1965 cultural events

This page lists 31 cultural events I attended in 1965. Movies are listed on my films page, not here. The program index page displays thumbnails of all the printed program images. Cities are in California, except as noted.

This list was reconstructed ex post facto in 2016 from old datebooks. I was a Harvard freshman at the start of 1965, spent the summer living at home in Minneapolis, and a sophomore at the end. Considering how much time has elapsed, I have remarkably vivid recollections of many of these performances:

• von Karajan waiting a long, long, long time for the audience to become completely silent at the beginning of the Beethoven 4, then starting with tiny baton movements before bursting into action.
• Coltrane at the Guthrie: jazz has never been my thing, but Coltrane was just amazing.
• The Fantasticks at the U. of M., with huge thunderclaps and a raging thunderstorm just after the beginning of Soon it's gonna rain.
• Ashkenazy's recital at Symphony Hall: he broke a key (whacking off the top of a black key, I think) in the middle of Gaspard de la nuit. At the end of the piece, there was a long pause while a technician came out and poked at the piano. Eventually, they wheeled off his Steinway and replaced it with a BSO Baldwin, to everyone's dismay.
• Karel Ancerl and the astonishing Czech Phil, playing a hair-raising Romeo and Juliet. I especially recall The Death of Tybalt, with full fff chords followed by ppp strings that seemed to come up by magic as the fff died out. They played five or six encores too, what an orchestra!

Oddly, I don't have a clear recollection of hearing Richter (my favorite pianist) in Boston, though I very clearly remember his almost identical recital in London in the summer of 1966.

I started keeping event data in the format used by this page in 2010, so data from 2010 to date is accurate. I started keeping appointment calendar data in .txt format in August 2005. I later extracted 2005-2009 event data ex post facto, so data for 2005 to 2009 is less complete and a bit less accurate. I have older pocket calendars and hard copies of event programs going back to 1963, but I have not yet scanned programs for years before 2010 or entered event data for most years before 2005.

See also: 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1971 1981 1982 1983 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1993 1994 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 All

Click on a heading below to sort the list accordingly. Click on a Program link to see the printed program for an event. Enter a search string (e.g., "Mahler", "Berkeley", "piano") below to filter the output.

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