Hollywood Bowl – September 2, 2025
There were 2 nights of Shostakovich this summer but THIS night of Shostakovich was Márquez and Shostakovich! I was lucky enough to snag $1 seats for this one. As you can tell from this picture, I did not sit in the $1 seats. When we arrived and made our way up to the top (the last escalator was working!) an usher stopped us and said they’d only sold 5,000 seats, so we were welcome to sit closer. We ended up in M1, just behind the Super Seats. Score!!!!
Since I’d managed to get $1 seats, I bought four. I always buy 4 because that’s the max and I figure for $4 even if I go by myself, I’ll just spread out. Julie had wanted to go and a friend from my side of town expressed interest so I invited her to join. Getting to the bus was an adventure as always. I really, really miss the days of the bus picking up at the mall. You just really never know how bad La Cienega is going to be. You just know that it will be bad.
After the national anthem, the program began with Márquez’s Danzón No. 2. My daughter played that piece when she was in high school and we both really liked it. Julie likes it too. It’s not the first time we’ve heard it at the Bowl. I suspect we will go every time they play it. The second piece, also by Márquez was Fandango. Anne Akiko Meyers took the stage in a show stopping red gown and proceeded to blow us away. She is really, really wonderful. This is the second piece written for her that I’ve seen her perform at the Bowl (the other being Philip Glass’ Violin Concerto No. 1). Of course no one will ever play it as well as she does, since it was written for her! And then as a special surprise, at the end of the piece, she marched Márquez himself out onto the stage to join her for a bow (which she did with Philip Glass as well).
The second half was Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5. I thought it was fine, but it wasn’t as good as the Márquez pieces in the first half. Before it started, the conductor took the microphone to explain to us that Shostakovich wrote this piece after his opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtensk District bombed and he was scared for his life. He told us that the celebration at the end was meant as a forced celebration to appease the Russian government. It turns out my new companion is a Shostakovitch superfan and this performance did not live up to her standards. I don’t know the piece well enough to judge, but I will say that the star of this show was definitely Anne Akiko Meyers. If I would have left after Fandango, I would have gone home happy. After Shostakovitch, I just went home tired. But at least I didn’t have to hurtle to the bus all the way from the $1 seats.