Member-only story
My wife and I took a short trip to Maine to see my daughter perform at the Monteux Music Festival. It’s an amazing program founded by French conductor, Pierre Monteux, in 1942. It’s a conducting school where some of the best young conductors come to train through the summer. Other musicians from around the world audition for spots in the orchestra. They practice hard, live in cabins, form bonds that you can only form when you train hours and hours every day with someone, then party until the early morning and do it all over again. They play a concert every weekend for the locals and vacationers in a beautiful area of Maine near Bar Harbor.
The highlight of the trip for me, aside from the lobster, and Acadia National Park, was listening to the Monteux orchestra perform Tchaikovsky’s 6th Symphony. If you can, please listen to it as you’re reading this. Here is a good, or at least what sounds good to me performance (for the full immersive effect at no extra cost). My musical ear is not great, and that is what I told the nice grey-haired woman sitting next to me in the small theater in the middle of a forest in rural Maine, but this performance does seem distinctly Russian to me, in a good way.
I asked the woman whose friend recently had my daughter and some of her fellow musicians over for steak, lobster, and far too much wine (which is often the perfect amount) if the orchestra was…
