At the weekend, I attended a concert of Jewish music entitle Pomegranates and Figs at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley. I went primarily to hear Kitka, the spunky all-female vocal ensemble which specializes in performing music from Eastern traditions. But I was equally curious about the other groups on the program — Teslim (pictured left — a gypsy- and folk-oriented string duo featuring Kaila Flexer on violin and viola and Gari Hegedus on a variety of plucked and strummed instruments including the oud and mandocello) and The Gonifs (a klezmer band led by Jeanette Lewicki on vocals and accordion.)

Flexer organized and emceed the concert. She managed to pull together a brilliant band of musicians, including guest string players (Shira Kammen, Julian Smedley, Leah Wollenberg and Liza Wallace), a virtuostic clarinettist (Peter Jacques) and a percussionist (Faisal Ghazi Zedan) to round out some of the numbers in her own set. What was less successful, however, was the format of the evening.

The entire first hour was devoted to some rather introspective music by Teslim & co which failed to go over in the draughty, barren and entirely unintimate setting of Zellerbach Hall. Starting off with just two musicians and building to include the extra players throughout the first half of the program didn’t seem to add much excitement. Only the final number before the intermission, which featured the sprightly Jaques on clarinet ignited a fire inside me.

Thankfully, the concert changed gear in the second half. Kitka performed a gut churning set of songs from all over the Jewish diaspora. I generally identify this group by their wild, penetrating and nasal sound. But during this set, the singers demonstrated a completely different aesthetic at times, singing lightly and gracefully. The two styles offset each other perfectly.

When Kitka quit the stage, The Gonifs performed some racy and touching Yiddish songs. I could have listened to this band play all night long. The musicians were not only virtuostic but had a great sense of humor. It was hard to sit still. If only Zellerbach Hall were more conducive to dancing.

The concert ended with a grand finale in the old fashioned sense of the word. Led by Flexer, all the musicians came on stage to perform the Yiddish standard “By Mir Bist Du Schein.” The Gonifs’ Lewicki sang the verses. She was joined by the members of Kitka, having exchanged their ethnic-y robes for plain black dresses and flamboyant 1930s style hair ornaments, on backing vocals. If I didn’t know it before, I know it now: These women can sing anything.

A newly published NEA survey of the U.S. theatre landscape between 1990 and 2005 entitled “All America’s A Stage” shows theatre companies to be remarkably resilient in troubled economic times. The ability of many performing arts organizations to keep going during periods of recession partially stems from the fact that they’re often run on shoestring budgets anyway so are at one level slightly more impervious to the yo-yoing economy. It also stems from the support that they get from their communities.

I’m always heartened by the way in which local communities come to the aid of their arts organizations in times of trouble, even when money might be scarce all around. Ten days ago, Shakespeare Santa Cruz (SSC), one the country’s most high profile Shakespeare festivals, announced that unless it could raise $300,000 by lunchtime today, December 22, it would have to cease operations.

The community rallied around the company and I’m happy to report that SSC has managed to exceed its target. At 1.25 p.m. PST, the company’s marketing officer confirmed an official figure of $416,417 received from more than 2,000 individual donors. As a result, the non-profit company, with its core staff of seven, can now move ahead with planning its 2009 summer season.

Over the week, the company’s website was bolstered by messages of support and sadness from members of the theater community. Playwrights Tom Stoppard and Donald Margulies, comedian Gene Gillette and actor Olympia Dukakis all sent empathetic words.

SSC has proposed a reduced 2009 budget of $1.45 million (down from $2 million in 2008). The new season, which runs from mid-July through August, includes Bardic stalwarts A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Julius Caesar and Margulies’ Shipwrecked!

As I ramp up for my classical radio hosting debut this Sunday on KALW 91.7 FM, I’ve been exchanging emails with Chris Van Hof (pictured left) the afternoon host on WXXI Classical 91.5 FM in Rochester New York about programing ideas. Chris (who also happens to be a professional trombonist, educator and music arranger) also sent me a list of very useful pointers about hosting a classical music radio show — his advice is invaluable to a novice such as myself. Chris tells me that he has only been in the radio business for a year. But his advice is so simply and eloquently put and makes such perfect sense that I asked if I could share his thoughts on my blog. He kindly agreed.

