Romeo's and Julie-o

♫A lovestruck Romeo sings the streets a serenade....♫

Even tonight, the car parks around the fancy restaurants are full, a night before The Big Day. We wound up doing that two better, having our Valentines' evening on Saturday. It's Eleanor's earliest and most stressful workday, and she asked that we make that the go-out night.

As I mentioned during Saturday afternoon's Goat Rodeo Report, just as I was pounding fists into keyboards over a screwed-up book delivery (which never made it on time, but our dear friends did connect and we're getting a signed copy anyway:), another friend offered us tickets to the BPO that very night.  Plus, Jenn lives round the corner from some of the awesomest restaurants in North Buffalo. So Eleanor did squatter duty in the absence of a reservation and already had a table by the time I'd picked up the ducats.

Romeo and Juliet's Café is one of the city's finest; we drive by their suburban branch almost every day but had never been in either until stopping on Hertel on a snowy evening. Food was wonderful, dessert positively sinful, and the service just great. Plenty of native Paisan being spoken; this place is the real deal.

That repast got us to Kleinhans just in time for the 8:00 curtain, if there actually was a curtain. Also, if there had been, it practically would have been in our laps. These seats were- oh. My. GOD.- third row center. I could read the cellists' sheet music. During the soloist's piano concerto, we could see, FEEL, the lid of the grand Steinway vibrating. And I was so afeered of committing a cellular felony (after the recent events along those lines), I did not entrust my fate to the mute button. I turned the phone completely off. Lowered the volume to zero anyway. Removed the battery. Swallowed the SIM card. Nothing technological was gonna ruin this experience, dammit, and blessedly, nothing did.

You can read the preview of the concert here, the morning-after review of it at this link. Or, just what I said about it in the wowed hours afterward at home on the Face thing:

Just got back from the BPO, a gift of grace from [baseballchica03]. Barry Douglas performed Tchaiovsky's Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor, which was awesome, but Maestra Falletta almost brought me to tears introducing Also Sprach Zarathrusta, with an expanded 64-piece string orchestra (our string section's usually more like 40) . She explained that the group was enhanced to provide Strauss' fully scored orchestration by inviting in a large contingent of their colleagues from the bankrupt Syracuse Symphony. The love for them, and from them, was palpable.

----

Then, the next morning at church, this happened:

Okay, we didn't get Mark Summer to perform it; our regular guest cellist Katie Weissman did. But she did it beautifully. An odd choice for an offetory, perhaps, but that didn't stop the congregation, usually repressed throughout the service, from giving her virtuosity a much-deserved round of applause.

Didn't watch a minute of the Grammys. What would have the point been after all that?