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Web Journal 5

DETROIT SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

For my final concert web journal, I unfortunately had to watch a pre-recorded concert online due to the major COVID-19 outbreak. The concert I watched was by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra from a 2017 performance. The piece was a Beethoven Concerto for the violin and orchestra.
The main violinist was Hilary Hahn and conductor was Leonard Slatkin.

Right from the beginning of the performance, the camera focused on Hilary so I knew she would have a major piece in this performance. She was wearing a beautiful multi colored dress as well as standing while performing. I thought that it was interesting that they opted to make her stand out so much more than the other performers. Typically, orchestras want everyone to be wearing the same color so that they truly appear to perform as one.

I was very impressed that Hilary played the piece without looking at any sheet music. It was a very complex piece with changes in tempos, a wide range of notes, etc. My favorite part of her performance was around 8:40 when she made a very interesting high pitch vibrato (I think), but almost mimicked a very loud bird chirping. I thought it was interesting because as someone who has played the violin before, those minuscule movements to manipulate the sounds of the string were very difficult for me.

I have always really liked Beethoven's music so I automatically gravitated towards this performance. I especially liked this performance because it was the only violin concerto performance that Beethoven has written, so as someone whose favorite instrument is the violin I had to watch. One aspect of watching this performance online that I did like was that the camera was able to give up close shots of the performers. This enabled me to better see the emotion and movements used to play their pieces.

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