Sunday, July 21, 2013
Tanglewood/Shakespeare/Kindel Inn/
We had quite a Saturday with Eddie and Cara. First, we went up for a rehearsal at Tanglewood. We can buy tickets now to the rehearsals. It is a fine idea someone had of increasing revenue. Sure, sometimes the music is stopped and replayed, but generally this is a very late rehearsal and things just go along as planned.
Classical music does not speak to me. My ear is not sophisticated enough to hear what other people hear. Eddie and Cara could actually hear when the performers hit the wrong notes or were off a bit or could note that without a mike the flutes were hard to hear when they came into one number.
Still, I enjoyed the experience.
I do admit that I drift off sometimes, letting the music be a backdrop to my thoughts. And, yeah, okay, in the last piece I did fall off to sleep, but not for very long.
I liked it best when Amanda Forsyth played cello with Pinchas Zukerman on violin. Here I had two chances to hear the music, first when the violin played it and then when the cello returned it. It sounded like a jazz rift, and the other instruments were more like back up that perhaps did not require as much of my attention. At least that was my uneducated experience.
This was Amanda's debut performance with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. She has played all over the world.
(note :"debut performance" is the kind of Tanglewood term that we would not hear on Prairie Home Companion when Garrison interviews guest performers playing for the first time on his stage.)
The Baroque music was Vivaldi, Back, and Teleman. Many in the audience knew these pieces well as they were first created and performed when they were still in their teenaged years.
I could not help, but think of the Seinfeld bit I read in my new book,
I never really understood the importance of the conductor. I mean between you and me, what the hell is this guy doing? Do you really need somebody waving a stick in your face to play the violin, does that really help you out? I can see how we need him at the beginning, okay, tap tap tap, start! I can see how you need that. But once we're going, once it's all happening... what, what do we need him for then?
Pinchas Zukerman is the conductor and he also plays violin and viola.
Eddie thought that Pinchas was just arrogant and that he could not possibly do the conductor's job well and play well on the violin also. However, the has been around a few decades, so I guess he must be doing something right. Either than or the folks who keep hiring him must have read the Seinfelt.
Still, all I can do is guess. This is another bit I just can't judge. What do I know?
But I was chuckling, remembering the Seinfeld while Zuckerman conducted and played his violin.
I was also amazed that he could keep the violin tucked in under his chin while he used his hands for other things and the instrument just stayed there. Eddie said that it was all just the pressure of his chin and shoulder. There was no little helpful clamp or superglue.
It also helped my enjoyment helped that the cellist was a perky and very pretty young blond who engaged the audience with smiles. I admit that I enjoy a good looking woman on stage. Or in the audience.
This audience did not include many pretty girls. Some of them had certainly been pretty girls once, when they had dreamed of dating Tellemann, but those days had passed.
I could not tell really if the audience smiled back at Amanda. Somehow I doubt it. There may have been a few who even snuffed a bit at her smiles and wondered, "Why is this little comeuppance being so informal?"
Part of my discomfort at classical music events is I don't yet altogether feel comfortable with the aloof upper class. I always keep wondering how a kid from the Eastside of Buffalo has gotten himself emersed in this crowd, and if I shouldn't just look for where to take the bus home again.
In the winter in Florida we carry our folding chairs and listen to a day of folksy bluegrass in one field or another, usually with Chuck Mary and John.
I can hear the bluegrass and it is quite common for performers to smile and joke with the audience.
There is often a leader, but he does nothing with a stick and is not needed for very long.
The contrast in audiences is stark.
Were a pretty, perky girl to smile at any point at anyone in the bluegrass concert, she might end up in a conversation where someone, learning where she was from, might ask her if she new their cousin so and so.
Few smiled at this concert and no one talked out loud. It must me a rule that reserved people don't smile. I'd sometimes make eye contact walking the paths, nod my head a bit in greeting, and be completely ignored. Few of the men looked very happy. I imagined their stock market holdings had tanked that day.
Even the usher who seated us was a bit gruff rather then friendly and not a bit subservient as some ushers are, almost as if to say, "Look, I've volunteered for this, but don't for a moment expect that I am comfortable serving anyone and I'm am not going to be friendly. Just think of my ushering as a business and I am the business manager. Just go where I tell you and go quickly. I volunteer because they need someone to do this menial task of getting people who can't seem to read a ticket to the correct seats. So, go, and let me get on with it."
Elizabeth was denied reentry to the tent when she came back late from the intermission bathroom break. We had moved from our fine, up front seats to the back in order to stretch out a bit and get a little breeze. And she pointed to where I sat guarding her purse, showing that her movement to that section did not pass another single listener and would be no disruption to anything because it was so removed from any other paying audience member. It did no good. He refused to let her enter.
