Radio City Christmas 75

As we approach the Christmas season, what can be more festive than an afternoon with the Radio City Music Hall Rockettes and their Christmas Spectacular show?

All I can say is "wow."

What's more exciting, this is the 75th anniversary of the very first annual Christmas show, so I think they made it a little extra-special spectacular this year. It must be exhausting to be a Rockette, since they do a minimum of three shows a day to as many as five, from mid-November through New Years. I'm sure they must be double cast, but still, dancing more than one 90-minute show per day, every day, would be a challenge!



The show is in the beautiful and spectacular Radio City Music Hall, a gem of American Modernist architecture from the 1930s. The stage is huge at over 100 feet wide, there are three balconies, and the auditorium is said to be the largest indoor theater in the world, seating a little over 6,000. And, Ian and my seats were perfect Wednesday afternoon, just a little to the left of center in the middle of the orchestra seating, giving us wonderful views of the full stage.

Before and after the show, organists at huge organ consoles along the side walls flanking the stage played duet holiday music on the enormous "Mighty Wurlitzer" theater organ. I was kind of amused to see the organists' shoes spiked with bands of rhinestones to catch the spotlights as they played and moved their feet.

There's a beautiful, three-story-tall, crystal Christmas tree in the soaring lobby of the music hall, and there are all kinds of souvenirs for the show and for the Rockettes. They sold cocktails with glowstick stirrers, and I was surprised that they allowed drinks and food in the auditorium (especially those $10 little bags of cotton candy being sold to the kids—who'll clean up the mess?).

But, on to the show! I wish I could have taken some pictures for you, but photography was prohibited, of course. Plus, there was no way to adequately capture everything that was happening to give you any kind of idea of the great pageantry and the scale or scope of this event.

They opened with the Rockettes dressed as reindeer at the North Pole, ultimately doing their signature kickline. Throughout the show, the precision and perfectly, perfectly straight dance lines of the Rockettes just astounded me. Even the military marching in formation doesn't get lines like these.

After we meet Santa Claus, he decides to go to New York City and instructs the audience to put on their 3-D glasses to come along for the voyage. A special screen drops down over the front of the stage, and we all go on a special effects animated tour across the tundra, through the skies, and up and down the narrow streets of New York with all the amazement and wonder that 3-D can bring!

The show is a series of a dozen "scenes" starring the Rockettes and with a cast of singer-actors to help maintain continuity while the dancers change costumes and prepare for the next scene. Some of the scenes were absolutely magical. We got a holiday tour of downtown Manhattan with the Rockettes on a real double-decker bus that drove around the stage and with an actual ice skating rink and skaters that came up from the stage traps. There was an abridged version of The Nutcracker with a young girl ballerina as Clara, and her magical nutcrackers and characters were all danced en pointe by bears, including some pandas for the Chinese dance and a particularly large and divaesque bear as the Sugar Plum Fairy. The parade of the wooden soldiers marched forth (this was only the 74th year for them!). There's a nativity scene with a couple of live camels and a donkey and a flown angel with big, flapping wings.

One of the most amazing technical accomplishments of this show happened to be the backdrops for each of the scenes. There was one for the whole show: an enormous high definition flat panel television screen! The colors just popped from that HD TV and it allowed for all kinds of animation and film special effects. They did a lot of lighting and projection, too, making use of the entire auditorium and the walls and ceilings of the auditorium. Also, at one point, when Santa is demonstrating his magic to convince a skeptical fourteen-year-old that he really exists, he makes it snow on stage.....well, I've done enough shows to know how the stagehands do stage snow.....but this Santa was especially magic, because not only did he make it snow on stage, he made it snow out in the house! Several snowflakes hit me, and they were real snow!

The Radio City Music Hall Rockettes Christmas Spectacular is an American treasure. I wish everyone could make the pilgrimage to New York at least once in their lifetime to see this show—it's well worth the trip!

Strike's over

Just in from New York City and I'm glad to see my trip was successful!

As we were walking around Times Square and the theater district around Broadway this evening, I told three or four lines of stagehands picketers to get back to work. Apparently, they listened to me, since when I got home, I found the news of a union compromise and settlement.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/29/theater/29broadway.html?_r=1&ex=1354078800&en=4e599847fe223a8a&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&oref=slogin

Now, you all can go to Broadway and see a show. You needn't thank me. The smiles of happy little children is all the thanks I need.

