A sweet touch to an emotional night

[blpurdom at yahoo.com]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at y..., "Rachel Bray" <bray.262 at o...> wrote:
> Friday night I was to see the Columbus Symphony with 
> Kathleen Battle (hometown girl).  It got cancelled.  But 
> the symphony decided to go ahead and have a Concert of 
> Healing.  It was free for the public and the Red Cross was 
> there for donations.  

Last night the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Philadelphia Singers 
also did a free concert at the Mann Music Center (donations were 
being accepted for the Red Cross); I wish I could have gone, but I 
have number of friends in Philly Singers, and I am emailing them to 
find out what pieces they performed.

> It was uplifting and 
> it was heartbreaking (they did Barber's Adagio for Strings 
> which makes me cry any time, let alone now).  

We played a recording of this at my father's funeral in May.  I was 
blubbering all through it.  This was my father's favorite piece of 
music in the world.  Barber originally wrote it as a memorial piece 
for those lost in WWII, but it is used as a general memorial now.  I 
once had the privilege of singing the a capella choral version (Agnus 
Dei) under the baton of Matthew Glandorf, who teaches at the Curtis 
Institute of Music here in Philadelphia.  It was serving as a 
backdrop for "Shut Up And Dance" (yes, I get the irony), an annual 
fundraiser that the Pennsylvania Ballet does for a local AIDS group.  

We sang the Barber at the back of the stage while two dancers did a 
heartbreakingly beautiful pas de deux, only part of which was visible 
to me because I had to have one eye on my music and the other on 
Matt.  He almost didn't make it through his first rehearsal with us 
because he was saying that Barber wrote the piece when he was exactly 
Matt's age, and when he had the exact same job as Matt at Curtis.  
And Matt had just lost his partner to AIDS...I had also recently lost 
another friend to AIDS.  That was probably the hardest performance of 
my life.  I have no idea how the musicians and performers made it 
through last night's concert.

> The basement of the theater is decorated in 
> this gorgeous red velvet/gold trim gothic looking columns, 
> furniture, etc. with a big mirror at the end of the room.  
> I've always loved that area and I make it a point to go 
> down there every time I'm in the theater just to stand in 
> the middle of the room and close my eyes for a moment.  I 
> stood there in the silence for a moment until a young boy 
> and his mother came down the stairs.  The boy gasped and 
> said "Mom!  It looks like Hogwarts!"  Though my meditation 
> was ruined, I burst out laughing.   

That's wonderful!  I'm counting on my kids to keep me laughing 
occasionally through all this.  The last two nights I woke up (at 4 
am and 5:30 am respectively) with horrendous nightmares.  It took a 
few days for the true horror to sink into my brain.  My husband also 
woke up at the exact same time on Sunday morning after having a 
nightmare.  

Then we received a phone call from our best friend, who lives out in 
Lancaster County.  She'd also woken up before dawn with nightmares.  
She wanted to go to church and didn't want to go to any that are near 
where she lives, so she asked whether it would be crazy for her to 
drive to Philadelphia to come to our church with us.  We told her 
that of course it wasn't crazy.  (She'd just stayed over here on 
Friday night and driven back home on Saturday, so this constituted a 
lot of back and forth between her house and ours in one weekend.)  
She drove an hour and a half to be at our service by 11 am, and she 
was glad she did.  The church was packed, which it never is 
(relatively small congregation).  I have a feeling that many, many 
churches, temples and mosques had higher than usual attendance rates 
at services this weekend as people looked for solace wherever they 
could find it.  I have a couple of friends who are non-deists and 
attend the Sunday morning gatherings at the Philadelphia Ethical 
Society, and they were bursting at the seams as well.

I almost didn't make it through the service, which began with our 
music director/resident diva singing Ravel's a capella setting for 
the Kaddish, and ended with our pastor reading a prayer from the 
Koran.  She has reworked her sermon from yesterday to serve as an op-
ed piece (she sent it to me as mail this morning).  If anyone wants 
this forwarded, let me know.  It is wonderful and moving and I was 
crying all over again while rereading it.

--Barb