The Culture Vulture

Yesterday we took our houseguest around town to see the sights, ending up at a hall for a concert of chamber music, the opening performance of an organization that comes to Sarasota for a few weeks in June to teach a selection of music students.  The selections were various movements of composition of the Romantic era, Schubert and Brahms and the like, with a rousing performance in its entirety of a Beethoven violin concerto.  Our houseguest who plays the cello, although very much the amateur, like anyone from New York, was an instant critic, noting that the performers seemed singularly unprepared.  I had been basking in the pleasure of all these sad sounding Adagios, one after another, and could not have cared less.  It just sounded "real purty" to me.  A few years a very gifted amateur pianist was visiting us and I took him to the Philadelphia Orchestra advertised as being conducted by Segun.  But of course it was the road show and as my friend observed not only lacking Segun but also sporting a pianist who held back for sheer laziness from some of the well known pyrotechnics of the various pieces played. I guess, like the more commonplace lacklustre performance of theater down here, it's all about getting culture-lite for an audience that really doesn't care that much.  You can't escape the fact that people in the halls of culture don't resemble New Yorkers, but elderly retirees from the Midwest, and I guess that's just the way it is.  You're not going to get the stars of Broadway working a nursing home audience.  I can enjoy classical music without fretting over the performance.  I well remember going to the Met with my opera queen friends who dissected every bar of the program once we were on the way out, whereas I was basking in the spectacle and the sound and thoroughly pleased not to have noticed what they perceived as glaring imperfections.  Theater is much more of a challenge for me: stupid, boring, or inept verbalizations set my teeth on edge, the dullness drives me to leave at intermission.  Thankfully there is one young oufit here that has started their second season building on the reputation of a brilliant string of startling and challenging plays last season.  We've taken up watching a lot of television series, Downton Abbey obviously even if it is sooooo bad, and more recently another from Julian Fellows, Trollope's Dr Thorne.  And we went through The Good Wife loving the legal wrangling, and I put off by the emotionally unavailable Alicia Floreck and yearning of the oh so sexy Will, her law partner and potential lover.  Done with that, we picked up West Wing, and we've looked at Veep,  I scarcely check to see what reviews are in the Times anymore.  And it's all to the good, I tell myself.  I can't afford New York City theater tickets, I have more than once been seriously threatened by Times Square crowds toppling me to the ground.  Safety and serenity resides in the museums along Fifth Avenue and its hinterlands and on down to Murray Hill and the Battery.  Safe and sound and oh, so old.