The unexpurgated version of my WQXR “Arts File” segment that you may have heard (in edited form) on the radio or online this morning is now posted on the station’s website: New Arts Season, Rising Ticket Prices.
You can hear me here right now (click arrow on left), with more comments about my own cut-rate cultural explorations (including a Pitmen pitch) and ending with a plea (that didn’t make the final cut) for donors to step up their outlays so that less well-heeled individual ticket buyers don’t have to. (You’ll also hear me say “Metropolitan Museum” when I meant “Metropolitan Opera.” Art, not opera, is the usual focus of my professional preoccupations!)
But what I really want to know is: How did the Arts File producer know that she had in me the perfect cheapskate for this assigned topic? From talking to her, I learned that she hadn’t read my Metropolitan Opera lament before she called me. I guess my Bronx accent must make me sound like a shlepper.
But wait. There’s more! Below is a CultureGrrl Video from the cheap seats. I shot it at the Frank Gehry-designed Sosnoff Theater, which is part of the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. I was there Aug. 22 for a Leon Botstein-conducted performance by the American Symphony Orchestra that was part of a meaty, provocative Berg and His World series. The concert I attended was titled, Crimes and Passions (scroll to bottom), but it might have been more appropriately called, “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.”
Speaking of which, my video almost caused me a nervous breakdown, because my new, souped-up mini-camcorder repeatedly crashed my aging computer. This clip begins with my irreverent view of an unintended water feature outside the Gehry building (which predates his much more successful, more expensive Disney Concert Hall, home of the LA Philharmonic).
I then take you inside the theater to my vantage point up in the rafters. Next to me perched a young woman on an even more uncomfortable seat for the same price as mine—a highchair with a metal rung on which she uncomfortably rested her feet, since most women’s legs are too short to reach the floor. Believe, me, there can be no napping at this concert on this chair:
I had suffered on one of these instruments of torture the last time I attended a performance at the Sosnoff. Never again!
On that discordant note, here’s my concert-hall video: