Tomorrow I leave for Chicago, for the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra‘s world premiere performance of Metropolitan in Orchestra Hall on Sunday. The CYSO’s terrific Music Director Allen Tinkham will conduct, and it’s sure to be a barn-burner!
Turns out I share the program with the Sibelius Fifth Symphony. Coincidentally this is my #1 desert-island piece … and in fact, one of the pieces I took off the shelf and studied (and slept with under my pillow) while writing Metropolitan. There’s nothing overt in what I took from the Sibelius (as far as I can tell), but Allen still must have sensed some sort of cosmic connection when he did the programming. I like to tell myself that’s how it happened anyway. In any case, it’s a humbling circumstance, and I count myself lucky that Metropolitan is first and I’m spared from having to follow Mister Sibelius’s masterwork.
As the say: never follow an animal act … and never follow Sibelius.
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