So without further ado, here is the Chris Van Hof Guide to Classical Music Radio Hosting:

When it comes to announcing, my biggest rule is to picture someone you know very well, and speak as though you’re speaking to just that one person. Don’t talk to “all those out in radio land” but instead talk personally to just one person.

As for programming, here are some simple concepts that are easy to apply to your music selection and planning:
– Seek variety of instrumentation (chamber, solo, orchestral, concerto, etc.)
– Seek variety of style (Baroque, modern, Romantic, traditional, etc.)
– Try to follow minor with major and vice versa in terms of tonalities, although major after major is fine.
– Look for clean transitions piece to piece. Unless you’re going for a surprise effect, for example, seek to follow a quiet ending with a pastoral beginning. Even with a talk break between pieces, this helps the listeners’ ears along. At the very least, temper your tone and delivery to either gear us up for the fast start, or calm us down for the quiet opening. In other words, match your speech to the music closest to it.
– Play music you like.
– Play artists you know (either know their work well, or know personally.)
– Once again, variety. As prevelant as it is nationwide, the Mozart Lunch Hour sucks.

Thanks to Chris. This advice couldn’t come at a better time as far as I’m concerned. It also strikes me that a lot of his points apply to other forms of radio broadcasting, not just classical music. Hope to put as much of the ideas into practice as I can this weekend.

For Chris’ blog, click here. To hear a live stream of his afternoon classical music show at WXXI, click here.

The City of San Francisco has thankfully decided to postpone its decision regarding Supervisor Aaron Peskin’s proposed radical cuts to the arts budget until midway through next year. If Peskin’s proposal had gone through earlier this week, key organizations like San Francisco Opera, SF Ballet and SF Symphony would have seen their civic contributions fall by as much as 50%.

In the meantime, as I talk to many local theatre companies about how the economic downturn is affecting their operations, it’s been interesting to hear how small outfits — those who don’t get much if any city funding so don’t have to worry so much about the aforementioned cuts — are weathering the storm.

I don’t want to go into too much detail here as my article on this subject will appear in SF Weekly on December 31. But one thing which small theatre makers are doing to keep going in tough times is banding together to share resources, audiences and staging concepts. The difficult economy is encouraging companies to look for co-productions and co-marketing opportunities with their peers. Examples include the SOMA Cultural Coalition (a group of arts organizations based in the South of Market area of town about which I devoted a blog post in October) and the Bay Area Professional Small Theatres group (BAPST), an organization run under the auspices of Theatre Bay Area which aims to create “an environment of professionalism for small theatre companies to thrive in.” Meanwhile, some companies are entering into individual relationships with fellow arts makers. For example, The Climate Theatre is a member of the SOMA Cultural Coalition, but is simultaneously making separate coproduction plans with other companies such as Encore and The Clown Conservatory.

These small companies are being pretty smart by taking the old axiom of “safety in numbers” to heart. Won’t it be ironic if the behemoths of the theatre world end up coming off worse as a result of the downturn than the minnows?

Last Thursday, I spent an hour in the company of Sarah Cahill, (pictured left) avant garde pianist extraordinaire and doyenne of the Bay Area classical music radio scene.

I have long admired Sarah’s musicianship and her wonderful weekly Sunday night classical music broadcast, Then and Now, on local NPR affiliate KALW 91.7 FM. I have also been curious about her established practice of commissioning living composers to write music for her to perform.

So I emailed Sarah to ask if I could meet her to find out more about what she does and how she does it.

We sat in a cafe in Berkeley near where Sarah lives, and talked about everything from Christmas music to the output of San Francisco’s commercial radio station, KDFC to the relationship between music and memory.

Much to my surprise, about half an hour into our conversation, Sarah asked me if I’d fill in for her on Then and Now next Sunday evening, December 21, from 8 to 10pm. I happily accepted the challenge.

Between now and then, I have the fun and slightly daunting task of coming up with two hours of classical music programming, including a playlist (obviously), a script, interviews and other features. This is something entirely new for me. Even though I’ve served as KALW’s regular theatre commentator for the past couple of years, I’ve never had to come up with more than a few minutes of material, and it’s all pre-recorded and edited by a staff producer. I don’t even have to go into the station — the producer comes to my house to record my commentaries.

