Last night, we headed up to the Boothbay Harbor Opera House to see George Winston. Winston composes a great deal of the music he plays, focusing on piano, but he also played guitar and harmonica last night.
Boothbay Harbor is about an hour north of Portland, and BF worked until 4:30, so we hopped in the car as soon as he got home and headed north. We ended up stopping for dinner at the Montsweag Roadhouse. It’s on Route 1 in Woolwich, just before the border with Wiscasset. I had the butternut lasagna special, which was wonderful. Instead of a butternut squash puree, which is probably the most common way it’s prepared in lasagna, there were chunks of squash between the noodles. I love fall vegetables.
The Boothbay Harbor Opera House is a really neat space. There’s a bar upstairs, which was the original meeting room for the local chapter of the Knights of Pythias. The bar opened an hour before the performance, so we had time to hang out and examine the surroundings. The room has a cool tin ceiling and various decorations pointing back to the knights.
The performance space itself held about two hundred people with a main floor, and a wrap-around balcony. The only bad thing about the space was the folding chairs. My back was killing me by the end of the concert. Everything else about the space was great. It’s perfectly sized for great acoustics, no matter where you’re sitting (we were only several rows away from the back on the main floor).
The concert itself was Winston’s winter concert, and started with a piece called “New Orleans Will Rise Again”, which was a great jazz beginning to the show. Some of the other other highlights were “Tammarack Pines”, which reminded me of snowfall, a medley of Vince Guaraldi’s Peanuts music, a really cool harmonica jig which had the whole hall resonating with pounding floor boards as pretty much everyone kept the beat (I’m frankly surprised we didn’t have improvised square-dancing) and a really great fantasia on the “Carol of the Bells”. It was a wonderful show, totally worth the extra long drive.