Tonight I enjoyed my seasonal dose of high culture: seems like it’s becoming a habit of going to a classical concert in the summer, ballet or opera in the winter and occasional other events opportunistically in between. We went to hear (and in the case of Mustonen, see) Helsinki Festival Orchestra & Olli Mustonen play Respighi, Mozart and Schubert at the Kallio church. Mustonen obviously needs to be anchored to the ground when conducting an orchestra as he was quite vivid, excited and one could almost say fanatic.
The concert was great, very enjoyable. The audience started out as good, too, in the sense that nobody was making unnecessary noises during the concert. After it ended – and we all know that concerts never end after the officially “last” composition, right? – first portion of the audience leaves. LEAVES! Like before even applauding. Second wave of quitters is after some applause. Have these people never heard of encores? Those remaining, some 2/3rds, applaud just long enough to get an encore. But after one high-spirited encore, all magically disappear soon afterwards without even trying for a second encore. Yet, even in Finland, I have witnessed three encores at an András Schiff concert, so it is possible. Guess we just had a mediocre audience tonight.
Of course, that doesn’t lessen the fact that the concert was good. For someone who understands absolutely nothing about music and has no natural sense of rhythm, I enjoy classical music a lot. There’s something wonderful about a full-blown orchestra playing without any electrical things, no amplifiers, no microphones, no playback, with instruments that have been in existence for up to hundreds of years.
And walking away from the church in the warm, pleasant evening, reality of Kallio reaches us – some poor drunken soul sitting on a bar terrace yells “Whas it a ghood shermon?!”. On the tram stop, people are getting arrested. Somehow ‘high culture’ and Kallio just do not mix.
