I worked further on this last section of IV. Lento, fleshing out all those hellish triplets for the strings, building up the discordance and sense of panic over the agitato theme in the trumpet. I got it completed, all the way to a very nice stuttering stop by the strings, but I’ve since made some notes in my waste book:

keep going, descending keys underneath countermelody of descending chromatics, ending with the pickup phrase for the G major theme.

So I’ll work on this section a little longer before posting an mp3 of the results.

In other news, we went to see The Drowsy Chaperone at the Fox. What a complete and utter delight!

The premise is that the Man in the Chair, who is feeling a little blue in his drab apartment, offers to share with us the old recording he has of a fictitious 1920s musical, “The Drowsy Chaperone.” Although he’s never seen it, the show springs from his imagination, bursting from his closets and refrigerator and slowly efflorescing and covering his reality with its own, even while he continues to narrate and comment.

It was enormously witty, gorgeously designed, and played with surgical precision by the entire cast. I laughed at some numbers until I cried, especially “Monkey on a Pedestal.” (The MITC sets it up by telling us it’s a lovely song… but please don’t listen to the words. They are accordingly awful and screamingly funny.)

It’s a glass of champagne from start to finish, and I highly recommend it. Oddly, I just went back to see what the Times had said about it, and it was not altogether positive. Somehow Ben Brantley (and others in the comments section) seemed to think that the weaknesses of “The Drowsy Chaperone”, and what does one expect from a 1920s musical?, were the weaknesses of the show itself. No, children, this was meta-theatre and the best I’ve ever seen.