She worked her way down the outside of the rope, listening, and stood just next to a seated woman listener for a long while with just the rope between them. Finally, the woman, who probably had mistaken this concert for bluegrass, motioned her to come in under the rope and sit down.
Elizabeth explained that she was told she could not do that, and the woman basically said, "Pshaw!" don't listen to those people, just come in." She did not say that the fellow at the rope gate might be a business manager, but she served on the board, but it was implied in her Pshaw!
And so Elizabeth slipped under the rope and gave the woman a bit of a hug for thanks which says a bit about Elizabeth's lack of upper crust reserve. And at the first break in the music she came back and sat with me and her purse.
No one chased her.
In Vegas not following the rules of the ushers might result in being 86ed, but here the overriding rule of reserve precluded any show of actual authority. I'm sure the guard saw her get in and expect he was fuming for the rest of the day, but he declined to make a scene.
One thing has changed, however, and that is that the upper crust no longer turns their noses up their inferiors. They all have smart phones, and it is hard to constantly check their stock prices without lowering their noses a bit.
Now, when I said no one said anything out loud, I did not mean in the seats directly around me. There is clearly a plot at any venue that requires quiet attention: movie, concert, speech. Whoever assigns seats, sits the folks who are going to talk right near my seat.
As soon as the show starts these folks being to talk. The talkers know that what the performers say is really secondary to the thoughts they need to say and that since many of them are as old as Vivaldi, if they refrain from making comments and explanations and even arguments, they will forget their most important reflections.
I always want to say, "Shut the f**k up and go put all that driven in your blog."
But generally, I am quiet.
Besides f**k would not be good vocabulary.
"Kindly refrain from talking." might work.
Here there were a few people who gave "the look" and shut down the conversation. To do this you have to have developed from practice a certain disdain in just a look. Perhaps this is what the old men are practicing on the path the restroom when I nod. They there was one woman who tapped her finger against her lips.
In some of the music venues I attend this might be misinterpreted as asking if the talker had an extra cigarette, but here the talkers seemed to get the right idea which was, if translated,
"Shut the f**k up!"
************************************************************************
After the concert we went into the crowded town for a bite of food at a place that did not have air conditioning. The food was fine, but I got uncomfortably hot again.
At the Shakespeare, however, the air conditioning worked so well that the bar in front of my seat was like an ice cube and I leaned on it and enjoyed it very much.
I had to sit back in my chair during the performance because our seats were right there at the stage left entrance and actors came within inches of us when they entered and exited. I might have bumped them had I leaned too far forward. I've never been so close to the action before. Great seats! It was a good bit of fun.
I should have read a review of the play.
Love's Labour's Lost
I thought I'd remember it from my college Shakespeare courses, but I did not. I was a bit confused in the first half. The second half, however, was easy to follow with good humor, plenty of action, some fine lines I wanted to remember and cannot, and fine little songs from the 1940's, the time chosen for the setting, Paper Moon being the only one I can remember.
Shakespeare is often set in a different time. I once took my Harriet Gibbons students to a MacBeth which was set in the future where the characters used ray guns and one of my favorite productions was Midsummer Night's Dream set in Gainsborough times.
Aparently, this setting of Love's Labour's Lost in the 1940's is common. I thought it worked fine.
I certainly enjoyed it.
Here is a review. Very good photos. Not altogether favorable, especially comments on the 1940's setting. I liked the setting too, however.
http://berkshireonstage.com/2013/07/01/review-shakespeare-company-offers-rarely-seen-loves-labours-lost/
Interesting selection of quotations. Not the ones I hoped to remember.
http://www.shakespeare-online.com/quotes/lllquotes.html
The central dilemma, whether to keep at the books or be drawn into the joy of women, is an issue college men face even today. I remember that well. Now, it is the poker taking me from my studies. It is sad to get old.
**************************************************************************************************
From there we went for a fancy supper at the Kemble Inn's Table 6 restaurant, chosen because it was one of the few with open reservations, being fairly newly refurbished, renamed, and opened.
http://www.kembleinn.com/dining
I don't think we will be staying there any time soon. The prices are just incredible.
But we could afford to eat there, especially choosing the prix fix menu and everything was very good. Oddly, part of the game hen meal was a cold salad of potato and vegetable. Elizabeth sent hers back to be reheated and liked it better hot.
I was off the regimen of my diet most of the day but not overdoing it.
We had a fine Portobello dish with a deep fried Portobello. It was rich and decadent. I even had a nice dessert.
Elizabeth enjoyed the meal but thought it was overpriced for what we had.
It was pretty expensive.
