SMF

drmoss_ca wrote: ↑Mon Dec 02, 2019 5:13 am I too saw Supertramp twice in the Halifax Metro Centre, in 1981 and again sometime in the 90's.

Most embarrassing concert was going to see Ralph McTell at Imperial College London in 1977, and got up to leave after the backing band finished as I didn't really know who Ralph McTell was. Fortunately Pippa dragged me back down to my seat and forgave me.

Best experience was a four nighter - the first Ring Cycle in Canada to mark the opening of the new opera house in Toronto. What an experience - to have ~16 hours of music, costumes, acting, sets, all spread over five days. You spend the days trying to make sense of the story and what it might mean, attending lectures, and thinking, talking and dreaming of nothing else. You enter a weird state akin to to the delusional mood of pre-psychosis, aware your mind has been taken over and occupied by something alien. I felt tantalisingly close to making sense of it all, but the spell broke shortly after leaving Toronto and I could no longer grasp what it was that I had grokked. Afterwards I read scholarly works analysing the Ring from Catholic, Jungian, Freudian and Marxist points of view, and realised no one else quite understood it. Why was Wotan constrained in action, and how did this lead to the fall of the gods? I had decided it was the contracts he had inscribed on his staff, between himself and the older gods that granted him power.
I still feel the last few minutes of Gotterdammerung are the most emotional moments in music, when Brunnhilde rides Grane into Siegfried's funeral pyre, with achingly sad music for her lost love, the Rhine rises, Hagen is drowned, Valhalla and the gods burn and we are left with the redemption leitmotif and the world is born anew into the age of men. Gods, dragons and dwarves all gone. Ah, me - makes me cry just to describe it.