Things Do Do in Sarasota (this is yesterday's blog, somehow not downloaded)

Yesterday evening we were listening to a performance of Brahms' Sonata in F minor for Viola and Piano presented by a group called La Musica, a group of musicians who  offer four concerts of chamber music in the opera house and then this one at another auditorium, always in the month of April, this being their the thirtieth year of performance.  Later in June there will be a series of chamber music concerts of faculty and students of a group studying in Sarasota.  During the winter Izaak Perlman runs a winter version of his Long summer camp for aspiring instrumentalists culminating in a charming orchestra group playing his orchestrations of chamber pieces.  Yesterday we could have stayed to hear Samuel Barber's Sonata for Cello and Piano in C minor, but both of us so awash in the ravishment of Brahms chose to leave while we were ahead.  Plus we were hungry and there was a great fish restaurant in the vicinity.  During the "season" we go to six performances of the Sarasota Symphony which does not have the most exciting programming but marvelous playing and sound, and to chamber music concerts put on by the chairs of the various instruments which are always much more interesting.  There are four or five operas on offer during the season where excellent principals as a rule mingle with relatively indifferent and poorly directed choruses.  The ballet in Sarasota is world famous right now garnering reviews in the New York Times for their performances of Ashton.  The Asolo Repertory Theater is sort of the Broadway of Sarasota catering to an audience of very old people who last saw a play, one senses in the Eisenhower era out in Ohio--it's a bridge and tunnel crowd you might say, that comes from all over the Midwest and Canada to escape the cold.  The Asolo's  student conservatory theater balances this by unpredictable and sometimes difficult pieces---I saw my first play by Annie Baker there;  then there is a black theater that puts on mostly musicals but this year also did three serious dramas ("Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," for example) not their strongest efforts, and a conglomerate theater company with many auditoriums which puts on a melange of musicals, comedy shows, in our estimation mostly shlock, and now the quite new and small intense Urbanite Theatre which devotes itself to edgy and difficult plays for which it has already developed a passionate following.  The jazz music is well represented in clubs and halls throughout the city, like the Friday afternoon two hour sessions at the Unitarian Church.  All of which is to say that there is usually something going on during the season.  (I did not even mention the summer season of the Banyan Theater.)  The curious feature is that for any given moment there is very little choice, and there are no sudden commercial shifts.  The art scene is far more institutional here, the result rarely random and unpredictable.  So as opposed to Manhattan the great feature about it all, I recognize and appreciate, is that it is predictable.  There is no desperate struggle for the almost sold out event of the must see artist.  Everything is plotted long in advance, the drive to the theater is easy, parking is plentiful, quality restaurants are waiting  in the near vicinity.  True enough, there is very little that makes you really tingle, throws you for a loop, leaves you shaken for days.  The audience is mostly beyond seventy and maybe those moments of strong emotion are just as well over.  And yet, and yet down twenty miles south the theater in Venice last November put on a production of "Hair" that was as strong as the one that opened on Broadway in 1968.