Mélange des danses

It's always interesting how Washington, D.C., has a way of helping people see just how small the world is.

I was born in a town back in Oklahoma that straddles the border between the Osage Indian Nation and the Cherokee Indian Nation. For several years, I lived out in the country on the Osage, and I love going to the annual Osage religious ceremonial dances in the summer. Well, the Osages have three beloved women—all in their 80s now—who were internationally famous ballerinas. One of those Osage ballerinas is Maria Tallchief, the first prima ballerina of the New York City Ballet, the country's preeminent ballet company. During her reign there, she fell in love with and married George Balanchine, one of the most famous ballet choreographers of the 20th century who was also the founder and director of NYCB.

Balanchine, as much as his name is spoken of in awe in ballet circles, had this bad habit of falling in love with his latest beautiful and talented ballerina and then creating his best work for them. His marriage to Maria only lasted about five or six years, and she ended up leaving NYCB because of another beautiful and talented ballerina who joined NYCB in 1961, Suzanne Farrell. Well, he fell in love with her, but Miss Farrell ended up marrying another dancer because Balanchine was married to yet another ballerina at the time; I think it's probably the fact that she was never an ex-wife that allowed Farrell to maintain her close friendship and association with Balanchine. She had a long, distinguished, international career through NYCB, and dozens of major works were created and choreographed specifically for her. At his death, he willed her the rights to the choreography of several of his great works, and she has since worked with the George Balanchine Trust.

Then, in 2000, Farrell formally created the Suzanne Farrell Ballet, the resident ballet company of the Kennedy Center in Washington. We went to one of their dance concerts last night at the Kennedy Center, a dance concert that was based entirely on the works of George Balanchine. And hence we come full circle to see the small world.

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It was an interesting concert, to say the least. They presented five ballets in three acts.

The evening opened with Bugaku, a stylized representation of a Japanese marriage. Some very unusual music by Toshiro Mayuzumi made up the accompaniment, played by the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra with Ron Matson conducting. Mayuzumi was a fan of blending the avant garde of modern 20th century music with Japanese sensibilities.

The set was a striking three-sided rectangular, red barre with Japanese architectural lines that was suspended by thick ropes. Costumes were gauzy white overlays that trailed behind both male and female dancers as they moved. In the short first scene, the women wore classical tutus such as the one in the photograph that graces the cover of this month's Kennedy Center Playbill.

The dance was rather slow, with movements and postures designed to evoke Japanese theater and geisha traditions. At times, that stylized movement seemed almost robotic to me.

In act 2, they opened with Ballade, set to the music of Gabriel Fauré with a very romantic piano and orchestra score. This ballet featured their up and coming star ballerina Bonnie Pickard, partnered with principal Runqiao Du (who we would later see in the fourth ballet pas de deux). The company danced on a bare stage with only a cyclorama backdrop illuminated in midnight blue.

The third ballet was my favorite of the evening. Pithoprakta is a starkly modern study in binary black and white, complete with black and white costumes and a large backdrop with mathematical numbers and a graph. Music was by 20th century Greek composer Iannis Xenakis, from his work Pithoprakta. Xenakis originally trained and worked as an architect before turning to musical composition, and that mathematical nature can be heard in his music; this work has a lot of random plucked notes and is freeform, even for modernism. The dancers were very angular in their movements and much of the company rolled around a lot on the floor. We particularly noticed featured dancer, soloist Matthew Prescott, who's a tall, tossled-headed blond man who was required to dance a very physical performance.

Tchaikovsky's Meditation, Op. 42, from his Souvenir d'un Lieu Cher provided the backdrop for the fourth ballet and opening of the third act, Meditation, a simple pas de deux for principals Du and Natalia Magnicaballi. This was one of those ballets that Balenchine created especially for Farrell. While I think the focus was to be on the male dancer, the real work and choreography was all with the female dancer. They also danced to a bare stage, and Du was costumed in street clothes and Magnicaballi was in a simple, unadorned, romantic tutu.

The final work of the evening used Arnold Schoenberg's orchestration of Johannes Brahms' Piano Quartet No. 1 in G minor, Op. 25, as the background for a ballet called, simply, Fourth Movement of Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet. This was their big company finale number, starring Miss Pickard and Bulgarian principal dancer Momchil Mladenov. It seems to have been inspired by Eastern European folk dance, and the costumes had a Hungarian look to them. Mladenov was the first male dancer of the evening to have any particularly challenging choreography, and Pickard was very well received with her dancing en pointe.