I still have this cold with chest congestion and it makes me very uncomfortable, but I managed the day anyway and managed to refrain from coughing during the classical music. The foot gives me no problems and slowly over the next month I should be able to get that healed up.
Classical music does not speak to me. My ear is not sophisticated enough to hear what other people hear. Eddie and Cara could actually hear when the performers hit the wrong notes or were off a bit or could note that without a mike the flutes were hard to hear when they came into one number.
Still, I enjoyed the experience.
I do admit that I drift off sometimes, letting the music be a backdrop to my thoughts. And, yeah, okay, in the last piece I did fall off to sleep, but not for very long.
I liked it best when Amanda Forsyth played cello with Pinchas Zukerman on violin. Here I had two chances to hear the music, first when the violin played it and then when the cello returned it. It sounded like a jazz rift, and the other instruments were more like back up that perhaps did not require as much of my attention. At least that was my uneducated experience.
This was Amanda's debut performance with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. She has played all over the world.
(note :"debut performance" is the kind of Tanglewood term that we would not hear on Prairie Home Companion when Garrison interviews guest performers playing for the first time on his stage.)
The Baroque music was Vivaldi, Back, and Teleman. Many in the audience knew these pieces well as they were first created and performed when they were still in their teenaged years.
I could not help, but think of the Seinfeld bit I read in my new book,
I never really understood the importance of the conductor. I mean between you and me, what the hell is this guy doing? Do you really need somebody waving a stick in your face to play the violin, does that really help you out? I can see how we need him at the beginning, okay, tap tap tap, start! I can see how you need that. But once we're going, once it's all happening... what, what do we need him for then?
Pinchas Zukerman is the conductor and he also plays violin and viola.
Eddie thought that Pinchas was just arrogant and that he could not possibly do the conductor's job well and play well on the violin also. However, the has been around a few decades, so I guess he must be doing something right. Either than or the folks who keep hiring him must have read the Seinfelt.
Still, all I can do is guess. This is another bit I just can't judge. What do I know?
But I was chuckling, remembering the Seinfeld while Zuckerman conducted and played his violin.
I was also amazed that he could keep the violin tucked in under his chin while he used his hands for other things and the instrument just stayed there. Eddie said that it was all just the pressure of his chin and shoulder. There was no little helpful clamp or superglue.
It also helped my enjoyment helped that the cellist was a perky and very pretty young blond who engaged the audience with smiles. I admit that I enjoy a good looking woman on stage. Or in the audience.
This audience did not include many pretty girls. Some of them had certainly been pretty girls once, when they had dreamed of dating Tellemann, but those days had passed.
I could not tell really if the audience smiled back at Amanda. Somehow I doubt it. There may have been a few who even snuffed a bit at her smiles and wondered, "Why is this little comeuppance being so informal?"
Part of my discomfort at classical music events is I don't yet altogether feel comfortable with the aloof upper class. I always keep wondering how a kid from the Eastside of Buffalo has gotten himself emersed in this crowd, and if I shouldn't just look for where to take the bus home again.
In the winter in Florida we carry our folding chairs and listen to a day of folksy bluegrass in one field or another, usually with Chuck Mary and John.
I can hear the bluegrass and it is quite common for performers to smile and joke with the audience.
There is often a leader, but he does nothing with a stick and is not needed for very long.
The contrast in audiences is stark.
Were a pretty, perky girl to smile at any point at anyone in the bluegrass concert, she might end up in a conversation where someone, learning where she was from, might ask her if she new their cousin so and so.
Few smiled at this concert and no one talked out loud. It must me a rule that reserved people don't smile. I'd sometimes make eye contact walking the paths, nod my head a bit in greeting, and be completely ignored. Few of the men looked very happy. I imagined their stock market holdings had tanked that day.
Even the usher who seated us was a bit gruff rather then friendly and not a bit subservient as some ushers are, almost as if to say, "Look, I've volunteered for this, but don't for a moment expect that I am comfortable serving anyone and I'm am not going to be friendly. Just think of my ushering as a business and I am the business manager. Just go where I tell you and go quickly. I volunteer because they need someone to do this menial task of getting people who can't seem to read a ticket to the correct seats. So, go, and let me get on with it."
Elizabeth was denied reentry to the tent when she came back late from the intermission bathroom break. We had moved from our fine, up front seats to the back in order to stretch out a bit and get a little breeze. And she pointed to where I sat guarding her purse, showing that her movement to that section did not pass another single listener and would be no disruption to anything because it was so removed from any other paying audience member. It did no good. He refused to let her enter.
She worked her way down the outside of the rope, listening, and stood just next to a seated woman listener for a long while with just the rope between them. Finally, the woman, who probably had mistaken this concert for bluegrass, motioned her to come in under the rope and sit down.
