Except for two two-day visits to friends of mine
who moved to Manhattan last year,
I haven't been to New York City
since the World Trade Center was still there,
before 2001 September 11.
I have
oodles
of Broadway-show programs from the 1980s,
but I became much more of a show-music-dance-concert
buff
in the past two decades.
My two two-day visits were brief,
time with my friends, one
museum,
some good meals, and seeing our joint-venture business
Novapetal NYC.
I have subscriptions to Ballet Arizona, the Phoenix Symphony, the Philadelphia Ballet, and Arizona Opera with memberships in the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts, the Mesa Arts Center, the Chandler Center for the Arts, and Musicfest. I'm an occasional concert-goer at the Musical Instrument Museum (MIM) the Celebrity Theater, ASU Gammage, and some big-arena, big-concert venues. So maybe it's time to do the city, six concerts in six days in Manhattan, 2026 January 18-23. I scored tickets online for two operas and two ballets at Lincoln Center and two concerts at Carnegie Hall. My friend Warren recommended the Empire Hotel right across the street from Lincoln Center which wasn't terribly expensive by New-York-City standards.
I recall my last visit to Lincoln Center was a tour in 1970 and I went to some concerts at Carnegie Hall circa 1980. As a Philadelphian by birth and a New Yorker by immersive osmosis so many years ago, I find my allegiance split between Philadelphia's beautiful Academy of Music with its crystal-clear opera-house acoustics and New York's more-austere Carnegie Hall with its genuinely-near-perfect concert-hall acoustics. The Academy's shorter reverbation time may have been hell-on-wheels for the musicians of the Philadelphia Orchestra for one hundred years but gave an especially rich, intricate, and detailed portrayal of the music to the audience that Carnegie does not quite do. I know it is possible to do both as I heard the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra perform the Franck Symphony in Amsterdam's Concertgebouw concert hall which combines all the articulation and detail of the Academy and all the concert-hall warmth of Carnegie. When the Dutch music lovers got what the phrenologist-psychologists call an "Edifice Complex" and wanted to build a new concert hall, they, instead, put a beautiful glass facade on one side of the wonderful, old hall so not only is the sound the same but I didn't have to wait outside in the rain to buy my tickets. (If any orchestra program directors on my travel itinerary are reading this, I'll point out the Franck Symphony in D minor is a wonderful work I've only heard that one time in a concert hall and deserves to be played again.)
Here are my photo slide-show pages from the trip.
Thursday night was Riccardo Muti conducting the Chicago Symphony at Mesa, Friday night was Kirk Whalum singing and playing the saxophone at Chander, and this day, Saturday, was my flight from Phoenix Sky Harbor (PHX) to Newark Liberty Airport (EWR) and a drive into the city. I noted that part of that drive was the "historic" Pulaski Skyway, a road I drove many times between 1974 and 1978 and a road mentioned in the historic War-of-the-Worlds broadcast with Orson Wells on 1931 October 30. I had memories of the Holland Tunnel as well, with a one-way toll of $1.50 instead of the current $15.00. I was delighted to see that my hotel really was right across the street from Lincoln Center where I would be spending four nights attending ballets and operas. So often something is claimed to be "right across the street" where the street being crossed is quite some distance away. The rooms were New-York-City small rooms with a comfortable lobby and helpful staff.
Morning was a crosstown visit from my former-Phoenician friend Anthony who moved to New York City's upper east side with his wife Olga to start a retail flower shop Novapetal NYC following their successful Novapetal shop in Phoenix.
Lunch was with a high-school friend David I really hadn't seen (except for brief hello-goodbye greetings at class reunions) and we had a delightful and delightfully-brief recap of our careers. At my age it's like the line in the movie "Fun with Dick and Jane" where the guy at the unemployment office says, "Here you are what you were." I chatted about the sale of my 2012 company Clear Demand that did retail-science pricing and promotions for big retail chains.
The opera was "I Puritani" (the Puritans), about conflict between personal love and political-religious duty. It was a long and wonderful opera followed by a cast discussion that centered mostly around the bel canto style of opera.
By evening I noticed New-York-City ads on my social media of Facebook and Instagram, a trickle that turned into a torrent. I liked it because there were suggestions of things to do that I didn't know about or didn't think of. One just has to remember that more ads or more-impressive ads doesn't necessarily equate to a better place to visit.