We sat in an interesting location on the third row of the opera house in the center of the left side orchestra section. We were surrounded by a bunch of balletomanes who knew dance and had definite opinions. There was a very elderly couple to my right who shared many of my thoughts and opinions, while a man in front of me was incredulous that I liked the third ballet better than the first. I also ran into someone on the first row who was recruiting me to work again with the Kirov Ballet when they come back to Washington in January, and then he looked at me and queried, "Have you gained weight?" Not wanting to admit it, I blamed it on my sweater.....you know how sweaters can make you look bigger....it's true! Really! However, if I'm going to try to dance again, I'm going to have to go on a massive weight loss campaign between now and then, since even the last time I danced, I was too heavy, and my feet and knees were killing me!

Anyway, it's nice to see someone working on preserving the Balanchine choreography. The women were all fine technical dancers, though none of them had me enraptured (that's hard to do, though, with these short ballets—you need a full-length production to develop the character). I was, though, a bit disappointed with the men, though disappointed is probably too strong a word and it really wasn't their fault.

Farrell certainly does not expect much from her men. Most of the time, she just has her men moving in rhythm, promenading, and partnering (lifting the girls). In the second ballet, the guy had one little sauté (small leap), and in the fifth, the danseur did some entrechats (jump with feet beating the air), and some single tours en l'air (spin in the air) and pirouettes, but not a single grand jeté (splits in mid-air) and not even any real tours chaînés déboulés. There were no "star" moments for the men.

I was trying to explain this to Ryan (who'd never before seen live ballet) using ice skating analogies. You know how when you watch those Olympic competitions and the really really top skaters do a "triple lutz" or a "triple toe loop," and if something goes wrong and the skater only does a double—or, heaven forbid, a single!—the commentators just jump all over it? That's how I felt with the men's dance performances, except they weren't scripted to do anything but singles, and very few of those to begin with.

The ballerinas, though, had plenty to do, and I'd imagine that Farrell—having been an international star herself—is very demanding with them. They, at least, got the opportunity to shine and display their grace, strength, and balance.

While I tend to prefer full-length productions, it will be interesting to watch the Suzanne Farrell Ballet, and I'm sure I'll be going to many of their concerts in the future.

Starting the Christmas onslaught

Every year in Washington, there are dozens of productions of The Nutcracker, A Christmas Carol, The Messiah, and all kinds of Christmas shows and concerts. We had our first exposure to the annual onslaught last night when Ryan and I ventured down to the Anacostia waterfront to attend a new reimagination of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol at the Arena Stage called Christmas Carol 1941. This new play, commissioned by Arena Stage, is by James Magruder with new original songs by Henry Krieger and Susan Birkenhead, and had its world premiere just last Friday.

Christmas Carol 1941 is set on Christmas Eve 1941 in Washington, D.C. Ebenezer Scrooge is now known as businessman Elijah Strube and Bob Cratchit is Henry Schroen, his typist. There's no Tiny Tim, just Schroen's son Butch, a seventeen-year-old anxious to enlist and go off to war. Partner Marley is burdened with chains made of Washington paperwork. And, instead of the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, the visions are led by famous D.C. statues come to life: Winged Victory from the First Division Army monument near the White House, Freedom from the top of the Capitol dome, and Grief from the Adams Memorial in Rock Creek Cemetery.

The reimagination is an interesting idea, but the playwright sorely needs an editor! I know that Dickens was known for being long-winded, but his play flowed and his wordiness always contributed to the plot; Magruder's play is often pedantic with obscure American history lessons. There are many long speeches that could use focus and major pruning, and the banter between Strube and the statues just didn't do it for me. I also felt we were being mauled with pro-war patriotism and 1940s morality lessons, things that were probably common in the '40s, but they could have been less heavy-handed.

On the bright side, the ensemble cast was good and the technical achievements with sets, lights, tech, and so forth were phenomenal! The music—by the same guy who wrote Dreamgirls—isn't really that memorable, but the USO scene is sweet and the song is toe-tapping fun in the big band style.

