My Grandparents

When I was growing up, my family eventually moved out of New York and into the suburbs.   I used to visit my maternal grandparents in New York; I would stay for the weekend, and my grandmother would take me to the NY Philharmonic.  They lived in an apartment at 9 East 10th Street, just north of Washington Square.   They were party types.  There are rarely any pictures of them without a drink in their hands; I think they lived a life of partying and going to the theater, and they had a whole circle of eccentric friends.  My grandfather was a Yale educated lawyer and worked for the family law firm in Brooklyn, and my grandmother was a great beauty who had lived in Paris before WWI, and who most likely had numerous affairs.

Here they are:

(No, I have no idea what the hookah is about, I think they were just goofing around..)

A number of years ago, I started to read the great novels of the American writer Dawn Powell, who wrote in the 1930's and 40's.  One of the things I enjoyed about the novels was that most of them take place in the Greenwich Village milieu, featuring characters that could (I imagine) have been found in my grandparent's living room.   What later astonished me was that I later found out that Dawn Powell had actually lived in my grandparent's building, which was not a large one.  I don't know if they actually overlapped in time, but it is an amazing coincidence.

The building itself is still there, and has a remarkable facade, with decorations in carved  teak.  The neighboring building, built by a teak dealer, has an even more elaborate facade.


Pictures:

The neighboring window:

Seeing unexpected architectural flourishes like the above window is one of the things I love about walking around New York; you never know what you might see.

Les Troyens

This week we went to hear Berlioz's opera, "Les Troyens" at the Met.   This is a truly extraordinary opera, in a grand style, lasting five and a half hours, with intermissions.  The Met production was superb, both visually stunning, and with many scenes of large choral groups on stage, and even 24 dancers.  The choreography, by Doug Varone, involves not only the specified ballet numbers, but some of the major crowd scenes as well.  Berlioz's music is magnificently strange; it really seems to originate from Planet Berlioz, and nowhere else.   The music moves harmonically in totally unpredictable directions, and there are sonorities both beautiful and strange.   There are far fewer solo vocal parts than normal; the chorus has a huge role, and there are important dramatic moments where there is no singing at all, and the orchestra conveys the entire narrative.

It was a great privilege to hear this performed live by Met Orchestra in such an elaborate production.

A few pictures:

The above background appears as a reference to Italy, i.e. the Pantheon...

Beware of Greeks bearing gifts!