And maybe the highlight of the concert was a new Tan Dun piece, Internet Symphony No. 1, “Eroica,” which was triumphantly vulgar (I loved every moment of it, including the flamboyant quotes from the Eroica Symphony), and also played with an explosive exuberance I didn’t hear in the other pieces. This was exactly what I would have loved to hear throughout the evening, and which would have made me love the concert, no matter what detailed faults I heard. Maybe the piece sounded so good because the musicians had rehearsed their parts individually with Tan, online. Or maybe it’s an easy piece to play. Or maybe — how’s this for heresy? — Tan is a better conductor than MTT (at least in his own work), and/or was more fun to work with.

OK, well, I actually didn’t think quite so highly of Tan Dun’s piece — I thought it had a good start, but the introduction of that really sentimental brass theme (was anyone else thinking Andrew Lloyd Webber?) was pretty hokey — even though I thought it was used to good effect later in the piece.

A more fun conductor to work with than MTT?  How could anybody possibly more fun than this?

M — can I call you M? — just a piece of advice: maybe it’s not the best way to kick off the first rehearsal of this exciting, youthful music project with an esoteric tuning arbitration.  Somehow it just doesn’t make for great YouTube viewing… in that 30 seconds, I would imagine that 97% of your viewership was wondering what the hell you were talking about.  Why not just let the oboist play the note that he wanted to without making some pretentious comment about “Viennese in our midst”?  Don’t you think that might have been just a little bit better?

PS. I totally saw my friend Dash in this video — Congrats!