if I may brag on my rock star...

For a blog called "Music in the Wings," there's been quite a dearth of posts about the music in my life. Let's see if I can remedy that.

A while back, the n c symphony was playing the Shostakovich Cello Concerto with a world famous cello soloist, Lynn Harrell. This piece is unique because it's definitely a concerto for cello but many times, the French horn has BIG solo parts too, going back and forth with the cello. This is a piece Brian has practiced for auditions but has never performed, let alone performed 3 nights in a row. It's kind of intimidating, there is only one horn part, so it was just Brian sitting on the back row by himself WAILING it! He did SO AWESOME! I was beaming from ear to ear the Friday night I went to hear the concert.

Saturday evening I got a call from my great friend Juliann, who was visiting us from New Orleans, and she had gone back to hear the concert again that evening. Nervously I answered the phone, "How did he do?"
J: He did awesome!
M: Whew! Yay! I'm so happy it went well again!
J: Yes and the soloist just dedicated his encore to your husband.
M: WHAT?! That's crazy!

Yes so for that last performance, Mr. Harrell decided to perform an encore and from the stage said something like, "I've had a wonderful week with these wonderful musicians on stage and I'd like to dedicate this encore to Bonnie (the principal cellist here, one of his former students) and Brian." *And motioned to my husband!

Mr. Harrell also told the music director that he's played this piece with a lot of orchestras and he's found the principal horn player is either really great at playing the bold, loud passages, OR the sensitive, softer passages. But here, they are lucky because Brian is great at both.

note to rock star husband: sorry, I'm sure I've embarrassed you by bragging on you so much but you work so hard, I just had to note your success