Besides this year's favourite, Gabriel Fauré, Ms. Lordi played the baroque Scarlatti and the romantic Liszt to an auditorium that almost reached ⅔ of its capacity— that's north of 150 music-lovers, if you, like me, are an optimist and prefer to see the hall half full.
There were a few surprises in Ms. Lordi's repertoire: the emotive Finnish Einojuhani Rautavaara, and the Argentinian (musical) nationalist Alberto Ginastera. While I was surprised to hear a composer from near home, most of the audience was delightedly taken aback by Rautavaara, whose first part of the piece about the transformative nature of fire, The Fire Sermon, could easily be used in an action's movie chase scene; the piece is so complex that I was sure Ms. Lordi sprouted a third hand in the midst of it. Mr. Simon Barker brought to the attention of the attendees that Mrs. Lordi did use her elbows at some point, so I'm not too far off in my suppositions.
The concert lasted for about 40 minutes, and after the presentation Ms. Lordi gracefully approached some well-wishers of the audience, a charismatic gesture proper to the outgoing character she conveys in her playing style.
Hopefully she'll be back soon. It's hard to say now if she brought this nice weather, or if it was the other way around: let's, then, keep this winning formula intact.
Originally published on the 6 of march of 2024