LECTURE

Harvard Club
Jim Cramer - Equity Trading

https://www.hcny.com/Default.aspx?p=DynamicModule&PageId=315984&ssid=206693&vnf=1

The Harvard Club of New York is on 44th between 5th and 6th.  It is a beautiful space.

Tonight's lecture was by Jim Cramer and he discussed the recent 60 Minutes Show article about how the stock market is fixed.  He considered that "No News Here."

It was a fun evening with dinner and lecture in beautiful and historic spaces.

LINCOLN CENTER

The Metropolitan Opera House
The Metropolitan Opera National Finals

https://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/auditions/national-council.aspx

We attended this event last year and immediately said we wanted to return.

I think I've figured out what it takes to win.  All of the finalists have beautiful, well trained voices that hit all the notes.  But, standing on the stage completely alone with a full orchestra in the pit, and then having to sing with your voice and no electronic amplification and "fill the house" is the test.  The Metropolitan Opera House is a huge room.  The ones who did not win had beautiful, well trained voices but they just couldn't create the required sound.  There's a lot of audacity required in thinking a singer can make that much sound.

The house is filled, the tension is thick, and the singing is superb.

 

Since it is a contest with winners and losers, the crowd buzzes between performances and oohs and aahs.  People and we score the singers on our programs as we follow along.  It's fun.

Rafael Moras is from San Antonio and attended St. Mary's University and The University of Texas at San Antonio.

http://www.classicalsinger.com/sites/index.php?pt=1&user_id=98273

TOUR

Walking Chocolate Tour
Meatpacking, West Village, and SOHO

We walked just under 3 miles moving from old, traditional chocolate shops to modern cutting-edge chocolate shops.  We ate samples at each and all of them!  

"Who doesn't like chocolate? Who doesn't love New York?! Come join your expert chocoholic tour guide for a delightful stroll through some of the New York's most decadent dessert boutiques and chocolatiers on the world famous Chocolate Tour of New York! From classic truffles to salty caramels, from dark chocolate almond bark to the most exquisite chocolate macaron, you'll be tasting the greatest chocolates the world has to offer on The Chocolate Tour of New York, if that doesn't satisfy your sweet tooth the great discounts will ensure you walk home with bags of chocolatey goodness for all the family...chocoholics everywhere will love this tour!"

• Food is included 8 tastings on the go (sidewalk tastings, or done inside the establishments)
• Capacity 20 people per tour guide
• Dress It's a walking tour, so wear comfortable shoes and clothing
• Weather Tour takes place rain or shine
• NeighborhoodMeatpacking District & Greenwich Village

Chocolate Tour Itinerary

Chelsea Market One of New York's best kept secrets and a foodies dream, this place is soawesomeit'scrazy!

Lilac Chocolates Roaring twenties candy shop remains cult fave, a fine selection of homemade mocha truffles, maple walnut fudge, chocolate cream rolls and the almond bark is to die for!

Chocolate Bar Chocorgasm pioneer Alison Nelson brings the real taste of chocolate to the West Village!

Magnolia Bakery It's a crime to go to NYC and not try one of these cupcakes!!

Milk & Cookies No chocolate tour would be complete without a warm baked choc chip cookie.

Bisous Ciao Luxurious and chic French macarons inspired by Paris and created in downtown NYC

Xocolatti's Soho's newest and most innovative chocolatier, try the mango paprika slate and see what the fuss is about

Pasticceria Bruno The best chocolate Cannoli in New York. Period!

Vosges Designer chocolates spiced with an array of exotic flavors ranging from allspice to ginger to hemp seed to wasabi!

LINCOLN CENTER

Avery Fisher Hall
New York Philharmonic

Orion - Vivier
Symphony No. 9 - Bruckner
Manfred Honeck - Conductor

Below is the review from the New York Times.

MUSIC|MUSIC REVIEW

Mystical and Searching, and Very Last-Minute

By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

MARCH 28, 2014

        

Manfred Honeck Mr. Honeck conducted the New York Philharmonic Thursday night at Avery Fisher Hall.

