Our day continued with a trip to the Desert Botanic Garden. It was fascinating to see such a diversity of cactus types. It was absolutely beautiful. Our guide told us all about the various ecosystems and many of the ways Natives used the plants for housing and household goods.
Next stop was Old Town Scottsdale. There was a farmer’s market in full swing, lots of fun places to eat, and plenty of Western shopping. Lots of students bought cowboy hats and checked out the jewelry; others sat on the grass in a city park. It was a great, laid-back time.
Our afternoon was spent at the Heard Museum of Native American Culture and Art. My group had a young Navajo woman as our docent. She took us through the exhibits, talking about the Katsina dolls and her own personal experience as a member of a family of weavers. It was all very interesting and beautiful. I bought a Navajo flute in the gift shop—I love having new wind instruments to play. Scattered about my home office are three or four recorders, a bamboo flute, and a xaphoon. Now I have a new addition!
After a Mexican buffet at Aunt Chilada’s, it was off to the Mesa Arts Center, a huge complex of theatres and galleries, where the Chamber Orchestra performed on the patio under the lights. It was a great example of (somewhat) spontaneous public art. People walking by or coming to the concert stopped and listened. I even saw a couple dancing. The students performed Grieg’s Holberg Suite, the first movement of Erik Ewazen’s Sinfonia for Strings, and “Tico Tico,” an old Brazilian choro tune with Mr. V playing the shaker and samba whistle. They did a wonderful job, even amidst the traffic sounds.
Then came the major cultural event of the trip, a concert by the BBC Concert Orchestra, led by Maestro Keith Lockhart. They were on the last night of a North American tour, featuring all English music. They opened with Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes, by Benjamin Britten. This is an opera that I teach in music theory class, so it was a great joy to hear some of the instrumental music and remember where the various themes appeared in the opera. A number of theory students were in the audience, so they got to revisit the piece as well.
The next piece was Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto. This is one of the cornerstones in the cello repertoire, and the soloist, Sophie Shao, did not disappoint. She played the work with a ton of passion and emotion, drawing all of the sorrow out of this work that Elgar composed in his later years, after WWI and the death of his wife. They followed this with a piece I had never heard before by a composer I had never heard of. George Butterworth (no relation to the anthropomorphic maple syrup bottle) was a friend of Vaughan Williams and Holst, and like them, he was a folk song collector. His work, The Banks of Green Willow, is a delightful setting of this tune, with “Green Bushes” thrown in for good measure.
The final work was Elgar’s Enigma Variations, probably his most famous work. It’s a set of 14 short movements, all based on a theme that is never explicitly stated, and each dedicated to one of his good friends. The orchestration is beautiful, and the melodies quite stirring. The ninth movement, “Nimrod,” has been arranged for concert band. We’ll have to take that out and sight read it when we get back to DHS.
By the time we got back to the hotel, we were exhausted but full of culture, from biology to history to music. I saw a lot of tired, happy faces at the end of the night. Until I told them we were getting up before 6:00 a.m. on Sunday…
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