Dear Diary: Flats, With Sharps
A new world opened up to me this evening, a world of sophisticated music lovers with a taste for hearing music in stylish homes. Entrée had not been expensive, and my experience of the evening intensified my awareness of the bargain. Let me put “not expensive” in relative terms. My benefactor ticket (name printed in program and everything!) cost 25% more than the Carnegie Hall seat (in Row S) that I bought for Musica Sacra’s Messiah on 21 December. And I bought two of those. There will, presumably, be no caterers handing out delectable goodies at Carnegie Hall. No unquestioningly refilled glasses of wine. There is a lot to be said for Classical Action, the AIDS-benefit organization that sponsored the event. And a lot will be said about certain so-called “music lovers” among my acquaintance who might have been expected to tip me off to these events — were they not opera queens in thrall to the crudely athletic displays of certain Swedish and Australian sopranos, not to mention the antics of deceased pasta-padded Italian tenors incapable of reading music. (Do I make myself clear?) Certain nameless friends — worms who don’t deserve to have names.
I’ll write up the point of the evening — a first performance ever, it seems, by Thomas Meglioranza and Reiko Uchida, of Schubert’s Winterreise — as soon as I finish this paperwork project that has taken over the apartment. Sooner, perhaps. I now have two fantastic and fantastically diverse evenings of Tomness to talk about. And Reikoness! (That’s the last time, Ms Uchida, that I will ever say such a thing; I promise!) And I can’t wait! Suffice it to say that the duo’s musicianship this evening began where that of earlier greats leaves off: at the top.
I don’t know why I felt compelled to show up promptly at 6:30 for the pre-concert reception. I was alone, and I didn’t expect to know anybody. It turned out that I did know someone, but, as always happens when a party presents just one familiar face, I was horribly anxious about abusing the privilege. So I was standing quietly against a wall, not at all discontented but only wishing that I could be invisible — the site of a solitary person is always embarrassing to everyone else at a party — when a gentleman of roughly my age but vastly trimmer figure introduced himself and launched a pleasant talk about music. He knew, it seemed, everybody, but this information was imparted without the slightest shade of ostentation. When he talked about talking about music with Joshua Bell, I was more interested than envious or resentful. (We can’t all talk to Joshua Bell!) When it was time for him to move on, I thanked him for chatting and gave him my name. When he told me his, I realized that he had introduced himself at the start. He was Charles Hamlen, Classical Action’s founder.
You can take your pick: Mr Hamlen took pity on a solitary gent and struck up a conversation. Or he was offering an indirect bit of thanks to a benefactor (see “bargain,” above) to whose identity he had been alerted by an adroit administrator. It doesn’t matter. I became a fan of Classical Action then and there — even though I’m aware that there will be events that cost the earth just to get into, and forget seeing my name in the program.
As it turned out, someone I knew saw my name in the program before I did. (I didn’t actually open the program at all until I was sitting opposite Kathleen in a booth at the Brasserie afterward. Sitting through Winterreise without looking at the texts was my own little way of showing off, if only to myself. There was a time, not so very long ago, when I listened to all of it at least once every day.) That someone was sometime fellow blogger Aaron G—, whom I’ve met here and there over the years, usually in the vicinity of Joe Jervis. Always, in fact, until tonight. It was so super to see Aaron after the concert that I didn’t until just now wonder why I didn’t see him before. Blame my neck, which makes surveying a room so awkward that I resign myself to a regal “stiff necked-ed-ness.”
I haven’t said a word about the loft in which the recital took place, and I’m not going to. It’s because of such scruples that I am not a novelist. I will say that it was sleek and stripped- down and, to my eye, very Sixties, although it’s my impression that neither of my hosts was alive in the Sixties. You could say the same of my place, though, with its eclectic mix of styles from centuries before my appearance on terra firma. (Have I shown you my Ramses II telephone?)
Appearances are deceiving, especially in New York. During my pre-concert pilaster period, I began to overhear a trio of stylish men who were chatting nearby. Had they been standing just a little bit further off, I might have projected all sorts of interesting topics onto their conversation, and wished that I could join it. But when I heard one of the men say that throwing up was the least of his dog’s problems, and that his boyfriend (not the dog’s) was convinced that too much water was being added to the pet’s dried food — well, I’m sure that they were three perfectly nice men, but talking about dogs, dog food, and dog-do has no place in my reveries of sophisticated New York evenings.
I got a nice chuckle out of it, though.