Recently, Gustavo Dudamel, the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, brought that orchestra to Avery Fisher Hall for two sold-out concerts. He was scheduled to conduct three performances at the hall of a program with the New York Philharmonic starting Thursday night. But last weekend Mr. Dudamel, the charismatic young Venezuelan maestro, came down with severe flu symptoms, which forced him to withdraw.

The intriguing program he had chosen paired “Orion,” a mystical 1979 score by the Canadian composer Claude Vivier, with Bruckner’s searching Ninth Symphony. On short notice, Manfred Honeck, the music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, where he has been thriving since 2008, agreed not only to take over for Mr. Dudamel but to conduct the same program. Mr. Honeck, who made his debut with the Philharmonic last year, drew assured and exciting performances of both works from the players, who looked and sounded inspired.

Vivier, born in Montreal in 1948, moved to Paris in 1982. He was stabbed to death the next year in his apartment, a month before he turned 35, by a 19-year-old man. “Orion” shows what a loss his untimely death was to 20th-century music.

The young Vivier was drawn to the circle of composers then experimenting with atmospheric sounds and electroacoustic techniques, especially Stockhausen, with whom he studied in Cologne. This 15-minute score, which takes its name from the constellation Orion, begins with subdued string tremolos and what seems a tentative hunting call for trumpet. Is the mood pensive or rousing? The ambiguity ends as bursts of brass, spiky chords and jittering rhythmic figures send the music into dizzying spirals. This was the Philharmonic’s first performance of the piece, and the playing was impressively vibrant and colorful.

Bruckner completed the first three movements of his Symphony No. 9 in D minor, leaving only sketches for what was to be a formidable finale. As it is, the incomplete work lasts about an hour.

The first movement opens with a tremulous, subdued hum from which melodic fragments emerge. The similarity in character to the opening of the Beethoven Ninth, also in D minor, has long been noted. On this night the more intriguing resemblance was to the opening of Vivier’s “Orion,” something Mr. Dudamel had surely wanted us to hear.

Revealing the structure of the mysterious 25-minute first movement is a conducting challenge. Bruckner alternates moments of Schubertian grace with stretches of Wagnerian frenzy. Often, in making transitions, he simply has the music stop whatever it is doing, take a breath and move on.

The overall design and narrative flow came through in the compelling performance led by Mr. Honeck, who, like Bruckner, was born in Austria. He kept things reined in just enough to reveal the music’s breadth and shape. He brought ferocity to the pummeling chords of the defiant main theme of the Scherzo and offered a luminous, rich-textured account of the mystical Adagio. During Mr. Honeck’s first curtain call, the Philharmonic players remained in their seats and applauded him along with the audience.

CLAUDE VIVIER (1948-1983)Orion (1979)When Claude Vivier was fatally stabbed in his apartment on the night of March 8, 1983, an unfinished manuscript for a choral work lay on his worktable: Crois-tu en l'immortalité de l'âme? (Do You Believe in the Immortality of the Soul?), which, according to The Guardian, is a dramatized monologue in which the composer describes a journey on the metro during which he becomes attracted to a young man. The music breaks off abruptly after the line: “Then he removed a dagger from his jacket and stabbed me through the heart.” It’s as though he had predicted his own death. He was 34. Born in Montreal, Canada, he grew up in an orphanage and later attended a school for boys destined for the priesthood. But his time was limited there—he was expelled for “inappropriate behavior.” He subsequently went to Europe, acquainting himself with the likes of Stockhausen and the “spectrum analyzers” but then went his own way. In his music he was preoccupied with the themes of childhood, death, love, and immortality. In 1976 Vivier traveled from Asia to the Middle East, soaking up the sounds of those cultures. The approximately 15 minutes-long work Orionevokes those sounds. The Montreal Gazette referred to Orion’s “otherworldly sonorities and exuberant rhythms…the spirit of joyous melody…wildly spontaneous yet true to itself.” The Ruhr Trienale program book summed up the man and the artist: “Claude Vivier remains one of the most enigmatic composers of the twentieth century. [He] left behind a singular and extensive body of work. In its individuality and spirituality, it is like a lone star in an empty sky. Ultimately, Vivier threw himself into this dark night, ending his life in what can be regarded as a final, definitive dramatic performance. … A man encapsulates his life in music, and in doing so increasingly blurs the line between life and art and ends his work by fusing both.”