Elizabeth explained that she was told she could not do that, and the woman basically said, "Pshaw!" don't listen to those people, just come in." She did not say that the fellow at the rope gate might be a business manager, but she served on the board, but it was implied in her Pshaw!
And so Elizabeth slipped under the rope and gave the woman a bit of a hug for thanks which says a bit about Elizabeth's lack of upper crust reserve. And at the first break in the music she came back and sat with me and her purse.
No one chased her.
In Vegas not following the rules of the ushers might result in being 86ed, but here the overriding rule of reserve precluded any show of actual authority. I'm sure the guard saw her get in and expect he was fuming for the rest of the day, but he declined to make a scene.
One thing has changed, however, and that is that the upper crust no longer turns their noses up their inferiors. They all have smart phones, and it is hard to constantly check their stock prices without lowering their noses a bit.
Now, when I said no one said anything out loud, I did not mean in the seats directly around me. There is clearly a plot at any venue that requires quiet attention: movie, concert, speech. Whoever assigns seats, sits the folks who are going to talk right near my seat.
As soon as the show starts these folks being to talk. The talkers know that what the performers say is really secondary to the thoughts they need to say and that since many of them are as old as Vivaldi, if they refrain from making comments and explanations and even arguments, they will forget their most important reflections.
I always want to say, "Shut the f**k up and go put all that driven in your blog."
But generally, I am quiet.
Besides f**k would not be good vocabulary.
"Kindly refrain from talking." might work.
Here there were a few people who gave "the look" and shut down the conversation. To do this you have to have developed from practice a certain disdain in just a look. Perhaps this is what the old men are practicing on the path the restroom when I nod. They there was one woman who tapped her finger against her lips.
In some of the music venues I attend this might be misinterpreted as asking if the talker had an extra cigarette, but here the talkers seemed to get the right idea which was, if translated,
"Shut the f**k up!"
************************************************************************
After the concert we went into the crowded town for a bite of food at a place that did not have air conditioning. The food was fine, but I got uncomfortably hot again.
At the Shakespeare, however, the air conditioning worked so well that the bar in front of my seat was like an ice cube and I leaned on it and enjoyed it very much.
I had to sit back in my chair during the performance because our seats were right there at the stage left entrance and actors came within inches of us when they entered and exited. I might have bumped them had I leaned too far forward. I've never been so close to the action before. Great seats! It was a good bit of fun.
I should have read a review of the play.
Love's Labour's Lost
I thought I'd remember it from my college Shakespeare courses, but I did not. I was a bit confused in the first half. The second half, however, was easy to follow with good humor, plenty of action, some fine lines I wanted to remember and cannot, and fine little songs from the 1940's, the time chosen for the setting, Paper Moon being the only one I can remember.
Shakespeare is often set in a different time. I once took my Harriet Gibbons students to a MacBeth which was set in the future where the characters used ray guns and one of my favorite productions was Midsummer Night's Dream set in Gainsborough times.
Aparently, this setting of Love's Labour's Lost in the 1940's is common. I thought it worked fine.
I certainly enjoyed it.
Here is a review. Very good photos. Not altogether favorable, especially comments on the 1940's setting. I liked the setting too, however.
http://berkshireonstage.com/2013/07/01/review-shakespeare-company-offers-rarely-seen-loves-labours-lost/
Interesting selection of quotations. Not the ones I hoped to remember.
http://www.shakespeare-online.com/quotes/lllquotes.html
The central dilemma, whether to keep at the books or be drawn into the joy of women, is an issue college men face even today. I remember that well. Now, it is the poker taking me from my studies. It is sad to get old.
**************************************************************************************************
From there we went for a fancy supper at the Kemble Inn's Table 6 restaurant, chosen because it was one of the few with open reservations, being fairly newly refurbished, renamed, and opened.
http://www.kembleinn.com/dining
I don't think we will be staying there any time soon. The prices are just incredible.
But we could afford to eat there, especially choosing the prix fix menu and everything was very good. Oddly, part of the game hen meal was a cold salad of potato and vegetable. Elizabeth sent hers back to be reheated and liked it better hot.
I was off the regimen of my diet most of the day but not overdoing it.
We had a fine Portobello dish with a deep fried Portobello. It was rich and decadent. I even had a nice dessert.
Elizabeth enjoyed the meal but thought it was overpriced for what we had.
It was pretty expensive.
I still have this cold with chest congestion and it makes me very uncomfortable, but I managed the day anyway and managed to refrain from coughing during the classical music. The foot gives me no problems and slowly over the next month I should be able to get that healed up.
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