Peter Crosta

I'm not a movie fan, but spend most of my leisure time with classical music (having been trained as a music educator). I was so very anxious to watch this film. I love Mahler and I rubbed my hands sitting down to view this fictional depiction of life in the concert hall, et al. This is one of THE most boring films I have ever forced myself to watch. I was hoping with each passing half-hour it would start to make sense and get into something meaningful. For 2-1/2+ hours I kept checking the time, pausing the movie to see how much "grief" remained. The only "valuable" take away of this horrible experience was the narrative provided by Bernstein at his very FIRST "Young People's Concert" Broadcasts (Jan 1958) that spoke to the power of music. Truer words were NEVER spoken! Here is what I waited 150 minutes to hear: "… we can really understand what the meaning of music is; it's the way it makes you feel when you hear it. Finally we've taken the last giant step, and we're there, we know what music means now. We don't have to know a lot of stuff about sharps and flats and chords and all that business in order to understand music; if it tell us something - not a story or a picture - but a feeling - if it makes us change inside, and have all those different good feelings music can make us have, then we are understanding it. And that's all there is to it. Because those feelings aren't like the stories and pictures we talked about before; they're not extra; they're not outside the music; they belong to the music; they're what music is about. And the most wonderful thing of all is that there's no limit to the different kinds of feelings music can make you have. And some of those feelings are so special and so deep they can't even be described in words. You see, we can't always name the things we feel. Sometimes we can; we can say we feel joy, or pleasure, peacefulness, whatever, love, hate. But every once in a while we have feelings so deep and so special that we have no words for them and that's where music is so marvelous; because music names them for us, only in notes instead of in words. It's all in the way music moves - we must never forget that music is movement, always going somewhere, shifting and changing, and flowing, from one note to another; and that movement can tell us more about the way we feel than a million words can."