Philadelphia Orchestra + Planet Earth

Last night I went to the Mann Center, which is a huge amphitheater in Fairmount Park in Philadelphia.  So I get in my car and start driving along these windy roads in the park, with no buildings around and no place to pull off until you get out of the park.  So Google Maps says it takes 20 minutes, so after about 15 minutes I still haven't come to the turn I was supposed to make.  But I tell myself to stop being paranoid, and that it's probably just around the corner.  So I keep driving, but after 25 minutes I'm like "Ok, maybe I should pull out the GPS on the iPhone to see where I am..."  And I'm MILES away from my destination, like on the OPPOSITE side of the Schukyll River, across a major bridge, etc.  And these are park roads with a median in the middle and no shoulders, so I have to drive another 10 minutes before I can turn around.  That's the worst  feeling in the world -- knowing that you're driving in the absolutely wrong direction, but you have no way of  turning around.

Anyway, I finally get there, and I paid about $40 to have an actual seat in the amphitheater (as compared to a lawn "seat").  And the program was AMAZING.  They had about 4 to 5-minute clips from Planet Earth that the Philadelphia Orchestra played to.  The composer/conductor of the original Planet Earth score was conducting the orchestra, so it was fantastic.  There were about 6 songs, and intermission, and another 6 songs.  In between each song, this guy would tell incredible stories about the clip we were about to see, and also about how they were able to capture these rare moments on film.  He had a British accent, which made it so much better : )   

Anyway, there was one clip with elephants migrating across the Kalahari Desert to reach water in Botswana, and they were the "happiest elephants ever" when they arrived there - it was so cute, they were trumpeting their trunks and splashing in the water and playing with each other.  Another segment involved the snow leopard in the mountains of Pakistan.  This animal is so elusive that BBC had sent one cameraman to look for it, and that guy lived in the Pakistani mountains for 3 months, and started hallucinating, thinking rocks were moving.  So they replaced him with another cameraman, who stayed in those mountains for another 4 months, and he started hallucinating again, but one time those "moving" rocks were actually a snow leopard! 

The last segment I liked was showing cranes migrating from central Asia to India, and to do this, they have to pass over Mount Everest.  Yes, that's right, OVER Mount Everest.  Not around it or to the side of it, but on top of it.  And with the lack of oxygen up there, you can see that each flap of their wings is a monumental effort. 

All in all, I am so glad that I went.  Despite getting lost, it was an extremely talented orchestra with some incredible film shots, topped off with the original composer/conductor of the Planet Earth score!