Columbia-Met Opera, Concerts 2006 R 3-20

When I first arrived at Columbia in September 1957, I joined the ZBT fraternity and was invited to join a number of upper class members who made it a habit to get the inexpensive top balcony tickets to the Metropolitan Opera, in the old Opera House on 38th Street. The tickets cost only were four or five dollars. One of us would go to the Opera House box office and buy the tickets some morning and a few nights later several of us would happily climb to the upper most balcony of the Old Met. I recall hearing Renata Tebaldi, Maria Callas and Kirsten Flagstad; and saw Tosca, La Traviata and Don Giovanni. What a treat for a freshman corning from Rochester as I had never seen opera before, but had attended the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra a few times.

I had taken piano in elementary school, and can charitably say that I was not very good, and then clarinet, an experience that proved that I could do some things quite poorly. Performing in the Monroe High School orchestra concert one year, I did catch the eye of Arnold Cantor, the conductor, who then signaled me to stop playing! I don't know why he objected to the fact that my clarinet would occasionally emit a squeaking sound, but I guess he thought that wasn't something the clarinet should have been doing!

Our group also had tickets for the center box at Carnegie Hall for the two or three Tuesday night performances of the Philadelphia Orchestra, then conducted by Eugene Ormandy. It was pretty amazing to think that box seat tickets then were within the financial reach of college students on scholarship, as some of us were, including me.

Joining that group led to my seeing one of the most remarkable performances of Handel's Messiah. The Philadelphia orchestra performed it with over one hundred musicians, and with the Salt Lake City Tabernacle Choir comprised of over four hundred singers, and several major soloists, whose names I cannot recall for certainty, but believe that perhaps Paul Robeson was one of them. This performance has since been noted as the high water mark of the romantic-style presentation of the Messiah, which now is more usually performed in the chamber music style for which it was composed. However, it was a breathtaking performance, overwhelming to everyone present, and it has lived in my memory as one of the most exciting musical events I have ever experienced.

I also had the rare privilege of hearing Glenn Gould play the Goldberg Variations at Carnegie Hall, this time sitting with a date (whose name I cannot remember, an attractive college student from Sarah Lawrence), and we sat in the top balcony at Carnegie Hall in obstructed vision seats---last row on the side. I knew nothing of Goldberg Variations, or for that matter of Glenn Gould, other than rave and rapturous reviews, but once he started playing the piano, we stood and craned our necks to see him play. The concert was around1958, not long after his famous 1955 recording, which became one of the most renowned recordings in musical history and spawned the continuing interest in the Goldberg Variations.

It has always been one of my favorite pieces of music, thirty variations on a theme by Bach, ranging from stormy to contemplative, and played at that time by Gould in breathtakingly fast style. He later criticized his speed in performing it and released a much later (1980s) recording which is several minutes longer. There is a CD set put out several years ago which includes both recordings and a rare interview with the introverted Gould, who expresses embarrassment at the youthful high speed of the early version. Given the very limited number of performances Gould gave in his lifetime, I have sometimes wondered how many people ever heard him play it at a concert.

I first encountered Pachelbel 's Canon in D, my very favorite piece of music, eclipsing even the Goldberg Variations, in the required Music Humanities course at Columbia in my freshman year. No music strikes me as being more stately or elegant than the Canon in D, and I've heard versions on a number of different instruments, and Wendy and I chose it to be the organ music played at our wedding on September 16, 1984 at Temple Emmanuel in Newton.

My interest in music was enhanced by my being elected an Overseer (the current title is ‘Advisor’) of the Boston Symphony. Once we moved to Lenox, Wendy and I have attended twenty or more concerts each summer. This summer (2006) I gave myself a music appreciation course by attending six of the eight performances by Garrick Ohlsson of all thirty-two Beethoven piano sonatas. They were a highlight of the season, and it was amazing to see him play all of those pieces, together with one or two short works of Chopin at every concert, and never look at a sheet of music. Some years later I spoke with Ohllson at a BSO luncheon at Tanglewood and mentioned that I had heard Glenn Gould play the Goldberg Variations at Carnegie Hall when I was in college; he simply rolled his eyes and said “Oh my”.

Moving to New York meant that Wendy and I could explore opera for the first time in our lives, a classical music form I far prefer to sitting and watching musicians play instruments, given the amount of dance, acting, staging and costumes that make opera so lively. In our first nine years in New York we attended sixty-eight Metropolitan Opera performances, an exciting musical education. Our favorites have been Lohengrin, Die Frau Ohne Schatten, and the Pearl Fishers.

Through my client and friend Phil Turner, I had met Arthur MacKenzie, a classical pianist who had studied with the great Vladimir Horowitz, and who was no longer performing widely on the concert circuit, but was a business person in the Boston area. One day I received a call from Niels Brandt, the head of my client the Velux Corporation in Greenwood, South Carolina, to ask if there was any way I could possibly obtain tickets for him and Mrs. Brandt to see Horowitz perform in Boston or New York, as Horowitz had just announced his first concert tour in many years.

Horowitz was one of the greatest concert pianists ever, very successful in both Europe and America, now fairly advanced in years, and had not performed publicly for fifteen years or more. I called MacKenzie, and asked if he could possibly help obtain tickets. He responded that since he had been a student of Horowitz, he certainly could obtain tickets.

Only when we got to Symphony Hall in Boston, did we realize that we had the six seats in the front row, directly adjacent to the middle aisle, perfect seats for seeing Horowitz, and his fingers, performing magic on the piano. The Brandts, MacKenzies and we had the best seats in the house and we had dinner after at the Ritz Carlton.

That reminds me how sad it is that we no longer have the programs of so many of the wonderful events we have attended – concerts and theatre. We once kept all of them, but I threw them all out when we moved out of the big house at 25 Quidnic Road in Waban in the summer of 2001. I regret too that we disposed of our collection of wine bottle corks from many years of dinners, parties and celebrations, each marked with the date, place and initials of friends and family with us. I wonder why good judgment didn't require me to set aside those from events, dinners, concerts and plays that I knew even then were remarkable, and worthy of being saved, and being reminders worthy of memory.