The lone oboe player in the deserted foyer struck the loneliest note of the night. After everyone was seated, he remained standing patiently outside one of the closed double doors which lead into the auditorium at the National Concert Hall. He was waiting for his cue.
When James Gorton, a member of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra for the past 28 years, last played in Dublin 14 years ago, he had "a very important part to play", he said. But on Wednesday night he was on his own, unseen by the elegant audience. Was there a tinge of regret in his voice? "It's supposed to sound very far away," he offered as he waited to play his part in Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique - it was at the point where the oboe and the English horn have a conversation, he said, "playing back and forth in bucolic fashion". Alone but not forgotten, he too, like all the other musicians there, was loved and lauded by the packed assembly. "I feel it's almost sexual the buzz that comes as soon as those sounds come out," said actress Susan Fitzgerald at the interval. The others in her party - PR guru Mary Finan, psychiatrist Ivor Browne and Amalee Meehan, a postgraduate at TCD - looked at each other and gathered in closely swallowing her up. Pianist John O'Conor, head of the Royal Irish Academy of Music, was ecstatic about the orchestra's clarinet opening of Sibelius's Symphony No 1 in E Minor. "I've never heard it played that softly - it was just magical." He was there with his wife, Mary, a sex therapist, who said the O'Conors all lead such busy lives that they rarely get a chance to sit down as a family to have interesting conversations at the dinner table. Ah, well.
"The brass is just fantastic," said Loretta Brennan-Glucksman, president of the American-Ireland Fund, talking about the instruments - not the top brass who were present in large numbers. It was the Pittsbrgh Symphony Orchestra's first stop on its European tour.
Taking a couple of hours off from preparing for "a big ambassadors' conference on September 1st in Iveagh House" was Joe Brennan, deputy chief of protocol at the Department of Foreign Affairs. There too was Dorothy Barry, head of Mile Atha Cliath, who said she'll be turning on the lights along the Liffey on New Year's Eve.