in order to play it, the musician must have lung power strong enough to inflate a car tire.

This is kind of hard for me to imagine, and I am not certain that it is true, but it is what I was taught.

I would like to tell you that the performance was flawless, that not a note was missed nor rendered even slightly shrill, but that would not be an honest statement.

What is true is that I greatly enjoyed sitting there with my son, having all these musicians playing their instruments to send sound waves of Bach flowing over us. It was very good.

It reminded me too of when Margie and I were first married, and I would often take her to recitals and concerts - classical and rock and roll. Then we would come home and go to bed and life would be sweet. Those were good times.

Linn Weeda played the trumpet, Roxann Berry the flute, Sherman Piper the Oboe and Kathryn Hoffman the violin. 

They accept their applause.

This is Paul Sharpe, playing a solo on the double bass during the performance of A Carmen Fantasy for Double Bass and Orchestra Prelude by Frank Proto.

It is a fact that I could have gotten pictures of much greater technical quality with any one of my big DSLR cameras then I got with my pocket camera - and with a telephoto lens I could came in much tighter on the subject.

But... I could not have used such a camera at all in here. I could not have taken any performance pictures at all. The pocket camera is perfectly quiet and exceptionally discreet and so I could get away with taking pictures, without getting kicked out or rising the ire of nearby audience members.

And that is a big advantage of a pocket camera.

For his encore, Sharpe played the Alaska Flag Song.

After a bit of Debussy, the Symphony wrapped up the evening with Exposition on the Anchorage Museum, a commissioned piece by California composer Gregory Prechel - who has also composed music for The Simpsons and various shows and films.

Throughout the work, selected paintings, sculptures and carvings from the Anchorage Museum of History and Art were projected overhead, beginning here with Alvin Amason's rendition of a puffin, title "It's a Sweet Dream that Keeps Me Close to You."

The painting, "Easter Tableu" by Pat Austin.

The mask: Txamshem (Raven Man) by Jack Hudson.

Update insert: As I prepared this post early this morning, I had naturally planned to give credit to the conductor, Randall Craig Fleischer, who has done good things with the Anchorage Symphony. You see the time stamped at the top: 3:06 AM? That's when I opened Squarespace to begin constructing this post, not when I closed it. I closed at about 4:45 AM and I was so tired and so anxious to get this done so I could go to bed that I forgot to credit the conductor!

Very bad of me, but here he is, Conductor Fleischer, waving his baton beneath the picture of Hudson's mask.

Afterwards, I said goodbye to Rex under an awning that he had helped to construct.

And on the way home I encountered this crazy driver. I had set my cruise control at 65. When I first came upon this vehicle, it was doing about 50 in the left lane - a no no - and so I passed on the right. Pretty soon, it shot by me, doing 75 or 80.

Shortly after that, I again passed it on the right. Then it zipped past me. Then it fell back... then it passed me...

That's the kind of driver that was in control of this vehicle.

Notice the fog - how it engulfs the lights, but does not touch the ground.

There's lots more that I would like to write about the day that has most recently ended, but its almost time to get up and I have a big day ahead of me Sunday, so I think I had better stop and go to bed.

I should note, though, that of all the music performed, it is Bach that continues to play in my head. The other pieces have fallen silent. 

Bach rules!