The Arena Stage's Fichhandler Theater is a square theater-in-the-round and a surprisingly fine facility. I don't know if this is normal or if it's a set built just for this show, but the stage was a two level construction. The upper platform had two trap doors that were frequently and skillfully used for set changes. The lower level had compartments that went under the upper level for both set changes and character entrances. Characters also entered from the house aisles at each of the four corners of the square. A raisable platform on two pillars was used for Strube and the statues to "fly" over D.C. to see and watch the scenes from above.

The lighting design for this show is excellent and demanding. Occasionally, characters would be listening to a radio address from Franklin Roosevelt or Winston Churchill, and Roosevelt's or Churchill's face would be projected on the stage floor. During some of the nightmares and moments of turmoil, ledger numbers flashed on stage. Mood lighting—always a challenge in the round—and character spotting were both great.

Christmas Carol 1941 runs through New Year's Eve, so there are plenty of chances to go see it. The reimagination is different, but the show was entertaining, and Ryan loved it. And, I think that there's a good chance it could become an excellent play as the playwright tightens and trims the dialogue, tweaking it as most new works are, and it might even get some productions in the future outside of the D.C. area. It will be interesting to watch its evolution.

Russian cello

Last Friday night's Kennedy Center expedition was to hear the National Symphony Orchestra play one of its tribute concerts for its late conductor laureate, Mstislav Rostropovich, who led the orchestra from 1977 to 1994 and who died earlier this year. The first time I ever heard the NSO when I was first at Georgetown in 1978, Rostropovich was on the podium.

The main feature of the concert was Dmitri Shostakovich's Cello Concerto No. 1 in E-flat Major, Op. 107, a work that was actually composed in 1959 specifically for Rostropovich to play. Heinrich Schiff played the work. Schiff is an older man with an unruly shock of long white hair who has an interesting way of draping himself over his cello when he plays.

The concerto is a difficult, virtuosic work. I happened to like it, as well as the performance, though I don't think the other three guys in my group appreciated it.

We had good seats down front that gave us a fine view of Schiff and his cello, so we could actually see his fingering. We also got to watch guest conductor Roberto Minczuk, who seemed fairly standard in his conducting. He was wearing a black bow tie and cummerbund with his tail coat instead of the standard white piqué bow tie and waistcoat, so he kept reminding me of a waiter.

The second half of the concert was devoted to Rimsky-Korsakov's famous tone poem Scheherazade, Op. 35. It's often loud and brassy, so the other guys liked it a lot. I was less than excited about sitting through it, since this is one of those "old war horse" piece I've heard at children's concerts all my life, and it regularly gets in the rotation on classical radio stations. But, I actually heard some new colors in the work, since we were sitting right by the orchestra, so the brass was right there without being blended into the background by some sound engineer. One thing about Rimsky-Korsakov, he certainly was a master of orchestration.

The first work of the evening was a rather odd Homenaje a Federico García Lorca by early 20th century Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas. It's a short piece—about ten minutes—in three movements for a tiny orchestra, but it all had this odd, bright, unfinished sound to it, and it wasn't my favorite.

Time warping from the '50s

Illegal immigration. Homosexuality. Incest. Jealousy.

What is this, a discussion of 2008 presidential candidate speeches?

No, these were the issues last night when Washington National Opera plunged a full house at the Kennedy Center Opera House into the dark, gritty 1950s for its penultimate performance of A View from the Bridge.

Opera mirrors the hot topics of the day. A View from the Bridge, though, isn't a 2007 composition. William Bolcom composed the music in the mid-1990s, but, even then, this wasn't new stuff. The source of these "current," angstful issues is actually half a century old, as Bolcom based his work on the 1955 play by Arthur Miller.

WNO mounted a gripping production. Starring University of Oklahoma voice professor Kim Josephson as longshoreman Eddie Carbone and legendary soprano Catherine Malfitano as Eddie's wife, Beatrice, an excellent cast gave the audience a glimpse of 1950s culture in the working class Italian neighborhoods of Brooklyn, New York. Josephson and Malfitano created their roles in the opera's 1999 Chicago premiere, previously reprising them at the Metropolitan Opera in New York a couple of years ago, along with their original cast member Gregory Turay, who sings Rodolfo, Beatrice's cousin from Sicily. Rounding out the lead cast are Christine Brandes as Catherine, Beatrice's niece; John Del Carlo as narrator and lawyer Alfieri, and Richard Bernstein as cousin Marco.

