concerts thread.

[Ruby]

There’s a park in the middle of the southern suburbs of Cape Town which is famously home to annual performances of Shakespeare’s plays, as well as other performances of music and dance – it’s an open air theatre. I went to the Symphonic Shakespeare concert this weekend – music under the stars accompanied by a few raucous guinea fowl, some equally raucous humans (who were clearly under the weather but fortunately a little way away), the distant wailing of emergency sirens, evening birdsong, and intermittent rushes of mean black south-easter through old oaks and bamboo, not forgetting the smells of progressively chilly night air, proper coffee and smoky wafts from the inevitable braai (that would be barbeque to most of you); sensory overload! Lol!

Surprisingly, the acoustics are great – magical to see those instruments against the backdrop of a glade of stately trees. In my imagination, it’s like the strings have come home, and somehow the double basses, cellos and violins resonate with the other rooted woods.

The full Philharmonic orchestra played a collection of works paying tribute to the bard – I preferred the second half of the billing which was Mendelssohn’s Midsummernight’s Dream overture, Walton’s As You Like It: A poem for orchestra, and Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet Suite. Orchestras are quite fascinating, IMHO – love watching them – the precision, and unison, and the fact that every instrument counts – yep – even the triangle!

Walton’s overture – this recording by The Academy of St Martin in the Fields …