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Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Concert at Kitara

Our upstairs neighbor is a musician and she teaches in the music department at the University. We’ve seen her play the cello in concerts here, but we know she performs all over. She also conducts the orchestra.  Her orchestra had a concert at Kitara Hall in Sapporo, with her conducting, so we went to see it. We hadn’t been to Kintara, but had good directions. We took the bus to Sapporo, then the subway for three stops. We had about a five minute walk from the subway station to the concert hall.


 
Photographs were not allowed inside, so I can only show you these photos taken outside.


 
It is a beautiful new facility.  Our seats were third row center, so we could see and hear everything very well.  We met our friends Alicia and Miwako at Kitara and all sat together.

When we saw our neighbor performing at the cello concert, she wore a long gown and wore her hair up.  You can see photos on this post. As the conductor, she wore black shoes with gold heels, black leggings, a white blouse with lots of ruffles in front, and a black long tailed coat. Her hair was done in loose curls. She looked every bit the part of a conductor, even before she stepped out on the stage.

How do conductors know what to do and how do the orchestra members know what it all means?  It’s like a secret language. Are there conductor classes? Does each conductor teach his or her orchestra members what the signals mean?   It’s all very interesting.

We enjoyed the concert and now that we know how to get to the concert hall, we may go to another performance there.

I’m still working on Miss Kitty’s Dragons.  The colors are very appealing and with each stitch, I see more of the garden emerging.

2 comments:

  1. The concert sounds great. I hope you do get to go to another. Great progress on Miss Kitty.

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  2. There are indeed conductor classes, our choir director occasionally mentions them. But I think that includes directing as well as things like motivation techniques and song choice.

    As for the signals, they're pretty standard and all musicians know what they mean. When I was younger, my band director made all the students direct a piece once so that we'd understand the signals better, but I think most musicians learn them pretty well even without that, since it's all very standardized.

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