An Ordinary Day #3

I’ve just bought tickets over the phone to three concerts in October,
January and April by the Yale Philharmonia. The concerts will be performed in Woolsey Hall, which is a 10-minute walk from my apartment.

One of the benefits of living in the middle of Yale in downtown New Haven is that I can easily walk to anything important at the university.

For years, I subscribed to the Yale Chamber Music series at Sprague Hall, which is next door to Woolsey Hall. But after a dozen years or so, I drifted away.

It’s so easy to drift. Just close your eyes and lower the blinds and don’t answer the phone or open your mail. You can almost hear things fall away . . . like shrapnel.

But on one of my morning walks this week, I noticed a poster put up in from of Woolsey Hall advertising the Philharmonia’s upcoming season. The schedule was too enticing to ignore — three concerts I particular.

The concert in October will present a new edition of Bruckner’s Symphony No. 8 in C minor. The April concert will offer Mahler’s Symphony No. 9 in D major. Both concerts will be conducted by Peter Oundjian, who for many years was first violinist with the great Tokyo String Quartet. I heard him and the Tokyo perform many times, both here in the city and in the Yale summer music festival in Norfolk. But Peter had to retire from the Tokyo because of arm and hand pain. For the past 10 years or so, he’s limited his music career to teaching and conducting.

But the concert listed on the poster that really sparked my interest was the one in January. That will feature Franck’s Symphony in D minor, which I fell in love with nearly 60 years ago. It’s the only symphony that Franck wrote, and I first encountered it while I was in the Army.

Back then in the mid-1950s, I was introducing myself to classical music on my own, never having encountered such music before. It was all brand new to me. Every so often on weekends, some of us would travel to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, from my living quarters at Fort Bragg, outside Fayetteville. Two or three of us would drive to Chapel Hill and I would head for the record shop. This was the time of LP records. There were no such things as cassettes or CDs.

I would buy whatever looked interesting. I was winging it, based on no experience, and picking up easy things like “The Grand Canyon Suite” and “Billy the Kid” and collections from ballets and a wonderful edition of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony No. 6 — largely because of the painting on the album cover. I instantly fell in love with the Beethoven as soon as I put it on the turntable back in the barracks recreation room. I was the only one who ever played classical music down there. I’d wait until there was no one down there and then I’d play my records.

It all felt as if I was entering a new wonderful world of music on the sly.

That’s how I encountered the Franck. The Westminster LP had a huge photo on the cover of a swampy area surrounded by tall trees with brown, luminous leaves. The color photo was both attractive and kind of strange. Maybe the music was, too

And it was. The work was more complex than the Grofe and the Copland and more modern and dark and moody than the Beethoven. Strange and melodically rich and perplexing. Beautiful and yet a little sinister.

I still have that record. It’s on my desk right now. I wrote on the back of the album the date I bought it: 6/11/58. Two months later, I would be discharged from the Army, having served three years of active duty.

At that point, I would enter a world that would have enough helter-skelter and huggermugger to last me a lifetime.

What makes the January concert so special is that it will mark the first time I will ever have heard the symphony live and in-person. And to make the event even more special and historic, the Philharmonia that night will be conducted by Ignat Solzhenitsyn.

Ignat, who is 44, is the second son of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Does anyone under 50 or 55 years old know who Alexander Solzhenitsyn was and what he did? I have my doubts. Nowadays, if it isn’t ’trending,’ it barely exists. If it isn’t part of Twitter or Facebook, it is nowhere. People can always google his name, of course. But why would they?

Great men and great works of literature are dying in cultural memory faster than the half-life of quarks. How about Heinrich Boll? How about Andrei Sinyavsky?

It all slips through our fingers like Sahara sand. At least classical music keeps old sounds alive.

It will be very special for me to be in the audience when Alexander’s son brings Franck’s symphony alive in ways I’ve never heard it. I’ve waited a long time for this.

It will be like closing a circle that began to form 14 years before Ignat was even born, while I was still in an Army uniform protecting Western civilization.

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