The penitent critic

Man did I blow it–big time. On Sunday, January 28, I headed to what I thought was going to be the best concert of the new year. Rafael Payare was conducting the San Diego Symphony in an all-Mozart concert in the 506-seat theater of Patrick Henry High School. It was going to be great.

As I approached the school parking lot around 1:45 pm for a 2:00 pm downbeat, I thought the parking lot looked awfully empty. In fact, it was completely empty because the concert had been at 2:00 pm on Saturday, January 27. I felt like a complete idiot and rightfully so.

The long-suffering John Velasco, The San Diego Symphony’s Communications Manager, had sent me an email on Friday to confirm that I was attending on Saturday. There must have been something about the 2:00 pm time that excluded Saturday from my mind. The fact of the matter is, I have a conflict on Saturdays that would have prevented me from attending a 2:00 pm concert. I’m sure Freud would have something to say about wish fulfillment or something.

The winter and spring concerts for The San Diego Symphony are in general disarray because of the delay in the completion of the concert hall renovations. This means that creatures of habit such as myself need to pay attention to the the day, date, and time.

This happened to me once before when the symphony started a concert earlier on a Sunday in order to complete the concert before the Super Bowl. The tickets clearly showed a start time of 1:30 pm but I was there at 1:45 pm for what was normally a 2:00 pm start. I think I missed Symphonic Dances from West Side Story.

The next weekend concerts by the San Deigo Symphony do have a 2:00 pm downbeat on a Sunday. I’ve already checked that nine times.

Maybe I’m making too big a deal of this but the fact remains, every concert is a once-in-a-lifetime event. The Japanese have a term for this. It is Ichi-go ichi-e. It translates to something like, “for this time only.” Ichi-go ichi-e emphasizes that no moment is repeatable. Yes, there are more San Diego Symphony concerts on the way but none of them will capture the same moment as the previous concerts.

Recordings are great and I have my favorites and they are dependable but the classical music concert experience is still supreme because it is not dependable but often transcendent.