I went up to Avery Fisher Hall this morning to purchase my ticket for the New York Philharmonic's New Year's Eve Gala with Angela Gheorghiu. This is the first day that tickets for the season went on sale so the line was pretty long, rather to my horror as I had to be at work at 11:00 AM and I pretty much had to be out of there by 10:15 if I wanted to be sure I'd be at work on time. To my delight, Philharmonic employees were passing out pieces of pound cake and water or soda to the people on line! I suppose this was being done because it was the first day, but it was an extraordinarily thoughtful gesture, and the cake was superb, really rich and buttery. It reminds me of stories about how in the days of Rudolf Bing's rulership of the Met he used to order coffee to be served to the people on the Standing Room line in the wintertime. Not a gesture I would have expected from him, and I can't remotely imagine Joseph Volpe doing something like that! Admittedly, I think the standee line is inside on the concourse in the winter.
This almost makes up for having to drink the dreadful water that comes out of Avery Fisher Hall's fountains. I had considered writing a protest letter to the Phiharmonic demanding that they get a water filtering system or a water cooler, but, as I should have realized, they're trying to force the patrons to buy the bottled water from the refreshment stands.
There were other tickets I would have liked to buy for the Philharmonic, such as concerts conducted by Marin Alsop and Xian Zhang, but I only had so much money, and Angela, of course, was the priority!
(I did get to work about 5 minutes late. No big whoop. They're pretty relaxed on Sunday.)
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