A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC

One of the advantages as well as disadvantages of having a long time in NYC is that we don't feel any rush to do any particular thing.
Today we had plans to go see if we could get rush tix for "One Man, Two Guvnors," but that didn't work out.

With a little time on our hands we went to the garment district to look for some material to re-do the window seats in our sun porch. After a few shops we found something just perfect.
After that we decided to go to Rockefeller center to check out the little shopping mall, which was a pretty big yawn. Although, in the circles we walked around while looking for Rockefeller Center, we did go through this interesting water feature. 

I took this sort of cool picture in the subway station while we were waiting for our train. Came home and fixed a nice salmon dinner, then headed over to Central Park to hear the Knights, a pickup group of NYC musicians in a free concert in the Naumberg series. Music of Purcell, Haydn, Milhaud, and Copeland. Well, this orchestra turned out to be anything but a pickup group, or maybe it's just that there are so many wonderful musicians in NYC that even a pickup group is really good. These people really seemed like they had played together over a decent period of time.

The band shell was built in 1926, donated by a philanthropist named Naumberg, and was apparently threatened with the wrecking ball in the past few years. New Yorkers raised the money to sue the City over removing it and some money for improvements, but as usual, not enough. However, they won the case and the shell still stands. It's south of 72nd St. and a bit closer to the East Side than the West Side, but only marginally so. It faces west, and the area behind it is about half as high as the shell. This created a magical effect once twilight came, as the fireflies were blinking on and off on either side of the stage in the darkness. The music was really nice, too. Although I had expected to like the Purcell and the Haydn, what I really liked was the Milhaud and the Copeland. Go figure. They even had a harpsichord for the Purcell and Haydn, some revival plunker, but they were using amplification, so the sound was okay. There were about 500 people there and I thought it really said something about the difference in sophistication between a NY and Sacramento audience that nobody clapped between the various parts of the the Purcell, which was a suite of dances, even though the various pieces weren't listed. But by the end of the program, even though the movements in the Haydn were listed, there were several outliers who applauded between movements. Another cool, but probably unintended visual effect was the creation of shadows on the back of the band shell which clearly showed the cellist and one of the violinists. I tried to take a picture, but I was too far back, and it didn't work. For me, the best piece on the concert was the Copeland piece called Quiet City, especially because in the really pianissimo part, you could only hear the music and the insects. You really couldn't hear the traffic noise, or any sirens, or any planes going over. Toward the end of the piece, a plane did fly over, but it was appropriate. The one funny thing that happened was that the orchestra often changed configurations, and during one of those longer changes I think people thought it was the intermission, and they were standing around chatting in the aisles, and after about 4 minutes people started realizing that the musicians weren't warming up, they were actually playing the next piece. John actually got up and told the woman in front of us to sit down and stop talking. She was one of the last chatters standing. And she was pretty embarrassed. After the concert we walked back to the subway, stopped at a new frozen yogurt place and came home. Turned out to be a really nice evening.