ANTON BRUCKNER (1824-1896)Symphony No. 9 in D Minor (1887-1896)Bruckner’s Symphony No. 9 is his final symphonic masterpiece. Due to his physical weakness and pleurisy, he finished only three movements, and he would spend most of his last two years working on the third movement Adagio. After his death well-meaning people tinkered with his works—including this symphony—and there has been much debate about what Bruckner intended, what is original material, and what to do with the sketches the composer left for a fourth movement. Most orchestras present only the three that Bruckner completed, which are magnificent on their own. Among the hallmarks of his symphonies is the frequent use of long rests. As Neal Gittleman (music director, Dayton Philharmonic) has pointed out, being an accomplished organist, Bruckner was familiar with the grand interiors of churches in his native Austria and with the interaction of organs with these resonant spaces (i.e., when a chord releases, the room continues to echo with that chord). Bruckner may have wanted to create that effect in his orchestral works. Says Gittleman, “The reverberation is actually an integral part of the composition. [One] could say that Bruckner tries to turn the orchestra into a massive pipe organ.” Words like “epic,” “monumental,” and “timeless” are usually applied to Bruckner symphonies. They belong to a world of their own—a time conception of their own. Once listeners allow themselves to get in synch with Bruckner’s pulse, their patience is rewarded. There is no denying that the Ninth inspires awe, as its massive, sweeping score unfolds and rises sublimely—like spires of a grand cathedral—to God. As the composer’s dedication of the Ninth Symphony reads: “To the Lord of Lords, to my dear God, my last work, and hope that He will grant me enough time to complete it and will generously accept my gift.”

LECTURE

One Day University
Powerful Memory Secrets

We're going to give this a try and see if it helps?!

Peter Vishton / The College of William and Mary 

"What was the name of your first pet? Where did you put your house keys? How do you get to work every morning? Most likely, you didn't need to look up the answers to these questions. You remembered them. Memory is, without a doubt, the most powerful (and practical) tool.

By linking both your past and your future, memory gives you the power to plan, to reason, to perceive, and to understand. As long as thinking and insight are important in how we live our lives, memory will be critical as well. And the better your memory, the more information you'll have at your immediate disposal and the better your thinking will be. Yet while all of us have an amazing capacity for memory, there are plenty of times when it seems to fail us. Why does this happen? And how can you fix it?

According to award-winning Professor Peter M. Vishton of The College of William and Mary, an engaging cognitive scientist who has spent decades studying the secrets of human memory, the problem is simple. "Our brains were not really built for the types of memory challenges we give them in classrooms, offices, and throughout our daily lives," he says, "So the central trick to enhancing the power of your memory is to transform things that are hard to remember into things that are easier for your brain to encode and later recall.”

This insight lies at the heart of his captivating course. You'll explore the real research (not the fads) on how memory functions—and then apply these findings to help you make better use of the memory abilities you have. By tapping into a series of scientifically proven strategies, tricks, and techniques, and by practicing them through dynamic exercises, you'll emerge from this short course with the ability to process information more effectively and increase your chance of remembering almost anything you want."

THEATER

Club 54
Cabaret

http://www.broadway.com/buzz/175047/life-is-a-cabaret-once-again-performances-begin-at-studio-54-starring-michelle-williams-alan-cumming/

Dramatic.  Studio 54 was an interesting venue.

THEATER

Polonsky Theater
King Lear - Shakespeare



Well, here's to a beautiful Saturday afternoon filled with murder, intrigue, and sadness.  We're going to see King Lear!

Below is the New York Times' review.  Our seats were the best in the house and Carolyn sat next to the critic.  He liked the show.

THEATER|THEATER REVIEW

Shakespeare Reimagined, Once Quietly, and Once Very Loud

‘King Lear,’ With Michael Pennington, Opens in Brooklyn

By BEN BRANTLEYMARCH 27, 2014

        

 “King Lear” has lowered its voice, the better to be heard more clearly. The bluster quotient has been toned down in Arin Arbus’s thoughtful and affecting interpretation of this most daunting of tragedies, which opened on Thursday night at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.

Oh, don’t worry. Thunder still rumbles, swords still clack noisily, and men still shout in defiance at the unbearable cruelties of the gods. Blood flows copiously enough to unsettle the squeamish, and that long-awaited fifth-act chorus of “howls” is appropriately loud and harrowing.

Yet more than any “Lear” I’ve seen (and nobody knows all the “Lears” I’ve seen), this Theater for a New Audience production gives the impression of talking to — rather than yelling at — its audience. “Come closer,” it seems to say. “Listen carefully. You might just find yourself in what’s being said.” No matter that you and your own kin will never be royals.

For Ms. Arbus is here to remind us just how much “Lear” is a story not only of dynasty but also of families, with all their mixed-up rivalries and affections. Starting with the British actor Michael Pennington’s delicate portrait of a paterfamilias who has never taken the time to know his daughters but now expects the world of them, this “Lear” is less electrifying epic tragedy than absorbing domestic drama.

Some theatergoers may regret the absence of an unconditionally volcanic Lear, who struts and rants his hours upon the stage in ways that force us into awe-struck submission. But after decades of watching high-voltage versions — and this year’s contenders have already included Frank Langella (a power-addicted Lear at the Brooklyn Academy of Music) and Simon Russell Beale (a Stalinesque Lear at the National Theater In London) — I welcomed the chance to get to know the old guy under more relaxed circumstances.

By relaxed, I don’t mean casual or accidental. Ms. Arbus has obviously been conscientious in her reading of this play, and in turning her insights into action. But instead of imposing big conceptual metaphors (“Lear” in Bosnia! “Lear” in a Soviet dictatorship!), she works from the inside out.

The key here lies in the relationships between parents and progeny, and among siblings. Ms. Arbus starts with the everyday to build toward the monumental.

Let’s take the opening scene, in which the old King, who has decided to retire, asks his three daughters to say how much they love him before he rewards them with their inheritance. When Cordelia (Lilly Englert), his youngest and favorite, refuses to lay on the flattery, he snaps and orders her banishment.

As Mr. Pennington plays the moment, you can tell that Lear regrets what he’s said as soon as the words leave his mouth. There’s a softening plea in his glowering eyes that seems to say: “I didn’t mean it. Get me out of this.”

I don’t know about you, but I’ve certainly experienced family quarrels in which an ostensibly small slight assumed a long and smothering life of its own. The imp of the perverse (to borrow from Poe) is never more self-sabotagingly present than in arguments with loved ones, when feelings run so deep that we can’t even fathom them.

The sorry events that follow here seem personally upsetting because you’re so aware that none of this would have happened if Lear had thought before he spoke. Mr. Pennington makes it clear that Lear’s subconscious never stops slapping him in rebuke from that moment on.

His anger also lights a match to the combustible powder of which his family has always been made. This production is unusually strong in suggesting the dysfunctional dynamics that operate among Lear’s daughters. The elder two, Goneril and Regan (Rachel Pickup and Bianca Amato, both superb), seem steeped in a history of sibling squabbles and power games. For once, I believed that they, along with Ms. Englert’s youthfully severe Cordelia, were truly blood-bound.

