Awe and beauty and wonder: Yeah, I’ll take that

Me, I’d never heard it — my education in serious music is spotty, to say the least — but the concert last week at Davies Symphony Hall gave me a chance to rectify that.

There was, I regret to say, some distracting multimedia stuff going on, a way of “opening up the piece,” as they often say in all performance disciplines.

The projections on the rear screen above the orchestra and chorus contained most of the dopey stuff.

There were some stars, and some vaguely nude males wandering in a fog, and little drawings of Jesus that varied from “Map of the Constellations”-style pictographs to a really scary Jesus with glowing eyes and a Dylan-dream-level gaunt radiating face.

The distractions consisted of moving singers, striding up and down the aisles, sidling into each other on the podium, facing rear, slowly turning frontward, then unaccountably making for the exits.

The boys were cute and sang like angels — why banish them to an upper balcony half the time?

Why do anything to lessen the power of the chorus, an overwhelming instrument, a thing that can only be experienced live?

After the awe, the beauty, the timeless, tumultuous ambition, my overwhelming emotion was gratitude.

Gratitude to Beethoven for writing this stuff two centuries ago, gratitude to all the musicians who carried it forward from then to now, gratitude to Thomas for bringing it here.

Speaking of gratitude, I want to take a moment to note the passing of David Littlejohn, the author (“The Big One”) and critic (the Wall Street Journal, most recently) and teacher at the UC Berkeley journalism school.

He encouraged young musicians and followed their careers avidly.

[...] he kept stretching his own boundaries — a few years ago, he managed to get to Burning Man to look at the art, which he adored.

[...] after dinner, we’d do some choral singing of our own, mostly songs that Littlejohn had loved in college.