I have opera tonight. It will be the second to last performance. Time sure has moved quickly for this run.

I’m not entirely sorry to be finishing up. I do enjoy the music to Carmen, but I guess I’m ready for something new. Sometimes it’s just time to move on, you know?

Next week will be, for me, a bit ‘o fluff; Symphony Silicon Valley is doing the Mozart Flute & Harp Concerto as well as Schumann’s Second Symphony, but we open with music from Sullivan’s Pineapple Poll. I played some portions of this ballet when I was in high school (a band arrangement, mind you). I don’t remember much about the work, but I do remember I had an oboe solo in a slow movement and I recall being incredibly nervous. In my recent listen to the snippets I could find online, I realize now that it was no big deal after all. And definitely fluff. Funny how something that feels so major to a 16 year old becomes very trivial to a whatever-age-I-am-now person. (Okay, I’ll admit I’m 48. Who cares, eh?) For next week’s concerts I’ve opted to play the English horn, and only the Sullivan uses EH. So it might be a very short concert for me unless I move to assistant principal for the Schumann, (The work does tax the principal oboist, and I’m happy to play. We’ll see, though, if management approves it.)

Anyway, it’s the end of Carmen this Sunday. She’ll die. As always. When will that girl learn to make better choices? When will Don Jose get a clue?

(Side note: I’ve always had this dream of a “Psychotherapist’s Opera”; maybe a three-act with different famous operas for each act. The singers sing snippets from the operas. A therapist sits off to one side and occasionally offers advice. The singers make better choices. Everyone stays alive. All’s well that end’s well, and that sort of thing. Except maybe in the final act someone gets fed up with the therapist’s interruptions and kills him or her off. It’s just an idea … but I do think it would be great fun. Maybe even the pit musicians could be involved. We never have a “visible voice” in opera and I think it is time.)
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