So two days ago Yeung and I had tickets to see the Boston Pops. For those who don’t know, it’s the Boston Symphony Orchestra performing more modern music (like jazz, etc., not like 50 Cent…). She got the tickets as an anniversary present and the show we got had John Williams (see: Star Wars, ET, Jaws, Indiana Jones, etc.) as a guest conductor. The first thing that happened as we walked from the lot where we parked to the Symphony Hall was that John Williams is getting out of his car like ten feet from us. So I persuade Yeung to get an autograph (a few people were asking already, so I didn’t feel too much like a slut)… I don’t have an online version of the photo, only one on my PC. I can’t recall right now how best to put it on here, but I will later. Anyway, the show was super fun. The whole theme was music from movies. He started with some older movies (like Citizen Kane) and also played some stuff he recently did for the Harry Potter movies. The second segment featured various stuff, mostly composed by him, including Schindler’s List and Scent of a Woman. The last segment was probably the best. He played a tribute to Henry Mancini, and played a lot of his most famous stuff, including “the Pink Panther”, “Peter Gunn” (forever known to me as the theme from the video game Spy Hunter), “The Days of Wine and Roses”. He also played “Moon River”, which was amazing (I’m sure Chris would have appreciated it).

One funny thing was that we were sitting right in the very front row of tables, so we were chatting with one of the bass players, and he gave us a copy of his schedule, which also had the encores they had decided to play: the “Raiders of the Lost Ark” march and “E.T.”. So we were totally pulling hard to get them to play those, which of course they did (how could he not play “Raiders”?). The bass player we were talking to had a fedora hidden behind his gear and he whipped it out when they eventually played it, and JW was laughing when he saw it (the whole time, still conducting the song).

Anyhow, the thing I can’t really describe was the quality of the orchestra. I mean, all of them are total pros. They are casual, but you can tell they are all superstars in whatever they play. My ears haven’t had a lot of training to pick up the finer points in this type of situation, but the entire group is basically perfectly in step with each other and with the conductor. Definitely something I plan on seeing again when I get a chance.