Thanks to good friends, I was able to sit in fine seats last weekend and listen to the Seattle Symphony.  This is the first time I've had a chance to go to Benaroya Hall, and the acoustics there are marvelous.  It's been years since I attended the symphony.  Thinking back, the last time I heard an orchestra perform live might have been 1992 or 1993, perhaps also the last time I was on stage performing.  Abraham Kaplan conducted Mozart's Requiem -- as soon as the last note sounded I wanted to sing the whole thing over.  Couldn't have done it physically -- the first time through took everything out of me -- but the experience was so powerful I wanted to dive back in.

Anyway, the sight of the conductor this weekend engaged in his own little performance, a sort of parallel solo modern dance set to strings, cymbals, and brass, elicited from me the following haiku:

Prokofiev's Three Orange March (20 March 05)

conductor's hair flies
flung with studied abandon
full springtime bluster

And he had the perfect hair for it, too.