I’m thinking of devoting my broadcast this Sunday to holiday season music. Nothing too original about that, I’ll admit. But in keeping with the non-mainstream concept of Sarah’s show, I’m interested in playing stuff that’s a little bit off the beaten track, both new, old and ancient. I don’t think the “Hallelujah Chorus” from Handel’s Messiah will be on my playlist, for instance. If you, dear readers, have any good ideas for me, please send them my way. And if you’re interested in catching the broadcast on Sunday evening and in the Bay Area, tune in to 91.7 FM. The show will also be streamed live on KALW’s website at http://www.kalw.org.

Last time I wrote about Santa Cruz, I described the unparalleled experience of eating a deep fried Twinkie (DFT) on the beach. I’ve had many good times in that laid back coastal town. Just last weekend, for instance, my couple of days in the city featured an array of cultural delights including a treat for the taste buds in the form of probably the most delicious cocktail I’ve ever imbibed in my life, not to mention a couple of good films and a wonderful evening spent in the company of a local Irish music outfit.

One aspect of Santa Cruz life that has made visits very worthy in the past has been the work of the city’s preeminent theatre company, Shakespeare Santa Cruz. As such, I was alarmed to receive an email forwarded from a friend while I was in town but which I ironically didn’t receive until I returned to my office, about the emergency state of the company’s finances. If the Board doesn’t raise $300,000 by Monday 22 December, the 27-year-old organization may have to close down. The San Jose Mercury News followed-up with a story about the crisis in yesterday’s paper. A few months ago I had the pleasure of profiling SSC’s then new artistic director, Marco Barricelli, for a profile in American Theatre Magazine. If anyone can pull the company out of this traumatic state of affairs, Mr. Barricelli can. He’s a great artist, a strong manager and, as someone who’s been through cancer, a survivor in the deepest sense of the word. Santa Cruz will not be the same without SSC and neither will the country’s non-profit theatre scene for that matter. I wish I had known about SSC’s financial woes when I was there over the weekend. Not that I could have written a check for $300,000 or anything like it. But I would definitely have made a beeline for the theatre. I would have bought a ticket to see the current holiday production of Wind in the Willows, tried to find out more about how things are going over there and talked about the company’s situation to all the locals I chatted with over the weekend.

On a slightly brighter note, here are some brief impressions of four highlights from my latest weekend in Santa Cruz:

1. The Wild Rovers at the Poet & Patriot Pub: This local, eight-member Celtic folk-rock band got a friendly if squat-looking downtown bar hopping until at least one in the morning when we left, with its lusty rendition of Pogues and Dubliners covers and fiery/sweet arrangements of traditional folk songs.

2. Milk: I wouldn’t normally dream of going to the movies in such a sunny coastal place as Santa Cruz. But it rained torentially all day Sunday, so there wasn’t much to do except hit the flicks. The gamut of emotions I felt while watching this biopic was extreme, ranging from sadness about the senseless deaths of Harvey Milk and George Moscone to amazement that equal rights issues have come so far in 30 years to anger that they haven’t come far enough (viz Prop 8.)

3. Zack and Miri Make a Porno: The perfect antidote to Milk. Lots of dick jokes and a touching story of young love. Enough said.

4. The Josephine at 515 Kitchen and Cocktails: Whenever I visit 515, my favorite spot for drinks, food and conversation in Santa Cruz, I order a champagne cocktail at the bar. Emily, the bartender, made me a drink I’ll never forget when she flavored my glass of bubbly with ginger-infused Bulleit bourbon and a hefty twist of lemon. The Josephine, as it’s called though no one at 515 seems to know why, is the best cocktail I’ve ever had in my life, hands down.

Once upon a time, the members of choral ensembles would stand at the front of a concert venue and simply sing their material. Occasionally they might sit in between songs if there were an instrumental interlude or solo, but in general, they pretty much stayed in one place.

I don’t know whether audiences complained of boredom or the singers complained of cold or pins and needles, but these days, it’s practically impossible to go to a choral concert and simply listen to the music in this country. There’s always some measure of “choreography” involved too.

The latest series of annual Christmas concerts given by the all-male a cappella ensemble Chanticleer is a case in point. I don’t think this remarkable group of singers stayed in the same configuration for more than one song. They processed in with candles, they changed position often between numbers. They even walked around the stage in a line like members of a chain gang at one point. Of course, there are musical reasons behind some of the physical movement — when performing an antiphonal work, for instance, it makes sense to separate out the main chorus from the smaller group. And one piece in Chanticleer’s program was rendered all the more intimate for being performed with the singers standing in an inwards-facing circle and spinning outwards during solo moments. Chanticleer performs all its choreography with machine gun precision, which is in some ways pleasing to the eye. At times though, when the physical movement somehow seems extraneous to the music, the effect feels all wrong — almost like watching a chorus line in an old fashioned musical, a synchronized swimming team or a military parade.

