The Kennedy Center Has A Veterinarian Backstage

I was struggling with what to post today and thought I would read SMID's blog for some inspiration - and there it was! Music Monday. Here forthwith, my musical Monday.

We attended a children's concert yesterday at the Kennedy Center (my husband does classical music reviews for the Washington Post) - hosted by the visiting conductor Ivan Fischer. He was fantastic - so animated with the kids. My husband offered to cover this concert because, as he told the press person for the National Symphony Orchestra, I'm "more in touch with my inner child than he is." It's true. Anyway, the concert was a series of pieces demonstrating different instruments - violin, viola, contrabassoon, flute, trombone. The conductor interacted wonderfully with the kids - who clapped so hard and shouted out their answers to his questions.

I noticed in the progam that there is an upcoming concert of Peter and the Wolf - the wonderful Prokofiev piece using differerent instruments for the different characters in a story (often narrated by someone famous like Cher, Sharon Stone, Sting, Dame Edna...) about a boy hunting a wolf.

In the story, the wolf (French horns) swallows the duck (oboe) whole. The press person at the NSO told us a funny story about a previous production of the piece (including mimes). At the end of the piece, when all the characters are marching offstage to the zoo, the children in the audience yelled "But the duck is still inside the wolf!" The conductor this day, not knowing how to respond, turned to someone offstage with a look of desperation - to which he received the reply - tell them "we have someone on staff who'll take care of that".

Since then, the NSO includes in its program a note for this concert that says "The Kennedy Center has a veterinarian backstage".