10.22.04

New York: Were walking, were walking…

Posted in Travels at 8:11 am by Leopoldo

Thursday, October 21, 2004
2:51 PM

I walked from 72nd and Broadway to 14th and 7th Avenue this morning. Along the way I stopped at the brand new Time Warner building on Columbus Circle and spent some time in the Samsung showroom playing with tiny little cell phones with built in cameras, MP3 players and other toys. 42nd street was crazy as usual with all kinds of geeks and freaks, some local and some imported moving about. I was surprised to see The Naked Cowboy is still out there shaking his moneymaker in tighty-whitties, years after I first saw him and in the cold of deep fall.

I stopped at Pen Station to see a Jeep climbing a building to a spot atop marked ‘Jeep Parking’. It was a nice stunt, which along with some good music had the undivided attention of passerbys.

I posted to a query looking for good eateries on the upper west side to PortlandFood.org and got some great replies. We tried one of the most recommended places, @SQC for lunch and had a good time of it. The menu was infused with various seafood dishes, which relegated me to a crafted minced sirloin burger that was pretty good. The Passion Fruit spritzer was excellent.

I have a standing-room ticket for Die Zauberflöte with production design by Julie Taymor tonight. I hope to find a seat open after the first intermission; I am not sure how well I will fare standing for the whole opera.

11:30 PM
The Magic Flute was quite excellent. I found both Tamino (Matthew Polenzani) and Pamina (Dorothea Röschmann) to be rather uninteresting. They both did a superb job singing their parts but neither put much character into their characters… they mostly stood there singing out to the audience like actors rehearsing their lines. Both Papageno (Rodion Pogossov) and The Queen of the Night (Erika Miklósa) though were simply stupendous. Papageno played his comic character well infusing him with a liveliness and humor that made it look like he would at any moment take flight. Likewise the Queen of the Night hit those high-f notes with such clarity and power that it sent chills down my spine. The production design was as expected otherworldly… literarily. Someone told me the 3 ladies looked like space aliens and as soon as they took their puppeteered heads off I knew exactly what they meant. I bought a cheap standing room ticket in the back of the orchestra level and was quite happy with it except for two scenes that had puppets that rose above my line of sight. The woman next to me told me it was her first opera, I told her this was an excellent place to start (it was my first opera as well, I saw The Magic Flute in Bogotá when I was seven).

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