There are countless other groups — including the one I sing with regularly — who seem unable to simply stand in front of an audience, sing and then get off stage. They’re forever processing in and out and around the room (often with candles) and attempting to pique the audience’s interest with various unusual bits of blocking. But many groups don’t think this choreographic stuff through properly. It can look exceedingly scrappy if under rehearsed. This was the case during a concert I experienced a week and a half ago in San Francisco, when everyone in the ensemble processed in from the back of the venue to stand in a line down one side of the room, except for one confused soprano, who for some reason filed in on the wrong side of the room and then had to tiptoe along the front on her own to join the rest of the group. This inauspicious beginning didn’t bode well for the rest of the performance.

In short, I am getting a bit tired of the endless shuffling about of choral singers on stage. It’d be refreshing to go to a concert where people stand still for once and focus one hundred percent on what the audience has truly come to experience: the music.

December is a strange, hormonal time of year. We look back at the past 12 months and sigh and wonder where it all could have gone to and greet with trepidation the 12 that lie ahead, knowing that they too will be gone in a whisper.

This is the prevailing mood that hangs over Jake Heggie’s chamber opera,Three Decembers, which I caught in its west coast premiere at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley last night.

Based on Terence McNally’s short play Some Christmas Letters (and a Couple of Phone Calls) the opera charts the relationship between the members of an American family — a renowned stage actress by the name of Madeline Mitchell and her two adult children, Bea and Charlie. The action takes place over three decades. In Gene Scheer’s libretto, we first meet the characters in December 1986. Charlie’s boyfriend Burt is dying of AIDS, Bea is feeling less happily married than she should be and Madeline is being a self-centered diva / “absentee mother.” Cut to ten years later, and Charlie is lamenting the death, seven weeks previously, of Burt. Bea is coming to terms with being married to a philanderer and Mitchell is even more engrossed in herself than she’s ever been as she prepares to go to the Tony Awards ceremony. Fast forward again to December 2006, and Madeline is dead. The hatchet is deeply buried and Madeline’s children reminisce fondly about her at the funeral.

It’s hard not to get involved in the lives of all three characters. Heggie’s romantic, American musical-tinged writing goes straight to the heart. The soaring strings, melancholy winds and lush piano orchestration helps couch the story in wistful warmth. The cast all act and sing superbly. Heggie wrote the part of Madeline for the great American mezzo Frederica von Stade. Stade inhabits the diva with the poise and haughtiness a Chekhovian/Shavian matron. As comically self-centered as she is, we still feel empathetic towards her. Keith Phare tinges his Charlie with regret and resilience. We feel for his loss and also see his inner strength. And Kristin Clayton’s Bea is spiky and petulant, though we also feel her pain and her deep-seated love for her mother, as impossible as the relationship seems.

Despite the vacuum-like barrenness of Zellerbach Hall as a venue, the cast and on-stage chamber orchestra create an intimate experience. And yet for all the familial warmth, the production kind of left me feeling cold. It isn’t just the overbearing sentimentality of the ending, the kitschiness of the music, with its touches of Bernstein and Gershwin and Andrew Lloyd Webber, also creates a wall between the experience and my ability to surrender to it. Still, the piece definitely suits the emotions that typically go with this confusing, backwards-and-forwards-looking time of year.

Besides the very foolhardy or extremely thick, every writer knows that plagiarization is tantamount to professional suicide. Similarly frowned upon — unless a syndication agreement is in place — is the practice of writers selling on entire articles, or large unadulterated chunks of their writing, word-for-word to different publications under the pretense of having produced original, customized texts. But should the repurposing of a few sentences from one’s own writing for later use in an entirely different context be treated with the same amount of derision as the writer who attempts to pass off an article written for another publication as a completely fresh work?

Last week, I had an interesting debate with an editor over the fact that I drew on information from a blog post I had written many weeks previously about an art exhibition in the lede to a review I wrote of a play.