The same ties of consanguinity are evident in the parallel family of the Earl of Gloucester (a touchingly goatlike Christopher McCann) and his sons, the scheming Edmund (Chandler Williams) and the virtuous Edgar (Jacob Fishel). The brothers have an easygoing rapport when we first meet them, and Edmund’s subsequent perfidy feels more than ever like an act of unspeakable violation.

That’s what this “Lear” is about: how blindly and instinctively we rely on our families, and how shocked and solitary we feel when that trust is betrayed. Mr. Pennington’s King is someone who has assumed unthinkingly that a certain social structure will always be in place for him.

After his elder daughters’ rejection, he seems truly stunned out of his wits, and he always appears to be musing, “It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.” Mr. Pennington punctuates the expected blasts of rage with a quieter, introspective insight that is even more devastating. As a man who ran a country for years, he knows the dangers of chaos, and you can sense him trying to find a steady island of calm within his own disordered wits.

In variety of shadings, not all the cast — which also includes a serviceably gruff Timothy D. Stickney as the trusty Earl of Kent — is on Mr. Pennington’s level. And making Lear’s Fool (a callow Jake Horowitz, the son of the company’s artistic director, Jeffrey Horowitz) a saucy boy pariah strips an essential depth from his relationship with the King.

But if some of the performances are one-note, they all combine into a clear, often haunting melody. Its motifs are beautifully echoed by the design team, which includes Riccardo Hernandez (the uncompromisingly spartan set) and Susan Hilferty (the stately Edwardian costumes).

Most crucially, Marcus Doshi’s lighting and Michaël Attias’s sound and music design summon a world in which the senses career between confusion and clarity. A sequence in which the blinded Gloucester stands alone amid the cacophony of battle is exquisite.

And for the fabled storm on the heath, we shift between muddled darkness and sudden, startling brightness. In those precious moments of illumination, we are allowed what feel like flashes of complete understanding, the kind that come to us in dreams and vanish by morning. Mostly, we’re left groping in the shadows, trying to make sense of the people we thought we knew best.

Below is a Wall Street Journal review of the production.

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

He's a Guide to Fellow

Shakespeareans

His 'spare information' goes into books aimed at

other actors.

By

JOANNE KAUFMAN

March 19, 2014 5:09 p.m. ET

Brooklyn, N.Y.

With his red sneakers, loose-fitting blue trousers and scruffy beard, Michael Pennington looked rather like a vagrant as he walked through a gentrifying neighborhood here.

But perhaps that was just his way of getting into character; Mr. Pennington, 70, is playing a homeless man, an elderly imperious fellow down on his luck and down on his daughters, in the Theatre for a New Audience's production of "King Lear," directed by Arin Arbus. Currently in previews, it opens March 27.

Ken Fallin

Mr. Pennington isn't exactly a household name in the U.S., except perhaps to those "Star Wars" obsessives who send fan mail hailing his performance as imperial officer Moff Jerjerrod, commanding officer of the Death Star, in "Return of the Jedi." But in his native England he's an acclaimed classical actor whose many stage credits include leading roles with the Royal Shakespeare Company—among them, Angelo and the Duke in "Measure for Measure"; the title roles in "Hamlet" and "Timon of Athens"; star turns in "The Madness of George III," "The Master Builder" and "The Dance of Death." He also frequently tours in his one-man show "Sweet Will," a tribute to Stratford-upon-Avon's favorite native son.

"Michael is brilliant—emotionally, technically and intellectually," Patrick Stewart said. Ian McKellen, meanwhile, described Mr. Pennington as "one of theater's matchless treasures. His acting style is modest and detailed, supported by intelligence and unrivaled experience.

"Brooklyn audiences are lucky to be the first to see his long-awaited King Lear," Mr. McKellen added. "I'll be among them."

Mr. Pennington is also an impresario (from 1986 to 1994 he was co-head of the English Shakespeare Company), a scholar of the Bard, and the author of books like "Twelfth Night: A User's Guide" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream: A User's Guide." The pages of his "Hamlet: A User's Guide" were apparently well-thumbed by Simon Russell Beale and Jude Law during their respective stints as the prince of Denmark. "They told me how helpful it was, though maybe they were just being nice to me," said Mr. Pennington over a cappuccino last week. "I made them swear on their swords that they actually read it."

