Columnist Joel Stein of the Los Angeles Times has written a great column on how to become an annoying, insufferable, classical music snob. It’s quite a funny read, and oh so true. My favorite bit is his concert experience with Mahler’s Sixth Symphony:
I downloaded Leonard Bernstein’s version of Mahler’s Sixth and read the Wikipedia entry about the symphony. This turned out to be really smart because I found out the symphony not only requires a triangle, a glockenspiel and, awesomely, cowbells, but, according to Mahler, a hammer that was to be pounded “brief and mighty, but dull in resonance and with a nonmetallic character (like the fall of an ax).” Somewhere, a child-prodigy percussionist is being yelled at for not pounding a wooden hammer dully enough.
That night, I did a lot of staring at the hammer guy, who, to my delight, was also the triangle and cowbell guy. And his hammer was this gigantic, Wile E. Coyote-sized mallet that he slammed maybe five times onto this enormous wood chopping block on wheels. I couldn’t decide if I was more delighted by the notion of Eschenbach, who conducts this symphony all over the world, trying to persuade airport security to let him board with his carry-on giant hammer, or the idea that the Philharmonic keeps a giant hammer and table in storage just for Mahler’s Sixth. Or that, for the rest of my life, I can talk about the sublime dullness of the hammer, which gets lost on recordings, as soon as Mahler’s Sixth comes up in conversation. Which it will. Because I will bring it up.
Read the entire column here.
Via ArtsJournal.com.