La Madre

In my last post, I mentioned that my host mother is on the executive board of the Mexican Philharmonic Orchestra. That is incompletely true; actually, she is the General Manager of said ensemble, which means her name is the big one on the top of the program next to the music director's. As I also learned last night, she is an excellent composer and pianist, and has no qualms about attacking the piano at 11:30pm with her compositions. Today she took me out to breakfast with her friends ("las Viejas"), followed by a Philharmonic Concert.


The Mexican Phil is considered to be the best in Latin America. The players are not as first-rate as in the top American orchestras, but the ensemble blends together beautifully as a whole and responds well to the fresh interpretation of their young conductor. The concert hall is comfortable and relatively new with very good but not exceptional acoustics. Their sound is full and rich in the middle range, but the lowest instruments lack clarity, perhaps due in part to the spacious stage area. The concert experience as a whole is similar in many ways to those of Eastern European orchestras; the atmosphere is much more casual and there is a much closer connection between performers and audience members than in the distant-and-often-stuffy dynamic of more "formal" orchestras of America and Western Europe. I was pleased to discover that, also similar to Eastern European tradition, it is customary for the audience to clap rhythmically and in unison at the end of a concert to call for encores. I also found the season programming very interesting; the Philharmonic's summer season is a series of concerts documenting the inspirations, works, and legacy of Gustave Mahler, both as a composer and as the music director of the Vienna Philharmonic. Only of a few of the concerts actually include Mahler's works; the others establish the musical scene of Vienna before Mahler's rise to fame or demonstrate works by composers who are known to be inspired by Mahler's music. Still others are historical recreations of famous programs conducted by Mahler himself at the helm of the Vienna Phil. As a firm believer that concerts should not only entertain but educate an audience, I highly approved of the idea as a whole.


So basically my host mother not only has one of the coolest jobs in the music business IN THE WORLD, but she is also super friendly and is much more honest about expressing her excitement about having an English speaker with whom to practice su Inglés but realizing that she should speak to me in Spanish nonetheless. As she noted to me today in Spanish, "you landed in the perfect house."