By other stuff, I mean a short piece by Texas composer Tobias Picker and Schubert’s Great C Major Symphony (which I have always known as the Ninth, but apparently there’s not universal agreement on that number) which did not feature Ms. Weilerstein.

I’ve never seen Weilerstein play before, but you can put me down as a fan now. She really threw herself into the Shostakovich piece. Despite being in a major key, this was not a happy piece, but felt sort of desperate. I am not a musician, so many of intricacies of interpretation are beyond, but the playbill talked about it as being philosophical and I could hear as a sort of conversation. In the first movement, I heard a progressive (subversive?) professor speaking to his class, trying desperately to get them to think for themselves, with the final three movements being more of the dialogue that the playbill suggested (though I didn’t hear the horn as being the other side of the dialogue, so much as it suggested).

One thing I noticed. During some energetic, frenetic, staccato bowing, she was shaking her head with the movement, but her head seemed turned towards the First Violin and for a moment I thought, is she criticizing the First Violin? Took me a moment to realize it was just her head moving with the action of her cello, but the image stuck with me.

This was my first encounter Tobias Picker. I won’t be looking for more opportunities. The playbill called it emotionally neutral and tried to make that sound like a compliment, but the whole thing (thankfully, brief) sounded like the score to a Hallmark Channel movie.

Schubert is Schubert. Never been one of my ‘go to’ composers, but, of course, I appreciate him. Like Shostakovich, the key may have been major, but the emotions were in a minor key, but with fierce desperation. The playbill did try to brush off the final movement’s appropriation of bits from the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth as being minor or unimportant, but I did find them very ‘noisy,’ so to speak.