The exhibition struck me as a good starting point from which to launch a discussion of the play, so I repurposed, with minor changes, a few sentences of the material I’d written in my blog post in the opening two paragraphs of my review, before going on to devote the next 800 words of my 1000-word piece to talking about the play.

After filing my story, I found out that the publication has a rule — I guess I must have missed the memo — about writers not using any of their own previous work at all in their articles for the paper. Every word a journalist writes for the paper must be 100% original — whatever that means. By way of example, the editor told the story of a journalist who tried to pass off an entire article he’d written for a different publication as a new piece for this one. He was caught and given a stern lecture. Following our discussion, I re-wrote the lede, changing as many words and sentence constructions as I could in order to differentiate the opening paragraphs of my review from the original blogpost.

My changes didn’t seem to settle the issue, unfortuately, and my entire lede ended up on the cutting room floor. By the time the piece appeared in the paper, it was considerably shorter, jerkier, and lacked the crucial thread that linked the play with broader issues I hoped to discuss. It was a pity.

What I think this points to is a gray area in terms of how media outlets should approach the issue of self-plagiarization. There is clearly a difference between trying to fool an editor into publishing an article that has appeared somewhere else before and drawing on a few sentences of a blog post to create a larger cultural context for an arts review on an entirely different subject. Part of my job as an arts journalist is to make connections between different things going on in the culture and draw out trends. It’s a way of making sense of the world.

Interestingly, one question the editor asked was to do with economics. It seems that part of his reason for not allowing me to use my lede had something to do with the fact that he thought I had been paid for my blog post about the exhibition, which is not the case. Hopefully things will change one day, but so far, I have not received any revenues for blogging. When I told him this, he said, “well you are getting something out of it: exposure.”

Does “exposure” in an arts blog put me in the same category as the writer who self-plagiarized a whole pre-published article and tried to pass it off as an entirely new piece of writing? If this is the case, then what happened to me raises some crucial questions about the future of arts blogging.

I mean, I’m out there experiencing and blogging about plays, films, art exhibitions, concerts, operas, dance shows etc all year round. It’s my vocation. If I can’t refer to the content of any of these blog posts in my formal articles for media outlets, then my writing going forwards may be seriously hampered. It’ll probably be a lot more narrow and a lot less rich.

The alternative, of course, is to stop blogging and simply keep my daily thoughts about culture to myself in a private journal. I used to do this prior to starting my blog two years ago. That would be to take a step backwards though. It would be absurd.

Why are so many apparently intelligent people in America getting so excited about 30 Rock? The critically-acclaimed NBC television show about life behind the scenes of a fictional TV sketch comedy series has been getting a great deal of attention of late. It’s all I ever hear about at dinner parties these days.

Following Nancy Franklin’s intriguing review of the series in a recent issue of The New Yorker I decided I had to see what all the fuss was about.

I don’t own a TV. (My husband and I threw our old set out when we moved into our new house last year; for years it had been gathering dust unwatched in the corner of our former living room.) So I downloaded a couple of episodes from iTunes to slake my curiosity.

What a walloping disappointment. The humor seems completely canned to me — even the great Steve Martin, who guest stars as a crazed billionaire agrophobe in one episode I downloaded, failed to make me crack a smile. The characters are one dimensional. You flick a switch on the back of the dorky Jon Heder-like NBC page character Kenneth and he behaves exactly as you would expect someone who looks the way he does to behave. There are no surprises.

The acting across the board feels wooden — I’d defy any actor to pull off a dazzling performance when faced with these flaccid zinger-laced scripts. Franklin is right about Fey’s unappealing “competence” in the role of Liz Lemon, head writer for the fake series-within-a-series. But the critic is completely wrong about Alec Baldwin, who plays a prying network executive on the show. “The show’s true claim to fame, and a reason never to miss an episode, is Alec Baldwin, whose comic magnetism is so strong I’m surprised it hasn’t caused weather disturbances. He doesn’t steal scenes; he makes them rise and shine,” Franklin gushes. Granted, Baldwin inhabits his role with greater ease than most of the other actors in the show. But it’s still an unremarkable, carboard-like take on the well-worn stereotype of the haranguing, meddling, sleazy boss. Both Ricky Gervais and Steve Carell did a better job of bringing this cliche to life in The Office.

Celebrity so often gets in the way of objectivity. Fey has become such a huge star over the last couple of years — and especially since her brilliant impersonation of Sarah Palin in the runup to the election — that her aura seems to have blinded people to the shortcomings of her show.

