At the Allen Room
This weekend has been something of a comble. I do not really understand this French noun, outside of the Racinian lament - "comble de misères" ("heap of troubles"). But we have had a heap of fun. I wish I could tell you that we had a fascinating dinner at some new restaurant - perhaps one of the "TimeWarner Collection" restaurants - before our Allen Room venture. In fact we had a pizza at home, at 8:30 - plenty of time to dress for a crosstown trip to a hitherto unknown venue. When we got there, we overheard a lot of other people saying that they'd never been to the Allen Room before, either. We were a Mostly Mozart crowd in temporary occupation of Jazz at Lincoln Center facilities.
Once upon a time, I programmed music for all of Harris County, but now I concentrate on surprising my wife. Did I know what the interaction between Concerto Köln and Sarband - a group of Turkish musicians determined to bridge gaps between east and west and Muslim and Jew - would be like? Not at all. The evening could have been awful. Even if the music hadn't been worth hearing, I reasoned when ordering what turned out to be second-row seats, I'd find out what the Allen Room was like. On the eve of its third season, I still don't know anyone who has been to it. It turns out to be the dream-come-true of a thousand black-and-white Thirties and Forties movies about New York: a modest amphitheatre, its levels generous enough for nightclub tables, sloping toward a performance area backed by an enormous window beyond which stretches Columbus Circle, West 57th Street, and, well, New York, New York. There are no famous skyscrapers in the view, but if the good people at the Pierre and the Sherry-Netherlands would light up their tops, the Allen Room would be an exciting place to sit still in.
The music was not awful, as, indeed, I'd had enough faith in Mostly Mozart's programmers to expect, and when it was over I got my favorite confession: Kathleen's saying that she really hadn't been looking forward to the concert at all but that she'd really, really, really loved it. The program, which was designed to show the impact of Viennese music on at least one early nineteenth-century effendi, might have seemed daring to some, but in fact it's all captured on a CD, of which this cut, which was reprised as an encore, had everybody whistling on the way out. (It could have been wild-West music, don't you think?) It was the opposite of difficult and demanding music. Everyone loved it.
I think I'll wait until the CD arrives to talk about Sarband. For the moment it's enough to note that, by a breathtaking coincidence, the Turkish bankers who summoned Kathleen to Istanbul at the beginning of 2005 are in town, and we're taking them to our favorite brunch spot at noon. Happily, there's one phrase of Turkish that I haven't forgotten: hoş geldiniz!
