Cafe Aman

The Poetry Show

Z is emphatically not a TV/video/computer user, but we make an exception as a very special occasional treat for the excellent HBO Family-produced Classical Baby series.

Happily, this series is not Baby Einstein-ish drivel (Mozart melodies played on a synthesizer, etc.), although the HBO website certainly pitches the classical-music-as-Ambien bit.  The series itself, however, consists of imaginative excellently realized animated vignettes matched with real music, e.g. an excerpt from the Bartok Rumanian Dances featuring a violin-playing cricket perched atop his mushroom home, or Duke Ellington paired with a Fernand Leger painting, or a monkey band shimmying along with Perez Prado's Mambo No. 5. (OK, so it's not all classical...)

Even though Z is younger than the target age group, the new favorite is "The Poetry Show--I'm All Grown Up Now," co-produced with The Poetry Foundation. Though MMFCC objects heartily to the super-precocious and precious kidlet interviews that are interspersed with the "real" interviews, I'm a fan myself, and am especially fond of the very witty take on William Carlos Williams' This Is Just to Say. Alas, alack, the Williams clip is not available online. However, you'll get the idea from this clip of Gertrude Stein's A Very Valentine. Good times.

Reconnecting: Mei-Ann Chen

I just had the pleasure of reconnecting, after some seventeen (!!!) years, with an artist whom I knew way back when in our salad days of high school: the conductor Mei-Ann Chen.

Back then, I knew her as an extremely fine violinist--but that was just a warm-up for another whole career path for Mei-Ann. I feel like I'm coming late to the party: Now in her first season as the assistant conductor of the Atlanta Symphony, she has also been a fellow in Marin Alsop's Taki Concordia program. She is also the first woman to ever win the Malko Competition for Conductors, held in Copenhagen. (There's a very sweet little YouTube clip of that evening.) Other honors include a League of American Orchestras conducting fellowship and an ASCAP creative programming award with her Portland Youth Philharmonic.

I'm looking forward to hearing her do the complete Lemminkainen someday...

Question of the day

Should I be at all concerned that Z's favorite new activity is to "conduct" and sing along to the first movement of the Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto? ("Doo, doo, doo, DOOH! Doo, doo, doo, DOOH!") Z loves the bombast, that's for sure. The favored recording seems to be the Vladmir Ashkenazy/John Ogden draw from the 1962 Tchaikovsky Competition (Melodiya).

Off for now. If I don't squeeze out 3500 words today, I'm dead.

Reading material.

I'm nearing the finish line of a marathon project that has taken me far away from my normal routines and pleasures, but I just picked up David Remnick's lengthy profile of Phil Schaap in the New Yorker and can't put it down. I'm only about halfway through the piece, but I'd say that Remnick has captured Phil--as I know him as an old friend and mentor of mine at WKCR--quite nicely.

I suppose I can be characterized, in Remnick's rather uncharitable description, as one of those "generations of Columbia d.j.s whose programs followed Schaap's [that] have learned to stand clutching an album of the early Baorque or nineteenth-century Austrian yodelling and wait patiently for the final chorus of 'I'll Always Love You Just the Same.'" For the better of a decade, I followed Phil on Friday mornings at some point past 9:40 AM.

(Personal note to PS: Remember when I answered"Take the A Train" in our conversation at Zankel? It was a bad joke, even more poorly delivered. Sorry.)

Lesson one for orchestras: once they actually come, don't hound them.

(I'm not going to say anything about posting again after another long absence, because I will doom myself once again to failure. Feel free to ruminate on the pyschological meanings of my shortcomings, though I would personally prefer to blame the whole thing on too many commitments in too short days--and nights.)

Here's an interesting post from The Consumerist today:

We have a mini-subscription to the New York Philharmonic and used to constantly receive solicitation calls from the "Friends of the New York Philharmonic"...Each time they called, we'd ask to be taken us off their lists before blocking the number. Those sneaky audiophiles, they'd call back from a different number and pretend we'd never requested anything other than another call...

The experience was annoying enough to keep us from ever being friends with the New York Philharmonic, even if they give us their Cool Ranch Doritos and invite us over to play Grand Theft Auto. No, they blew that chance. Take note, symphony orchestras, your pushy tactics won't win you any friends.

That's actually the editor's response to a reader submission, which alleges that the marketing department from the Boston Symphony Orchestra fraudulently signed him up for a $25 donation that he had never agreed to give, and then started harassing him to pony up. (Go to the link for the whole tale.)

Now, in the race to fill seats and raise dough, there must be a better way to build a relationship with people who have ventured in your front door than this, no? (I will say that I myself have been the recipient of some very aggressive NYP repeat calls over the years.)