Back to the big organ

 

As you see, I was sitting up close and personal with the QPAC concert hall's pipe organ on Sunday, as it was the 40th anniversary of the venue and they put on a bunch of free stuff, including a 45 minute organ recital, which was pretty great.

Clearly, though, when QPAC gives away free tickets (you still had to "book" and get your assigned seat), a lot of people who take tickets then don't bother showing up:

 It didn't fill up much more than that, despite the booking site that very morning indicating that there were only seats available in numbers up the back in the last 4 or five rows.   Even the side chorus seats, were I was sitting, was supposed to be nearly full, but there were heaps of seats left.

Anyhoo, I'll stop whining about lazy people who don't turn up, to note that the concert inspired me to re-listen to Saint-Saëns finale to his Organ Symphany, which I had seen performed at the same venue in 2019, as mentioned here.  (There's another post about the composer's personal life here. )

Listening to it again really blew me away:  it's both beautiful and thrilling.   Someone in comments following a nicely produced British performance said it's like the music you would hear on entering Heaven, and I completely get it.

This also led me down a Youtube path to a channel by an American guy called "The Ultimate Classical Music Guide" who has put out about 5,000 (!) videos up reviewing recordings of classical music (as well as other stuff - such as the most essential piece of famous composers.)     He reckons Saint-Saëns' Piano Concerto No 5 (known as the Egyptian concerto) is fantastic, and so I must listen to it soon too.

He (Dave Hurwitz) also recommended an old stereo recording of the Organ Symphony as the best, and listening to it on Spotify, I can see that it seems to have the bass-iest of organ sounds that you don't even notice on some other recordings.

(My gosh - Dave has been prolific.   Just searching Saint-Saëns comes up with scores of commentary videos.  And yet he only has 65,000 subscribers, which is not a huge amount by Youtube standards.)

Anyway, I figure its good to be discovering more classical stuff of interest as I get older.   Should contribute to helping stop eventual retirement from being boring!