Since I just got my ticket rather unexpectedly yesterday morning, I hadn't done my homework and learned who was in the cast, so finding Josephson, Malfitano, and Bernstein on the roster was a pleasant surprise. Josephson has a little ranch near Vinita, Oklahoma, about an hour from my parents' home (and about an hour from 's ancestral home, too), and I haven't heard him sing since an Il Trovatore with Tulsa Opera a few years ago. This was my first time to hear Richard Bernstein in person, and I'd been very interested in his sound, since he was the subject of so many feature articles about his athleticism and muscular body during the "opera beefcake" era of the late 1990s and early 2000s. And Catherine Malfitano.... wow.... what can one say about being in The Presence?

You know, Miss Malfitano will probably laugh, but my one criticism of her performance in this opera is that she looked and sounded too young for the part. Well, the character Beatrice is probably 40-something, and Miss Malfitano celebrated earlier this year her 60th birthday!

The primary tension in this opera is the relationship between Eddie and his niece, Catherine, whom he has raised since she was orphaned as a baby. He is overprotective and he loves her, though that love begins to take on a more sinister note as the young woman begins dating Rodolfo. It was difficult to judge Miss Brandes' performance as Catherine, since the musical line she had to sing was not terribly sympathetic. Whether the music or the casting decision, though, I never had an impression of innocence or youth, and Miss Brandes always sounded like a mature woman rather than the seventeen-year-old that Catherine is supposed to be.

The operatic love triangle came with Mr. Turay and his Rodolfo, an incredibly challenging role with a high tenor tessitura. In fact, in one line of the opera as Eddie criticizes Rodolfo, he says, "Sometimes he hits a note so high, you stop looking for him, and start looking for her." Turay has a tightly wound spinto voice with a highly pressured sound. He had a difficult character to portray, being not only a lover of singing, but having to dance on stage, and Rodolfo was also known to be good at cooking and at sewing dresses. The script rather heavy-handedly hinted at his potential homosexuality (though he certainly seemed appropriately romantic with Catherine), and Eddie opined that Rodolfo's only love interest in Catherine was so he could get married and become a legal American citizen. Two of Turay's solos (I hesitate to use the traditional term, "aria") garnered applause from the audience.

The "bridge" in the opera's title is the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City that links Manhattan to the southern portion of Brooklyn, overlooking where the opera is set. I presume the "viewing from the bridge" was being done by the lawyer Alfieri, who narrates the tale as an historical report. The stage design is starkly simple with industrial elements evoking the steelwork of a bridge. Projection screens along the back and sides show various old black and white photographs of New York. An area stage right includes the small Carbone home and stage left is an all-purpose area for the docks, the streets, and the lawyer's office. Raked ramps on the sides and back are often filled with members of the chorus, all dressed in dark, working class, period costumes. A scrim downstage serves as the main curtain for the stage; a small piece of scrim material hung obliquely over the "home" area and is used to receive a "shadow" of the lawyer's office door wording during those scenes where he is singing.

Dramatically, the opera is intense, emotional, and highly successful. Musically, though, I found it tedious.

Over the years, I've had the privilege to sing several opera premieres and to visit with the composers about their work. Many times, they write some beautiful, lyrical arias for the principal characters, and fill the rest of the score with typical modern opera atonality, dissonance, and cacophony. When I ask them if they really like that, if that is the music that sings in their hearts, every single composer has told me, "No." They all have said that they have to do that to be "taken seriously" and not considered "old-fashioned" by the musical academics who inform the critics what they should think of new compositions. Therein lies the problem for View. Composer Bolcom is a college professor—one of those "academics" who enforce the rules against melody and pretty music. He has no fear herein that his colleagues will accuse him of being old-fashioned!

The musical score for View is a stereotype of late 20th century opera modernism. The singers are forced to sing harsh, awkward intervals that bounce all around, back and forth, high to low, with no beauty to the musical line. Only Rodolfo and Marco had solos allowing the audience to applaud, and neither Beatrice nor Catherine had solo moments with any lyricality to show off their vocal talents. And how can Catherine sing beautifully of young love when her score has her braying like a mule? Meanwhile, the orchestral accompaniment chugs along with all kinds of atonal noise that bears little if any resemblance to the tunes being sung on stage, or even to the emotions being portrayed. Bolcom seems to favor a lot of minor second clusters. A lot. This, unfortunately, is "academic modern opera" at its height, and I can only say that I did not leave the theater humming a little tune.

