Beethoven in the desert

Mary and I are dry camping on BLM land about twenty miles north of Organ Pipe and some twelve miles south of the town of Ajo. We’ve been into town a few times, mostly to buy groceries and have a coffee and use the internet at a nice little café called the Oasis.

Other than the IGA market and the Oasis, Ajo doesn’t have much to recommend it except that it hasn’t been discovered by tourists yet, there not being much to discover. For a hundred years, it lived off a giant open-pit copper and gold mine, but that closed in 1983, and I’m sure the town’s economy collapsed just like the economies of small Northwest towns collapsed when the mills shut down. Today, law enforcement is probably the biggest employer, with 450 Border Patrol agents alone, though many of them must live in Gila Bend, about forty miles to the north.

So Ajo, despite some impressive historical buildings and a quaint Spanish-style square, isn’t a place you’d expect to find much in the way of culture, which is why I didn’t quite register the 8 ½ x 11 announcement at the Oasis the first time I looked at it: “Tucson Symphony Orchestra in an evening of all Beethoven, Tuesday, March 9, Dicus Auditorium.” It was only the next time we were in town that I looked a little closer and saw that the concert was sponsored by the Ajo Council for the Performing Arts.

“Where’s Dicuss Auditorium?” I asked at the Oasis.

“The high school.”

“Where’s the high school?” I asked.

“Right there,” she said, pointing through one of the Spanish-style arches that surround the square.

I bought two tickets, twelve bucks each, thinking, Who knew Tucson had a symphony orchestra and why are they driving a couple of hundred miles to this little town, and could they possibly be very good, really? Maybe it was in fact the honors orchestra for the University of Arizona, located in Tucson, not Phoenix, but still, that would probably be worth going out to hear. We’ve been camping for three months and haven’t done anything that might be called cultural the whole time, not even visit a museum. I guess we’ve been looking for other kinds of rewards on this trip.

What a wonderful surprise and a musically exciting evening! The Tucson Symphony, it turns out, is the oldest in the Southwest. It auditions nationally and sometimes internationally, and its conductor, George Hanson, has an impressive musical biography, as printed in the program. Most importantly, to my not entirely untrained ear, they sounded marvelous, at least in two of the three pieces they performed.

The Octet for Winds was performed by eight musicians, and although it was from Beethoven’s mid-career, I didn’t find it to be very interesting. To me, there’s a rather dramatic point at which Beethoven stops sounding a lot like Mozart and begins to sound like something entirely new and unsurpassed in classical music. The octet was still from the Mozart period, I thought.

The second piece featured the much larger string section performing the Grosse Fugue in B-Flat Major, which is an expanded version of one of the late string quartets. I’ve actually listened to the late quartets rather a lot, though many years ago, and remembered this piece and was once again struck by how modern it sounds, a good hundred years ahead of its time in its harmonies and fractured fugue structure. As the conductor said in introducing it, it drove audiences insane the few times it was first performed. I loved it.

Best of all after the intermission was the performance of Symphony No. 2. I expected this second symphony to be again rather Mozarty but was surprised at how many twists and surprises it held. The performance was stirring, only in part because it was so unexpected on a Tuesday night in Ajo.

In the whole evening, I can only fault the acoustics of the room, which swallowed up vast quantities of sound and left the performances sounding anemic, especially the two pieces before the full orchestra came on stage. Nobody’s fault. A high-school auditorium was never designed for a concert like this.

Mary and I drove back to camp navigating the twisted little dirt roads by my GPS and still having a bit of trouble finding our trailer in the dark, but enjoying that fullness of spirit that can come only during and after an evening of fine music, regardless of genre.

My knowledge of classical music is limited at best (please don’t take any of my music-critic comments very seriously here, though I do know enough to know that “classical” is a period, not a genre), but I actually did listen to quite a lot of Beethoven for a couple of years in college, about 1972 and 73, say. I had bought a number of collections on LP: the complete symphonies, string quartets and piano concertos of Beethoven, along with a few other things by different composers I liked. I remember often spending an evening just listening to music. Some music should never be used for background, I thought for a long time, though I suppose that’s a foolish limitation.

But still.

Beethoven was the composer who most fulfilled me emotionally and intellectually. The wonderful evening made me regret a little that I haven’t paid more attention to classical music over the years. Jazz has so dominated my passion for music, and so much of what I think of as classical music is frumpy rubbish. But then so much of everything is frumpy rubbish or rubbish of some other kind. In listening widely and well, I’ve discovered a world of music in jazz that I’ve now refined down to a broad but essential collection that continues to grow and delight. Is there room enough and time for a vast expansion in my tastes?

In any case, since I still have a working turntable, I think I’ll get out some of those old LPs when we get back home.