Gotham Diary:
Weekend in Five Parts
9 August 2010
1. Friday night: Mozart Mozart at Lincoln Center. A smashingly good concert, which is all the more super because I chose only two events, and this was the only Avery Fisher night, the only “normal concert.” (Next week’s Emerson String Quartet recital at Alice Tully ought to be great as well, but I’ll always associate Mostly Mozart with Philharmonic Hall, as it was during the first season — when, as I recall, you could be a sort of book of chits, convertible into tickets at your pleasure during the Festival.
The concert began with Così fan tutte and ended with Don Giovanni. Well, you’ll see what I mean. I don’t know when I last heard the Così overture by itself. It’s a jolly, but rather brainless piece, repeating its two very simple themes over and over; as such, it’s perfect for the opera that follows, which is about very silly young people who don’t really notice much of anything. As a rule, I disapprove of playing opera overtures by themselves (Rossini’s excepted), but this one is a very old friend, and of course it does the job of warming up the orchestra very nicely.
Mozart’s 22nd Piano Concerto was the last of the great ones that I got to know. It’s big (plenty of trumpets and drums), but its middle movement is ruminative rather than tuneful, the very opposite of the previous concerto’s. The pianist was David Fray, who, unlike our conductor (see below) looks rather younger than his 29 years. He is an excellent pianist, with very fine ideas about the balance of Mozart’s compositional blocks, but I should like to hear a few recordings, because, in person, M Fray is a romantic poet, given to raptures and collapses. You’d never know it, but his fingers have a wicked sense of humor, and when I read the review in the Times I agreed with James Oestreich that he ought to write his own cadenzas — one just feels that they’d be interesting. (Edwin Fischer’s were played; I knew the concluding one, but I’d never heard the first movement’s.)
Lionel Bringuier is one of those men who look totally grown up when they’re fifteen. He’s twenty-three now, but he could pass for a youthful forty. I don’t mean to say that he looks old. He just looks fully formed, set. And he conducts like someone three times his age. His way with the Andante of the Prague Symphony was extraordinarily controlled but also, well, wise. I want to say “organic,” because it wasn’t at all mechanical. The music was regular in the way that breathing is regular. The orchestra respired, between passion and sweetness, in and out, with no jerking shifts of tone. It was the most natural thing in the world — and very beautiful. If you can make the Prague Symphony sound fresh at any age, you’re a genius. The outer movements were grand, too, with the introductory Adagio and the entire Presto finale deeply infused with Don Giovanni, the opera that Mozart wrote at about the same time. (Indeed, he wrote it for Prague, along with the Prague Symphony, because the music lovers of that town responded so much more favorably to Le Nozze di Figaro a year or so earlier.)
The fountain at Lincoln Center — I must write about that separately. I feel rather stupid, since it’s got to be at the top of anybody’s must-see list, and here I thought it was just a fountain. It was redone, when? Last year? And is now a computerized marvel cum water cannon. I can’t wait for Will to be old enough to join the children runnng back and forth, shrieking in joyous terror.
2. Saturday night: Deep-Fat Fryer Disaster, narrowly averted. I haven’t had the big DeLonghi deep-fat fryer out in a while, what with &c &c. Having experimented with every known oil, and combination of oil and lard, I’ve come to realize at last that, whatever else, Crisco doesn’t stink up the apartment. The problem is that it’s solid. Which is not a problem, except that you know what happens when you power electric heating elements that aren’t immersed in liquid. If it’s one of those little numbers that boils water in a mug, it’s not so bad; if it’s a DeLonghi deep fryer, you’re talking expensive replacement. I had the bright idea (o tremble!) of placing the frying tub, which can be lifted out of the insulating frame, on a low burner, and melting the Crisco that way. But, oh, why was it taking so much Crisco to cover the heating element? The answer to this question occurred to me in the nick of time. I’d left the little drain tap open, and the oil had just about filled the well of my stovetop, without reaching the burners or flooding the sparkplugs that ignite the gas.
Ladling the melted Crisco from the stovetop — which is basically a one-piece enamel basin, thank heaven — was tedious but not impossible, and it only felt as though it would take forever. When the level dropped below ladling range, I sopped up the remainder with paper towels, and then cleaned the basin with ammonia. All better! But the French fries that I made for dinner weren’t very good; in the slight confusion of aftershock, I’d put the lid on the fryer while the potatoes were cooking, not a good idea.
If the disaster had to happen, Saturday night was the night. I was in a good mood, not too tired, and equipped, it turned out, to deal with the near catastrophe without raising either my voice or my arms. I’d say that it delayed dinner by no more than twenty-five minutes.
3. Sunday afternoon: Brunch at Orsay. The French fries were better, but not that much better. The croque monsieur was delicious, however. It was good to see our friends, a Brearley classmate of Kathleen’s and her husband.
Question that I keep forgetting to ask: is that what Mortimer’s looked like, or did they do the place over when it became Orsay? By the way, the banquettes have been removed from the larger dining room (the one without the bar). They probably did that months ago; it’s possible that I haven’t been to Orsay since we had brunch with the same couple last summer.
After brunch, we walked our friends toward their apartment, on our way to Gracious Home, where I picked up a brochure for an “ironing system” that costs $2500. You get the ironing board, the iron (which stores in a compartment) and even a tank of water. The whole thing folds up to a thickness barely deeper than the ironing board that I’ve got (also from Gracious Home, but a lot cheaper). Question: what’s the market for a $2500 iron & board? Even on the Upper East Side of Manhattan — who’s ironing?)
4. Sunday evening: Rubicon and Mad Men. When I got back from Gracious Home, I was too hot to do anything but shower and read. (See below.) As dinnertime approached, Kathleen suggested that we go out, and that sounded just fine to me. It was only at 8:30 that we woke up to the impossibility of going out, unless we wanted to miss Rubicon. So we called Gracie’s Corner for a burger and a grilled cheese sandwich, and we finished dinner just in time to turn on the Bravia. (This entails turning on the cable box as well; it must shut itself off after a day or so.)
Rubicon is a fairly dumb show with a great cast. I wonder if I’ve seen Dallas Roberts on the stage? I haven’t seen any of the movies listed at IMDb; nor, of course, have I seen the actor’s television shows. But Kathleen and I are both certain that we’ve seen him before.
Mad Men was good: lots of Don and lots of Joan — and no Betty. We really liked the goof-up on Lane’s flower orders, and we loved it when Joan fired the careless secretary who was responsible. More Peggy would have been great.
5. Every spare minute: Jennifer Egan’s Look At Me. I’ll have more to say about this masterpiece when I’ve knocked off Ms Egan’s first two books, The Emerald City and The Invisible Circus. Or at least I hope that I will; where I’ll find the time to write a comprehensive view of this amazing writer’s fiction I’ve no idea. Jennifer Egan is the only writer whom I would class with Jonathan Franzen: they can deploy technique in interesting, almost experimental ways that never, however, interfere with narrative thrust or threaten to degenerate into solipsistic moaning. (When he gets older, I may include Joshua Ferris in this small, expert group.)
In 2002, a year after Look At Me came out, Jennifer Egan appended an afterword to make it clear that her book was imagined in the “more innocent time” prior to 9/11. I think that she owes us another postscript, this time disavowing clairvoyant knowledge of Facebook. Uncanny!