Nevertheless, View is a powerful opera. I'm glad I went. Josephson, Malfitano, and Turay all offer noteworthy performances. There's one remaining performance in Washington, so grab a ticket if you can find one.

Opera tonight?

I'm going to the opera (A View from the Bridge) at the Kennedy Center tonight all by myself. Is anybody else going? I'd love to get together for a cocktail or something at the intermission. My ticket is H 12, orchestra right. Lemme know!

I'm really excited to be going to Washington National Opera tonight. Their tickets are so dreadfully expensive (orchestra seats can be as much as $220 for a non-gala performance!), that I seldom go unless I know people in the cast, or the opera is unusual or a new work, as is the case tonight.

This particular new opera is based on the play by Arthur Miller. Miller, who was formerly married to Marilyn Monroe, also wrote the play, The Crucible, and I've previously sung the opera (music by Robert Ward) based on it. The music tonight is by a guy called William Bolcom, who is a pianist and composer on faculty at the University of Michigan. He received the commission for this work from Lyric Opera of Chicago, where it premiered in 1999 to great critical and popular acclaim. While he's written a lot of stuff, I don't recall ever having heard any of it before, and Bridge is his most famous oeuvre. So, it should be a very, very interesting evening.

All Beethoven, all the time

The National Symphony Orchestra is playing an all-Beethoven concert this weekend in their classics series, featuring the young violinist Nikolaj Znaider as soloist. Our little gang went last night. I never get tickets in the same spot in the house, so this time we all sat on the very first row right in front of the first violins. This ended up being quite the interesting place to sit and watch, especially to observe principal guest conductor (who becomes the principal conductor next fall) Iván Fischer on the podium, and we were perfectly positioned to see the violinist's fingering and hear his fingers thumping on his instrument.

The highlight of the evening was the famous Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67, the one with the "da da da dahhhhhhh" opening motif. Maestro Fischer took the first movement at a frightening brisk tempo, then in the final movement he was again so fast I remember thinking to myself how I was glad I wasn't having to try to play a piano reduction! In the first movement, the horns were right on the mark and in the whole symphony, the cellos got quite the workout. The audience rewarded the symphony (and the end of the concert) with a standing ovation and three curtain calls.

The first half featured Znaider in the Concerto in D Major for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 61, and he was well received by the audience. He played passionately, sometimes almost violently on his 1704 Stradivarius. I was in just the right position in the house that, when Znaider was turning to watch the concertmistress at key times, he started looking right at me! For those of you who've never performed on a large stage, the lights blazing on the stage generally make all but the first two rows or so of the house a big, black hole. Some performers need the feedback and support of their audience, so they play/sing to some of the people they can actually see, and I guess I got picked for that task last night.

Znaider is a handsome thirty-year-old who is tall with an athletic build and a shock of curly, brown hair. He chose to wear, however, some sort of hideous European-styled black frock coat with four buttoned buttons, no lapels (they were so obviously missing they almost looked cut away), and a turned up collar that looked way too small for him (but that is the current "modern" European fashion), paired with a white, wide-banded collar shirt worn open at the neck. The coat had a bright red lining and he sported a matching red pocket square; his cuffs were fastened with gold square cufflinks bordered with black onyx.

Each half of the concert opened with an overture, first the one to Egmont, Op. 84, and second the one to Coriolan, Op. 62.

Earlier I mentioned watching Mo. FIscher conduct. It was actually both surprising and entertaining. He's a very active and dynamic conductor, but what most caught my attention was the degree of noise he makes. He made all kinds of breathing and whooshing sounds, even growling a couple of times, to help him punctuate his direction. And, he managed to get a pretty good sound out of the orchestra, though there were at least three times when I heard unexpected wrong notes pop up from somewhere in the orchestra.

I was pleased to note that Mo. Fischer was properly attired in white tie and tails, unlike Mo. Leonard Slatkin, who never seems to dress correctly. Being on the first row also gave me a chance to look in detail at the orchestra members, and I noted an interesting thing: the men who wore wing-collar shirts (the proper shirt for white tie) also wore black patent leather shoes (the proper shoes for a tail coat), while men in regular pointed collars wore more casual black leather shoes.

Twas a lovely evening with a packed house and music that was 200 years old, yet refreshing and inspirational to us all.