All summer long, Grant Park has offered free outdoor classical music concerts each weekend at Pritzker Pavilion. Don’t ask me why, but I made it down for the first time on Friday, just in time for the last weekend of the festival. By way of a grand finale, this weekend’s selection was Beethoven’s Ninth, which, even to someone as shamefully unfamiliar with classical music as I am, is recognizable. Well, recognizable in the loose sense of the word; I spent the entire time I was listening to the piece trying to place it, finally settling upon all those Sundays mornings spent at mass.
Amateur symphony-goer that I am, I arrived a fashionable forty minutes late, thinking nothing of it. With provisions—a sushi dinner and wine—in hand, Marie and I made our way through the enormous crowd, only to be puzzled when, halfway through our California rolls, everyone else broke in to applause and began to file out. Refusing to believe it was over (there are always those misleading fake endings in classical music, right?) we remained cross-legged on the ground, while the more cultured around us headed on to their next activity. Too bad because I thoroughly enjoyed the twenty minutes that I heard, and the setting was spectacular (though Pritzker Pavilion bears a strong resemblance to a piece of scrap metal, artfully sculpted of course).
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