It started out like any other concert. The Handel and Haydn Society Orchestra was performing works by Mozart in Boston’s Symphony Hall. Concluding the program was Mozart’s “Masonic Funeral Music”. The music ends softly and profoundly.
But then something wonderful happened.
As the music ended, and the conductor held the players and audience in rapt stillness, a child’s voice full of wonder and awe:
“Wow!”
The audience laughed, then erupted into applause. And set off a search for who that child was. Not to chide him, but to thank him and have him meet the conductor and be given a recording of the performance.
Because that child is all of us. That child is what, as a musician, conductor, and educator, long for.
To be that moved by music.
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Naturally, the “Wow” went viral.
And they found the child. And as it turns out, his story makes the moment even more remarkable.
It was a young boy named Ronan Mattin.
Thursday, the orchestra learned of Mattin’s identity after Stephen Mattin’s sister-in-law learned of the search. Mattin, his grandfather tells WGBH, is on the autistic spectrum. He’s primarily non-verbal.
“I can count on one hand the number of times that [he’s] spontaneously ever come out with some expression of how he’s feeling,” Mattin told WGBH.
Stephen Mattin said he took his grandson to a concert a few months ago and that his grandson loved it. But Sunday’s concert, which was recorded at Symphony Hall to be aired on Boston classical WCRB later this year, drew an audible reaction from Ronan.
“I was there and [it] was an extraordinary moment,” tweeted Marco A. Torres. “The kid’s ‘Wow’ was the best recognition for Mozart’s music and this wonderful orchestra.”
May we all be so moved by music.
To move you some more, here is the very end of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, as conducted by Claudio Abbado, shortly before his death. It is one of the most profound things I have ever heard, and this is a recording of a live performance. Oh, to have been there. In the silence he holds, you can hear the last chord still resonating, even though all sound has ceased.
What other performances have moved you beyond what words can express? Let’s discuss.
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