Sunday night I attended a performance of Mozart’s Requiem Mass and the Ave Verum Corpus at Grace Church on the Hill.  It was a charity event in memory of Rachel Krehm’s younger sister Elizabeth.  All the cast and so on details are here.

I was/am in no fit state to write any kind of analytical review.  There has been far too much death in my life recently and the music and the packed church was pretty much what I needed to process some of my own demons but not to tease out the nuances of the music or the performance.  Enough!  It was all in aid of St. Michael’s ICU and it must have raised a ton of money judging by the number of people there.  I’m really grateful to Rachel for organizing this and for the invite.

I have a ticket for tonight’s performance of Opera Atelier’s Abduction from the Seraglio.  I’m far too sick to go so if you would like it give me a shout.  It’s “print at home” so I should be able to transfer it fairly easily.

People keep asking me at musical events whether I have a business card.  So I created one.

As part of yesterday’s Koerner Hall concert yesterday there was a panel discussion between the President of the RCM, the Artistic Director of the ARC Ensemble and the Director of Koerner Hall.  Unsurprisingly the President at one point made a pitch about the value of the arts in education and deprecated the cuts that have been made in that area by various governments.  Fair enough.  That’s his job and, anyway, I agree with him.  What did raise my hackles was his contrasting the “creative” arts with “drilling” (his word) in maths and science.

As some of my readers may know, mathematics was once my field and it, and theoretical physics, remain important interests.  Now it’s quite possible, likely even, that someone running a conservatory never got far enough in mathematics to experience just how deeply creative it can be but there’s no excuse for not knowing it can be.  Some of the most subtle and beautiful ideas can only be understood mathematically.  And here’s the irony.  It’s just like music.  You have to do a hell of a lot of grunt work to get to the point where you can do beautiful mathematics just as even the best musicians still have to practice and play scales. This is probably true of anything where deep skill is involved.  That apparently effortless blind back of the hand pass of Richie McCaw’s comes from hours on the training field as much as from brilliance.

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