Guest
So, there we were in the middle of Cello Suite No. 2, in the aforementioned sarabande—the notes sounded golden—and all of a sudden there was a distant rumble from somewhere outside the church. It quickly got louder and louder, the church itself seemed to vibrate with the rumbling, until the sound morphed into a mighty jet plane roar that filled the church, streaked the width of the building in a split-second, and then faded away as quickly as it had appeared. It was the unmistakable cacophony of the Blue Angels, a squadron of fighter jets that perform aerial stunts in close formation for various U.S. events—in this case, the annual Navy Fleet Week celebration on San Francisco Bay. It’s quite a spectacle, and an extremely loud one, as the planes fly low at high speeds over many parts of the city. To his credit (and the crowd’s astonishment) Yamashita didn’t flinch one bit. And it probably happened five times over the course of the piece. In the audience, we sort of girded ourselves for each deafening flyover, maybe locked into the music even more closely, and on the other side of each eruption, the music somehow felt even more transcendently pure and beautiful. It was Bach vs. the Blue Angels—an apex of human cultural achievement vs. machines of war—and Bach won, handily. Perhaps that’s a tad dramatic, but it was easy to appreciate the striking contrast. And yes, when the intermission for the afternoon concert came at the end of that second suite, most of the audience went outside the front doors of the church and marveled at the jaw-dropping maneuvers of the Blue Angels in the cloudless azure sky above... —Blair Jackson
