Flashes of Panic

Friday night I watched the UMass men’s hockey team beat UConn, 5-1. Saturday night I went over to the College for the symphony’s “Holiday Pops” concert, which featured the standard Nutcracker selection and one of my Russian professors narrating Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf.”

I wasn’t long into the Nutcracker when I realized there was some similarity between the two activities. In both cases, there was a lot to watch, many pieces around the venue which all fit together to form the whole. You could watch the puck/melody, or try to follow what was going on with the whole ensemble. Players would be fully engaged or sitting back and waiting for their part. And the Russians are big hockey fans, of course.

There’s a bit less contact at the symphony, of course, and the fans are significantly classier. (I’m not impressed by the behavior of the fans at the UMass hockey games.)

(I mentioned this to another symphony attendee, and he pointed out Peter Schickele’s call of Beethoven’s Fifth, which is on his MySpace page under “New Horizons in Music Appreciation.”)