Reminder: I don't write headlines!

I love my night editing crew. They have saved me from numerous errors over the years and often let me push deadline when I am stuck. But they clearly still had football on the mind (it was less than a week after the Superbowl, after all) when they wrote the headline for my review of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra concert last Friday: Cardenes drops ball with Lalo; PSO great with Beethoven's 8th.

I had actually worked very hard to find the right tone in my review to get across both the shock of Cardenes stopping midway through the last movement of Lalo's "Symphonie Espagnole" and the fact that that really wasn't the end of the world.

On the one hand, I have gone to countless concerts over my life and never seen a concert stopped except for when a string broke, so it was a highly unusual happening that deserved major attention. But on the other hand, when you are someone like Cardenes, and you perform soooo many concerts over your career, something bad is bound to happen eventually. So I tried to walk the line between those two extremes and not kick Cardenes while he was down. The headline kind of wrecked that, but it is our editors' job to grab attention with a headline, and that certainly did! (It is hard to sum up a bunch of words in only a few, esp. with limitations on space and content).

Just for the record. I had to go to another concert Saturday (well, I really was looking forward to it, and my review of the excellent Biava Quartet and area native Mary Persin is here). But the word is that Cardenes had no trouble with the Lalo on Saturday and Sunday, so it really was a case of just one bad night. Here's to getting things back to normal!