no fancy title

It’s about 2:20 in the afternoon here in New York, and I’ve sat here in the lobby with my laptop struggling to think of a title for this post. None came, so ‘no fancy title’ will have to suffice. Friday was a busy – yesterday’s post covered everything up until about 4pm. I’ll pick up from there in today’s post.

Around 5:00 we walked from our hotel on W 55th/5th to our reception site on E 72nd/York. That’s about a 45 minute walk, and it’s always fascinating to me to observe the changes in a city’s emotional and physical landscape over the course of a relatively good walking distance [for Portlanders, I’d offer up the changes observable on Burnside Street walking from NW 23rd to SW Naito Pkwy]. We had a lovely time with composer LJ White, Matthew and Michael Dickman, and several wonderful patrons who made the trek with us to share in this historic Third Angle moment! Greg Ewer and I then made tracks to get all the way to Bargemusic in Fulton Landing (just at the foot of the east end of the Brooklyn Bridge) to hear a concert of music by three very talented composers who all went to school together at Juillard some years back. One of them,

Daniel Ott, has been a friend of mine for years, and hails from the same town in Washington where I grew up, and played in the same youth orchestra that I did. Greg and I arrived just moments before the doors were closed for the beginning of the concert. We were lucky that the titular barge stays moored to the dock, otherwise we’d have been left with nothing to do for the evening! As it was, it was fortunate that we arrived just in the nick of time, as Dan’s piece was first on the program. It was great to hear the music of three very different composers with distinctive voices receive such committed and electrifying performances. We joined the performers and composers at a local bar after the performance, and I was delighted to finally meet violist Nadia Sirota in the flesh! She’s one of the leading new music violists in New York these days, and is also the host of a radio program (Meet the Composer) devoted to talking with composers about their lives and music. We violists always seem to get along, and this was no exception, Nadia’s a lovely person who it was great to get to talk to for a few minutes!

After a bit too little sleep, we were back on the subway to make our way all the way down to Brookfield Place for our sound check. As usual, being in the venue with the sound system for the first time presented challenges – usually the opposite of what we’d anticipated. Fortunately, the sound team at Bang on a Can is top notch, and they’ll be working closely with our two composers to tune the sound during our performance Sunday afternoon.

The evening was spent going to see my first Broadway musical production of any kind – a revival of “On the Town” with music by Leonard Bernstein. It was a top notch production, with a superb cast and an crack pit orchestra that really made an already nearly perfect score and book come to life so vividly.

It’s now about 1:00 a.m., later today, Sunday, we’ll be playing our two sets of music for the marathon performance itself, and we cannot wait to represent Portland with much pride and the best performances we can provide.