My day was consumed by the American Museum of Natural History on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, not far from my hotel. There were the usual famous attractions like the dinosaur-fossil skeletons and a life-size blue whale. I signed up for half a dozen special add-on exhibits and displays including "Impact: The End of the Age of Dinosaurs," "Invisible Worlds," "Encounters in the Milky Way" in the planetarium, and "Passport to the Universe" on the giant screen narrated by Tom Hanks. What I liked about the exhibits and presentations I saw there is, unlike science-museum exhibits I've seen elsewhere this century, there was some "meat on the bone." I wasn't being talked down to even though the subject was made accessible to small children or adults with smaller minds. Distances and quantities were given with some precision, "hundreds of billions of stars," "tens of thousands of galaxies," "billions of light years," rather than platitudes I've heard about, say, Antarctica where the ice was "very thick" with the tops "very high" and the temperature "very cold." It may be my memory failing me, but I sensed a deeper sense of quantitative communication even in these popular-science presentation media.
I enjoyed a post-museum, late-afternoon, pre-concert visit with my friends Olga and Anthony and their son Anthony Jr. in their new, upper-east-side apartment. Since Anthony Jr. is my godson I have to watch all those Marlon Brando movies.
The concert was two works by Sir Karl Jenkins at Carnegie Hall, rich, deep choral works brilliantly performed with magnificent acoustics and the composer joining the post-concert bows. My seat neighbor was visiting from London, so we were both coming from reasonably far away. I liken the music to a PG-rated version of Karl Orff's Carmina Burana, rich and exciting without the vigorous sexual theme.
Both works were twelve movements with notations in the program asking the audience to refrain from applauding between movements and a master of ceremonies specifically making that point, so the delicious silences between movements were untainted by audience enthusiasm. I'll point out that when the audience started to clap after the first movement in Mesa last Thursday, Riccardo Muti waved his hand behind his lower back, the audience immediately got the message, and the rest of the concert was similarly untainted. Itzhak Perelman used to pretend to get a call from Mr. Beethoven asking the audience to wait until the end of the piece to applaud. Ballet and opera and jazz are different where the audience is expected to applaud after a solo or duet part of the program.
I signed up for a tour of Carnegie Hall with discussion of the hall's history and heritage. There were stories of great effort to build this hall and of great performers who played there. The standard Q+A joke is "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?" and the answer is "Practive, practice, practice." When the hall was slated for destruction in 1960 it was granted a last-minute stay of execution so the sad, closing concert because a celebration of the hall's future.
I recall a VHS tape I had of comedian Alan King walking out onto the Carnegie-Hall stage, looking up and down and left and right. "Look, Ma, I made it. And I didn't have to practice."
Lunch was a couple of big-city, big pizza slices at a small New-York pizzaria where I had to climb a narrow stairway to the small tables. "What they're spending on rent they're not spending on food," so New-York restaurants tend to be on the small side with portions designed for large-size appetites.
A few blocks walk took to the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA). My hit-rate of liking the art there may be lower than more-traditional-art museums, but there are some beautiful pieces and enough to keep me happily entertained for a couple of hours.
The New York Ballet was an evening of George Ballanchine. If Philadelphia and Phoenix can go gaga over George B., then certainly I expect Ballanchine's own New York Ballet to be ever-so-much-more-so enthusiastic about him, and there is much to be enthusiastic about. One piece, "Prodigal Son," I remember vividly from before and this performance was just as wonderful. Like in my other big-city ballet companies, when eight dancers moved in unison or in a wave, it was perfect, poetry in motion.
One of the Facebook ads was for RiseNY, a funky New-York-City-memories museum complete with a moving seats video ride through all five boroughs of the big city. There were pictures and videos of Times Square on New Year's Eve and the Ed Sullivan show and the famous skyscrapers. There was an appropriate display of the World Trade Center two square holes in the ground as it is at the actual memorial site. The movie ride is a lot of fun.
I enjoyed my stroll up Fifth Avenue to the Frick Collection. My last time there was several decades ago with my mother, but I remembered quite a few of the works of art. Whatever renovations and innovations they may have done, everything wonderful and lovely I remembered from decades ago was still there, right in my face. They had a no-pics-in-the-Frick policy so I don't have any pictures of the pictures there. (I probably could dig up images from the Internet, but I'm too lazy to do that, at least for now.)
My second opera of the week was "Madama Butterfly," a tragic three-act story of cross-cultural betrayal. The costumes and sets were absolutely wonderful along with the music and vocals. They had an angled stage-size mirror above the whole thing so the audience could look down on the whole scene by looking up.