Steven Winn, the eminent cultural critic and reporter from The San Francisco Chronicle, just penned his last column for the city’s flagging flagship newspaper.

In a way, this shouldn’t even qualify as news: Comings and goings — especially goings — are as common as unmarked graves in a war zone at media organizations across the land these days, so Winn’s departure is hardly surprising. Winn even hinted to me himself that he was thinking about moving on a few months ago when I met him for coffee at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It was the first time I’d met him in person and I’m still struck by how generous and candid he was with me that day about his job and future plans — I was a total stranger after all.

There seems little point in regurguitating the usual diatribe about how the media is going to hell and arts journalism is dying. (Arts journalism is very much alive, actually — it’s just going through a period of readjustment.) So let’s just take it as read that it was time for Winn to go.

Still, I will miss Winn’s presence in The Chronicle. He is one of the city’s liveliest cultural voices. For a time, the paper gave him a great role: Rather than restricting this man of peripatetic appetites to writing solely about theatre (which he did for 22 years as The Chron‘s lead theatre critic) the powers that be gave him carte blanche, more or less, to write about culture in the Bay Area in its broadest form. I loved reading Winn’s articles because you never knew what they’d be about from one issue of the paper to the next. The man wrote fluidly about everything from Hollywood blockbuster movies to classical music to art exhibitions.

In an economically happier, more media-friendly climate and market, newspapers, magazines, radio, Internet and TV properties would be elbowing each other out of the way to snatch Winn up. But we’re in San Francisco at the tail end of a beleaguering year. I wonder what 2009 will bring for Winn?

In his book This Is Your Brain On Music, neuroscientist/music producer Daniel Levitin discusses the way in which music, even snatches of pieces that we may not have heard for many years, serves to stimulate our memories: “When we love a piece of music, it reminds us of other music we have heard, and it activates memory traces of emotional times in our lives,” writes Levitin. “Your brain on music is all about…connections.”

Ever since I attended a concert performance of Benjamin Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols on Saturday evening, I’ve been following a long breadcrumb trail into the dusty recesses of my memory. The performance itself wasn’t all that remarkable. The Berkeley-based choral ensemble in question — Sacred & Profane — sang Julius Harrison’s arrangement for mixed, SATB choir competently and with concentration. The sound was light but lacked energy and warmth. Nevertheless, I came away from the experience with Britten’s music ringing in my ears.

The first thing I did was buy a recording on iTunes when I got home. I listened to many recordings, discarding some for using piano rather than the more authentic and lyrical harp accompaniment, and others for sounding too ethereal or warbly. I settled in the end on a 2003 Toronto Children’s Chorus recording which to my mind struck the perfect Christmasy balance between snowy lightness and a fireside glow.

Then, as I listened, the thought seeds that were planted in my mind during the live concert started to grow into full-bloomed memories. I found myself thinking back to being 14 again and singing the work in the East Kent Girls’ Choir, a chorus of girls aged between 11 and 18 based in my hometown, Canterbury. I found myself picturing our choir director, Mr. S–, an imposing and rather silly man with protruding nasal hair who doted over his favorites. Mr. S– was given to frequent fits of distemper. He kept slamming down the piano lid in the draughty rehearsal room that once served as part of the city’s prison every time we failed to give “Wolcum Yole!” (the salutation in the second number of Britten’s Ceremony) the right level of attack, which was very often.

Then, as I listened to “That Yonge Child” (track 4) my mind drifted to thinking about one of Mr. S’s favorites. A–  was the prettiest girl in the choir and had the most dazzlingly pure voice. A– sang that solo. I was about six years younger than A and I remember being in awe of the girl’s poise and the sweetness of her singing. Thinking back to A’s performance made the recent news I’d heard on the grapevine about her recent mental collapse all the more poignant. Funny how life turns out.

As I listened on, more and more thoughts and feelings ebbed through me. I’d never bothered to look up my old music teacher, Ms. P, up since I left school or checked out out the school’s website. By the time Britten’s glittering yuletide processional had ended, I had found old friends and acquaintances online and learned all the latest news about my music school and high school.

It’s amazing how one piece of music can trigger so much stuff. On the other hand, it doesn’t take much to set me off into a Proustian idyll these days. Perhaps I’m just getting doddery and nostalgic in my old age.