The road to his current undertaking was lined with ambivalence. "If you do a lot of Shakespeare, 'Lear' is something you're supposed to want to do," Mr. Pennington said in his flexible, silvery voice. "So you have to work out in your mind whether you really want to do it and if you have anything particular to bring to it other than what other people have brought to it, or if it's just something that lies in your path."

He felt no particular yearning until half-a-dozen years ago, when he played composer Richard Strauss in Ronald Harwood's play "Collaboration." "Strauss isn't a particularly Lear-like character, but he is an old man who regrets much of what he's done," Mr. Pennington said. "I was having breakfast one morning, and I threw my towel down and said 'I want to do "Lear" now, right now.' It was a startling thing, so sort of thespy, but I thought 'I could do it now.'"

The wheels were set in motion when, in 2010, Mr. Pennington came to New York with the two-hander "Love Is My Sin," an adaptation of select Shakespeare sonnets assembled and directed by Peter Brook and produced here by Theatre for a New Audience. At the opening-night party, Mr. Pennington met Ms. Arbus, TFANA's associate artistic director, and was immediately intrigued. "I'm not particularly interested in talking about Shakespeare to too many people," he said. "But we went to brunch and had a really interesting time."

Eighteen months ago, the two arranged a weeklong "Lear" exploration. "We sat around the table and went at the play without prejudice so that at the end of the time we could say 'this isn't going to work,'" Mr. Pennington said. "Well, I had the time of my life, and I said 'I really want to do this.'"

The only child of a lawyer and a housewife, Mr. Pennington was 11 when, unwillingly, he saw his first Shakespeare play. "My parents said, 'You have to come and see this.' Not because they were particularly keen on it—they just thought it was part of my education. They picked 'Macbeth,' which, as it happened, was a very good choice.

"The effect it had on me was completely visceral," he continued. "A lot of it had to do with the Tarantino-like theatricality of that production: a lot of blood, a lot of ghost effects. But there was also something about the language.

"Afterward, I went home, pulled a volume of Shakespeare off the shelf and started reading it out loud."

Thus, his course was set. "I knew what I wanted to do and never thought about anything else," said Mr. Pennington, who acknowledges that he's been less than canny about the management of his career. It was down to Jeremy Irons and him for the leading male role in "The French Lieutenant's Woman," Mr. Pennington claimed, and "I backed out of the race because I was offered 'Hamlet' at the RSC.

"I didn't stop doing Shakespeare and go do something else like Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen," he added. "The proper thing is to leave and come back with a certain reputation and more power. Somehow I missed a beat in all that."

Mr. Pennington began writing his Shakespeare guides as a way of recycling what he terms his spare information. "I've done these plays so often, and yet there are things I haven't been able to use. I know stuff about how the plays seem to work best.

"I know that 'Coriolanus' is difficult because the battle scene is at the beginning, rather than at the end where it usually is—thus you're exhausted after half an hour. So how are you going to get yourself up when you have the whole of the play ahead of you? I know that 'Hamlet' has various problems of logic from one scene to another that you had better be aware of. I don't have solutions, just guarded recommendations."

Alas, there is yet no "King Lear: A User's Guide," but Mr. Pennington seems well-versed in the challenges of the role. "You have such a little window with Lear," he said. "You've got to be convincingly enough that age"—Shakespeare gives the character's age as "four score and upward"—but you also have to have the energy and the memory for the part. And that's always been the problem. There are actors, brilliant actors, who have played him a bit too late when they just didn't have the physical stamina."

Mr. Pennington doesn't have to have any such concerns. "I feel about 50," he said. "I get tired washing the dishes or walking to the corner shop, but I never get tired acting."

Ms. Kaufman writes about culture and the arts for the Journal.