What's mind boggling to me is that the Metropolitan Opera that just did "I Puritani" three nights ago managed to squeeze a full performance of "Carmen" in between. It's the same story with the ballet. While Arizona and Philadelphia manage to do maybe half a dozen shows spread out over the season usually with a month or two in between, the Metropolitan Opera and New York Ballet find the resources to do multiple shows, enough that I could schedule two operas and two ballets all in one week in the city. Since I have some idea how hard Arizona and Philadelphia opera and ballet companies have to work to do their schedules I'm trying to imagine the resources it takes to do so many shows.
2026 January 22, Thursday
Since my last real time in the city had
the skyline dominated by the World Trade Center,
I figured a visit to the memorial site and museum
was in order.
2001 September 11 was a terrible day.
I'm old enough that there have been a few terrible days,
1963 November 22 was Kennedy's assassination in Dallas,
1968 April 4 was King's assassination in Memphis,
1968 June 5 was Robert Kennedy's assassination
in Los Angeles,
1969 July 18 was Ted Kennedy's car drowning
of Maryh Jo Kopechne in Chappaquiddick,
and
1986 January 28 was the Challenger space-shuttle explosion.
The last was the worst day of my professional life
(story some other time and place)
and then our group's youngest member
ran into the room and said, "The space shuttle blew up."
Really.
More-recent terrible days include
one or more U.S. Presidential elections
depending on which side you're on,
2020 was COVID,
2022 February 24 was Russia's invasion of Ukraine,
and
2023 October 7 was the Hamas invasion in Gaza.
There were also blizzard, hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes,
et cetera.
Still, 2001 September 11 sticks out as
especially awful, especially here in the United States,
and more-especially in New York City.
Blame Osama bin Laden or the
decision to have all airline-flight passengers helpless,
or blame it on ghosts and goblins,
"Nine Eleven" was an event where somebody did something
to make it happen.
It wasn't an accident of nature
like an earthquake in San Francisco in 1906
or a tornado in Fort Worth in 2000.
Its casualties were victims of something somebody did.
I have another connection with Nine Eleven. When I was at the Observation Deck there a few years before the elevators stopped working and there were no stairs available. The lights were still on but there were no elevators. A few hundred of us were nervously milling around the 107th floor. Nobody said the word "fire." What else would take out all the elevators and not the lights? I looked out the window at the ground a quarter-mile down and wondered what it would be like choosing between flames and a thrilling twelve-second descent with a fatal sudden stop. I suspect most of the others were thinking similar thoughts.
The World Trade Center memorial is appropriate and tasteful. The locations of the twin towers are maintained as pools of water with names imprinted on the rims. In the centers of these already-deep ponds are deeper squares of runoff. The new Freedom Tower is right next to this memorial, but does not replace it in the exact same location.
The museum is underneath where the towers were before they fell, so they have exhibits in the actual under-the-towers spaces. There are actual firetrucks and actual pieces of metal and lovely-before pictures and horrible-after pictures along with a few of the actual event. One of the museum docents I chatted with lost her brother in the event, so she had a lot more invested in the memorial than almost anybody else would.
The journey from my hotel to the memorial was a subway ride on the 1 train downtown almost to the last stop. I remember that same 1 train going uptown took me to Van Cortland Park in the north Bronx where we used to run cross-country races. The subway in 2026 has air-conditioned cars with fluorescent lights, different from the incandescent light bulbs fifty years ago. Those bulbs, they told me, deliberately screwed the other direction from regular light bulbs so subway riders wouldn't steal them to use in their own apartments. Instead of metal tokens access is controlled by credit-card tap access.
I got back to my hotel in time to meet Walter, a friend of my long-time patent-lawyer friend Dick who created my first patent #4182517 for the LOCI Tonearm back in 1978 and 1979. Walter is doing exciting work in medical-science investment. Getting people excited about investing in high-payout opportunities with low probability of success requires a long history of integrity and overall success. There are many medical breakthroughs throughout history that have relied on people making these high-risk investments.
Before my chamber-music concert I decided to try dinner at the Carnegie Hall Weill Café, an expensive meal where I met some interesting people at the table next to mine. There was some confusion as the dinner was timed around an 8:00pm concert downstairs in the big Isaac-Stern auditorium rather than my 7:30pm concert upstairs in the smaller Joan and Sanford I. Weill Recital Hall, but we made it all work.
The concert was a violin-harpsichord combination with a 'cello, Rachell Ellen Wong on violin, David Belkovski on harpsichord, and Coleman Itzkoff accompanying on 'cello. Most of the music was from J.S. Bach's time and earlier. Except for Johann Sebastian this isn't a period of music I find myself hearing in the concert hall. We hear The Four Seasons (1718-1723) with some regularity (twice in the past thirty years for me, I think), an occasional piece by Telemann, and, of course, Handel's beautiful Messiah (1747) and, occasionally, Water Music (1717). Hearing two hours of new-to-me music from this era was stimulating, entertaining, and utterly enjoyable. There was one piece by Tartini nicknamed the "Devil's Trill" where the violin and harpsichord were played quite rapidly. While frantic, quick notes on violin are almost routine, this harpsichord sequence would make many pianists envious.
