Disordered thoughts from a life in disorder

As I sit here amongst boxes, papers and oh so many CDs, I thought I'd jot down a few thoughts, before I depart for at least a week of spotty internet access.

• I can only be grateful for Placido Domingo. Period. He is certainly not perfect and I've heard an occasional spotty performance from him, but for someone to maintain his level of achievment for this many years is remarkable. The Proms Walküre is just the latest. Although the performance may not be as great as the one I heard at the Met this spring (he was in slightly fresher voice), it is still pretty fabulous. And with a slight caveat, the performers in London are on a higher level than those in New York. I have a preference for Dalayman over Meier as Sieglinde and Gergiev's first act surpassed all others in my experience, but Terfel is a vast improvement over Kit as Wotan and a good first stab that will only get better. Gert has documented this well on her blog (which freed from my prior employer's firewall, I can now read more regularly).


• I belatedly note with sadness the passing of Piero Capuccilli. I never saw him live (he avoided NY after an initial Met appearance), but certainly his recordings of Macbeth and above all Simon Boccanegra, under Abbado are benchmarks. He was certainly not as individual as Gobbi or as wonderfully endowed as Bastianini, but he held up the baritone end of performancees with honor and there are few (if any) like him today


• The controversy over Marin Alsop in Baltimore is sad. She is certainly a very capable musician and I find it hard to understand the fuss. Let's hope she and the orchestra make peace and beautiful music.

Separation pains

I'm convinced that moving is the least fun you can have in life. There is always a lot to do, usually involving hard work and great inconvenience. Then add to it the emotion of leaving a home, job, friends, family and location and you have a seriously traumatic event.

Five years ago my wife and I left Brooklyn and bought a house in New Jersey. We loved Brooklyn and only left because we felt priced out of the neighborhood. We'd come to accept New Jersey as our home, but Brooklyn was the place we first lived together, where we spent many of the formative years of our relationship and where we've left a little bit of our hearts.

We went back to see friends we see far too seldom and spent a few hours in our old neighborhood (Carroll Gardens/Cobble Hill). Despite the changes that five years have wrought, it felt like coming home. There is something very special and indefinable about this borough of churches. When we moved there our old neighborhood felt like a neighborhood and after 7 years of living there, we felt that we belonged, much more than we do in our very nice town in New Jersey five years later.

It's nice to see that despite the many changes, and improvements over the intervening years, that some of the old family places are still there and some of same characters (and I mean that in a good way) are still standing on the corner, chatting with friends and watching the "new" immigrants to the neighborhood, with a slightly uncomprehending look on their faces. They may not understand or accept these newcomers, but they always seem to find a way to coexist.

It will be soon time for us to get in the car and head south. I do so with no little trepidation, but also with excitment for the future. But wherever I may live, New York will be part of my soul. I was born in New York and raised there and even though I lived for five years in New Jersey, if anyone ever asked me where I was from, I always answered: "New York".

What is it then between us?
What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?
Whatever it is, it avails not -- distance avails not, and place avails not,
I too lived, Brooklyn of ample hills was mine,
I too walked the streets of Manhattan island, and bathed in the waters around it
I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me,
In the day, among crowds of people, sometimes they came upon me,
In my walks home late at night, or as I lay in my bed, they came upon me,
I too had been struck from the float forever held in solution,
I too had received identity by my body,
That I was, I knew was of my body—and what I should be, I knew I should be of my body.

Walt Whitman - Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

Not sure where I'll be

Things are changing rather dramatically and the lack of blog posts over the next few weeks will be attributable to those changes.

I am leaving my beloved NY and moving to Sarasota, Florida, where I will be the Marketing Director for Sarasota Opera. This is a career change that I've been hoping to make and I'm especially happy to be working for a company that I sang for during my singing days and with which I have such a strong connection.

So over the next few weeks, I'll be packing up my house and moving to Florida. I'm not sure how much internet access I'll have over the next few weeks.

But I will be back!

A sign of hope

Driving somewhere in Massachusetts this weekend, I stopped in a Burger King for a quick bite. It was the cleanest, most attractive fast food joint that I've been to for a while.

One of the older employees had received a gift certificate to attend an arts event in Boston. He explained that it could be a play, a musical, an opera or classical music. A person I assume was the manager was jokingly dismissive but the 4 or 5 other employees were trying to help him come up with ideas. As I got my burger, I heard one teenaged boy say, "Go to a classical concert. I love classical music!".

Now that's the right attitude!

Sadness and Solace

The news from London last week was shocking and shook me to the core, again. I won't get mawkish or martial. I can only grieve for those lost and for a world where this has become common place. I only hope that we never accept it, but carry on, so that some sort of normalcy returns to our lives.

Most mornings these days I pass a phone booth with the words Art Heals on the side. This is an ad for Free Arts an admirable organization, which tries to integrate the arts into the lives of abused children.

It is my fervent belief that art can heal or at least provide a medium to start the healing. In a world that once held Beethoven, Mozart, Bach and Verdi, I have to believe in the power of the human spirit and intellect and for the unalterable place of beauty in this world. Obviously this won't solve the world's problems, but when I need solace, it is to music that I first turn.

Gig slut

"Gig slut" is a term musicians use when they take pretty much every freelance job offered to them (no matter how lowly) to keep the bills paid. I was one briefly (one long Saturday singing 4 separate carolling jobs, in costume, covering about 200 miles, cured me of that).

Blair Tindall's book Mozart in the Jungle chronicles her life as a freelance oboist in New York City. It has generated a lot of "word of blog" because of her tales of "sex, drugs and classical music" (to quote the book jacket) and admission that many of her jobs came from contacts that she made in the bedroom.

It's a shame that the book had to be marketed that way. The book jacket blurb promises:

Now in "Mozart in the Jungle," Tindall exposes the scandalous rock and roll lifestyles of the musicians, conductors, and administrators who inhabit the insular world of classical music.

But the book isn't really about that. Apart from one short episode early on, I'm not sure where the "rock and roll lifestyles" are. Her sexual escapades are frankly the least interesting part of her story and aside from some pot and a few lines of coke, drugs don't really figure prominently. It is however, a compelling story of her life as a freelance musician in New York and one to which many musicians (including myself) can likely relate. In her career she achieves a certain amount of success but ultimately becomes disillusioned with the jobs that she has to take to make ends meet. Throughout her narrative she also weaves the emotional story of pianist Samuel Sanders, who was a preeminent accompanist for many world-class soloists (Itzhak Perlman appears in the story), but who died relatively young of a life-long heart problem.

Freelance gigging in New York is a lot about contacts. Most of mine came from friends and in particular my brother, who preceded me on the NY scene by a few years. Tindall's early jobs came from her boyfriends, which, apart from an early predilication for married older men, doesn't seem particularly out of the ordinary to me. It was dangerous for her since once the relationships ended, so did the jobs. It's not all that different in the business world. Since leaving freelancing myself, all of my jobs have come from contacts and acquaintances. Networking is the name of the game in just about any business.

The final chapter about the financial realities and future of classical music seems tacked on to me. She may be right in her conclusions but she really hasn't taken enough space to be persuasive. I think that this would be good material for another book. But other than that I did enjoy her story and found it interesting and truthful. I just wish she could have done it without the hype.