Tchaikovsky’s 1812 and the Canon

This weekend found us attending a concert of the St Louis Symphony Orchestra on Friday night, buying a new camera on Saturday, and spending hours hanging out in Bellefontaine Cemetery on Sunday.  In between, we found time to eat good things, sleep as late as we wanted, and watch several episodes of The Wire.

Photo by Dan Dreyfus

The concert was at the Powell Symphony Hall.  We splurged for seats in a Grand Tier box where we were sealed off and protected from the hoi polloi in the audience (those symphony crowds can be such louts).

We had our own lounge serving as an additional buffer between us and the masses, though we shared our little drinking room with two other boxes.  We wrote down our beverage orders before the concert started, left wads of money, and the staff brought us our requests right before the intermission started.  Very civilized.

Here, Nan is “enjoying” a taste of my Talisker (“The high phenol level and distinct taste may prove ‘challenging’ for the casual whisky drinker“).  It turns out that another name for phenol is carbolic acid.

The concert consisted of pieces by four composers; Korngold, Balakirev, Borodin, and Tchaikovsky.  I’ve listened to symphonic music most of my life but I’ve rarely seen it performed live.  It’s like watching a miracle occur before your eyes, to see people actually producing the sound you’ve only ever heard coming from speakers.

Most of us were there for Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, which you all know, even if you don’t know you know it (“The only cereal that’s shot from guns!” if you’re over 50).  There were no cannons since this was an inside concert, but a huge bass drum served as well.

The reference to cannons lets me transition to Saturday with a shameless pun, because we spent the day buying a Canon Digital Rebel T1i EOS 500D.  (Get it?  Cannon.  Canon.  Groan!  Sorry!)

We didn’t actually spend the whole day buying the camera, but I spent most of the day figuring out how to use it.  SLR Cameras have come a long way since I learned how to use Nan’s old Pentax in the seventies.

Nan's Old Pentax, state-of-the-art in 1965 (Photo by Erin)

The New Canon, more like an F15 cockpit (Photo by Mauritsvink)

We spent Sunday wandering around Bellefontaine Cemetery, a gigantic necropolis with thousands of interesting monuments, memorials, and mausoleums.

More of the pictures I took with the new camera are posted publicly on Facebook.

- Poppa