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Date: | Thu, 4 Dec 2003 13:42:19 -0500 |
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Ravi, latish but most welcome, wrote:
>At my request, I am seated behind the orchestra, to "organ right" in the
>next-to-last row. The auditorium is beautiful to look at but I, along
>with many, are uncomfortable in the narrow seats with very little legroom.
In the Kennedy Center, they call these the Chorister seats. I had
a seat there the other night for Das Lied von der Erde and Britten's
Sinfonia da Requiem (aside to Karl Miller in the Bernstein: Modern
Masters thread: this is indeed a tremendous piece). The KC's Chorister
seats are very narrow as well, worse than tourist class in an airplane.
>... For some reason, the Philharmonic Association has decided to seat
>latecomers after the first movement of the opening piece. This was
>highly distracting in the Mahler.
No, it's Salonen's attempt at authenticity. Mahler programmed a
five-minute break between the first and second movements, lol.
>Apart from that, coughs sound like gunshots and no amount of announcements
>or exhortations can induce everyone to turn off his cellphone and unwrap
>his cough-drops before the downbeat. At the end of Abbado's program,
>audience members streamed out of the hall while curtain calls were still
>going on. This must be highly disconcerting for conductor and performers
>alike. All of this will take some undoing and no one knows if or how
>change can be effected.
As for the cellphones, that's an atrocity. Regarding those who left
early, that's unfortunate but what can you do? Look on the bright side:
at least the early leavers got the traffic moving. Speaking of which,
here's a practical question that I don't think anyone's addressed yet:
How's the parking, and how much did it cost? To park in the Kennedy
Center garage now costs -- are you sitting down? -- $15.
Mitch Friedfeld
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