Birds who've flown the old coop

A passenger on the way in looked like Yuki (this means nothing to you but I’ll say that she’s Japanese and Italian and if she has tattoos, I am unaware of them) and had a Moomin tattooed on her ankle.

The whole season is things that end in triumph or at least a possibility of hope. Mahler 3, Bruckner 7. This is a difficult time for the country and we all need it right now.
An “All Mahler” program would just be one symphony. An all-Brahms program is the typical symphony and a concerto.

Brahms was the most indecisive composer ever. He wanted to write a symphony. It took him years to overcome his feelings of being in Beethoven’s shadow. He also played piano in a brothel, had a late puberty at 24, and had a high voice that embarrassed him.
At the age of 20, he went to visit Robert Schumann and he had Clara listen to him play the piano.
Schuman threw himself in the river Rhine while suffering from auditory and visual hallucinations and spent the rest of his life in an asylum.
Brahms lived with Clara and her seven children (she had 8 but one died in infancy). She was 35, he was 22. He also felt a bit of an infatuation that never amounted to anything more than an intense friendship. The second movement of the concerto is a portrait of her.
The first movement has a intense ferocity that is heard nowhere else. Begins with a roar of the timpani, a B♭ major theme. Then F major. Then brooding passion. Here, the orchestra and the piano are once again equals. This work began life as a symphony, after all, and they meet in symphonic proportions. And then a piano duet. Sonata form, of course. A horn call from the mysterious wildlands (when I do these, I’m furiously scrawling down these things and if I slow down to make my writing legible, I’d miss too much. So I’m not actually sure what word I used there. Wildlands? Woodlands?). In those days, people’d usually clap at the end of each movement but nobody clapped to this when it premiered. In fact, they hissed at the end.
The second movement is a hymn in C major and if you don’t believe things can be sad in a major key, you’re wrong. You can hear Schumann’s death here. The final cadenza doesn’t show off but reaches into the soul.
The third movement is a Hungarian Romany dance, a thing Brahms was obsessed with, in a 6/4 meter, which is tricky because it can be 1-2 1-2 1-2 or 1-2-3 1-2-3 or 1-2-3-4-5-6 or in this case, all of the above. The third symphony has 6/4 meter so it’d be too much to pair those things.
And then a fugue because Brahms was going through a Bach phase that transmuted into a Bach-with-a-side-of-Mozart-and-Palestrina phase when he wrote the fugue, and I was thinking of somehing Caiti said about her father going through a Bach phase in college and then Caiti herself going through a Bach phase that was really more a Tchaikovsky-with-a-little-Bach-on-the-side phase with a bit of Schubert and she thought about going through future phases with Chopin and Debussy and Handel and Vivaldi and Rimsky-Korsakov.
The last ten years for me have been an extended John Adams phase and I went through a Henry Cowell phase a decade ago and my college classical phase was Gustav Mahler in that summer everything fell apart and Ralph Vaughan Williams in the Caitlin days, which was mixed in with Flying Saucer Attack and Airiel and Cocteau Twins and Future Sound of London. Now is a Gerald Finzi phase. Berlioz as well because autumn is for French Romantics.

The encores were a Chopin prelude and a rather stately Chopin mazurka that I thought was a polonaise neither of which I know which specific ones they are.

At 29, Brahms decided he’d write a symphony. For real this time. He finished it at age 43.
At the start, the symphony is going boom boom boom and the wind players are coming down and the cellos and the vilins are going up converging on each other. And sometimes the timpani plays too loud. There’s the sound of fate knocking at the door. He just can’t escape. There’s a repeated section that is usually excised because it goes nowhere and adds nothing.
It ends in C major but that’s lost in the audience coughing.
The second and third movements are brief intermezzos. Warm, sunny E major, with various solos. And then Romany music.
The fourth movement sounds best in Symphony Hall and we’re not just saying that because it’s in Boston. A two part overture in a tragically distorted theme. A storm. A roar from the timpani, and the clouds breaks and we get this outpouring from the French horn and the trombones enter for the first time in this entire symphony. There’s a chorale and structurally, it's very similar to Beethoven's Ode to Joy minus the chorus, and it ends in C major and in a scream for joy.

This symphony has been referred to as Beethoven’s 10th but Brahms disliked that implication of plaigarism rather than the homage it was.

I drew Francesca and Marina and Abby though I’m not entirely sure who’s who and there were two of them whose names I didn’t get.

burning question: why would Republican provocateurs even need to show up when they can just fake it with AI and their base of terminally online 70-year-olds and terminally online 20-year-olds would eat it up?