The other five concerts I was able to get front-row or near-front-row seats while this one was sold out save one seat in the balcony's front row. When I got there I saw a whole lot of empty seats. Maybe a lot of people subscribe to these cool concerts and then go someplace warm for the winter, maybe Arizona, maybe Phoenix, maybe Scottsdale. At least I had an empty seat next to me so I got one armrest all to myself.
After the concert itself I asked how much more difficult the showy-fast stuff was than on a more-modern pianoforte. He said it was quite hard and it was all about "choreography" and that if he was in the wrong space or posture, then it would be a rapid-fire sequence of wrong notes. That didn't happen and the devil's trill was terrific.
The gathering after the concert was a lot of fun. The violinist's sister had a love of astronomy and I ran into a young audiologist who seemed to recall my father's work in the field back in the 1950s.
This day was particularly nice in terms of temperature, right around freezing, warm enough for no gloves. The next day was ten degrees colder (10°F) with enough breeze to gloves a must-have item for me.
I joined Olga and Anthony for lunch at our Novapetal NYC flower shop. We went to a local Chinese restaurant and had a delicious meal.
After that I walked about a mile to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There's always one more thing to see and it's all wonderful and amazing.
After a quick dinner back on the upper east side with Olga and Anthony I headed back to the west side for my sixth of six consecutive-day concerts, this one the New York Ballet "Masters at Work II."
There were four nearly-half-hour ballets, all new to me, "Kammermusik No. 2," "Le Tombeau de Couperin," "Antique Epigraphs," and "Raymonda Variations," with music by four wonderfully-different composers, Paul Hindemith, Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy, and Alexander Glazounov (from Raymonda it says on the program). Intermissions were after the first and third for a lovely evening and my seat neighbor was friendly.
There is an ice-cream place next to the Empire Hotel open after concerts (they're smart) that makes their ice-cream cones with rose petals by scooping the ice cream in layers. Lacking rocky road I settled for chocolate to top off my perfect night and my perfect week of New-York-City concert nightlife.
Since I arrived in New York City the cyber spies in my social media were clearly aware of my new geographic location. I have been deluged with advertisements for museums and monuments, none more than the new Arte Museum, a lights-and-mirrors environment on Pier 61. After my success following the advertisements for RiseNY on Wednesday, I decided to spend my last morning at this Arte Museum.
I wasn't disappointed. The first dark room was all mirrors with lighted water flow going up and down repeatedly up and down and left and right and front and back all over. There were rooms with floral displays and other kids-oriented light shows. I was ready to suggest this as a place to take my two-year-old godson for an outing.
The last room didn't change my godson recommendation, but it certainly changed my impression of the place. It was lovely. There was a mix of New-York-City urban scenes from subways to streets with famous paintings dropping down and going up and coming and going. Rather than a barrage of pointless images, it was a montage of reality and artistic beauty well worth visiting for kids from one to ninety-two. For those of us not doing too well standing for several minutes there were places to sit and to enjoy the ever-changing view. I stayed for a while and it didn't repeat for the fifteen or twenty minutes I enjoyed watching it. So this well-advertised Arte Museum was fun and terrific.
Lunch was a nice chopsticks-only oriental restaurant and my flight home from Newark (EWR) to Phoenix (PHX) was uneventful. What was more eventful was the number of flights that weren't flying because of the forecast blizzard that lived up to promise of coating the United-States eastern-seaboard with a lot of snow.
I got home tired and decidedly "under the weather" and took a couple of days to recuperate and to restore my energy. My cats were there to greet me.
In case I'm suffering from a shortage of concerts, Sunday afternoon was a concert at the Nash Jazz Club in the heart of Phoenix with sort-of-jazz-singer, sort-of-folk-singer Annie Moscow. I've been listening to her and her compact disks (CDs) since 2009 May 16 at Angel's Serenity, a hippie-style store some friends of ours kept in Scottsdale back then. The store is gone, our friends have moved to Boston, but Annie and I are still friends and I go to her concerts whenever I can. Her music is part of me and it was a nice pick-me-up way to spend a not-feeling-too-perky Sunday afternoon.
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12:27:50 Mountain Standard Time (MST). 31 visits to this web page. |