Lang Lang

Tonight Emilie and I went to Geneva to see a performance by Lang Lang, a celebrated Chinese concert pianist. And as you likely have already guessed, Emilie was the driving force behind this cultural excursion given my utter lack of knowledge on the classical music front.

Since we needed to leave for the concert directly from work, I took the train to Geneva and met up with Emilie at the concert hall. As such, I had to find my way from the train station to the venue and stupidly decided to opt for the 15 minute walk rather than trying to navigate the distance by public transportation.

In short, the combination of the freezing temperatures (exacerbated by the cold wind coming off the lake) and my bonehead decision to try to navigate by memory, resulted in a miserable and unnecessary 30-minute tour of Geneva. And thanks to my prescient decision to leave my gloves at home, I inflicted additional pain on myself through the borderline frostbite that resulted from my attempts to leverage the (incredibly inprecise) GPS function on my phone to help guide the way.

Given the unexpected delay, I arrived at the venue after the concert had started. This probably worked out for the best, though, as it took a good 20 minutes for me to thaw out and collect myself. Plus, there were TV's in the reception area, so I was at least able to see/hear what I was missing.

After the intermission I joined Emilie at our seats. The balance of the concert was nice, though I don't think that I ever really recovered enough to fully appreciate Lang Lang's performance. Here's the view that we had from our seats.

If you look closely at the photo, you can see that there was a small section of seats on-stage behind the piano. This resulted in one of the more awkward moments of the night, as a few of the people seated there decided to leave (thus walking across the stage) just as Lang Lang was returning for a second encore performance. Fortunately, he had a good attitude and made a joke about it.