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That was exhausting.
We went to have lunch with Alan yesterday afternoon after their plane got in, and ended up faffing around in Amoeba, the biggest record store ever, when it was delayed an hour and a half. I bought David a Christmas present.
Navigating downtown LA proved to be a greater challenge than Stephan expected, but we found the Omni Hotel okay (swanky swanky) and picked up a joyous Alan and went to find lunch of some geographically compatible variety. One circle of downtown, one accidental entrance into a private parking lot with a door that closed behind us, and one upside-down map later, we got to the Daily Grill, where we had a very snide, very late lunch and wavered over how much to tip the incompetent but charismatic waiter. Stephan was in full mockmode, Alan was a dopey puppy, and the food was only sometimes good. We did end with time to spare, and only got lost a little bit on the way back to Disney Hall.
However, after dropping Alan off (Chanticleer had a rehearsal at 5:30), we decided it would be unwise to go anywhere else before the 8:00 concert, so we killed two and a half hours. We went over the bookstore with a fine-toothed comb (some good recordings, pretty picture books about the gorgeous hall, and a spectacular box of mints called Oral Fixation, which Stephan couldn't resist), marveled at the architecture, and then sat in the lobby and played Botticelli. This is a game much like 20 questions, except only about people (historical, fictional, or otherwise), and with no limit on the questions. I got pretty good at the end, there; it took him over half an hour to figure out Little Red Riding Hood.
So, then was the concert. In the most acoustically live hall in the universe. With one of the worst audiences I've ever been in, although their noise was certainly amplified by the unique acoustics. We had cheapish seats behind the stage, rather than in front of it, but the sound wasn't so much muffled as dynamically reduced while maintaining quality. You could hear everything, all the time; before the show started, every conversation in the audience was clearly audible, if you had the ability to focus on it; there was no dull road, but a multitude of individual voices. This was not helpful during the concert when a cell phone rang (more than once, which boggles my mind; how do you let something like that happen, after it's already happened to someone else once in a night?) or an elderly deaf couple whispered to each other or the ushers had a conversation or the lady in front of us twiddled her thumbs with her jingle-bell bracelet on.
Also, as Alan told us over lunch, the stage can't hear itself. It showed up in the performance as the occasional tuning problem, totally unexpected in an ensemble of Chanticleer's caliber, and slightly shocking. But it stayed very occasional, and the blend and dynamic sensitivity and tone quality (except for a few things, but that's more personal preference than objective evaluation) and the musicianship were all to die for, as they ought to be. So it was as nearly an a capella religious experience as the King's Singers concert in London was. They sang a Christmas program, of course, and began with a perfect-unison plainchant entrance onto a darkened stage, each with a candle. Gimmicky, sure, but effective. The other moments that stand out are the Latin American pieces (Stephan was bubbling with excitement), the Renaissance pieces, and the gospel encores. As well as the Biebl Ave Maria, which was their second encore. That's the first piece I obsessed over in the Rice Chorale, when I was in seventh grade or so and Karim was the tenor in the solo trio. It melted me thoroughly.
I heard from everyone talking about the show afterwards that the audience was captivated, there was a crazy supportive atmosphere, and that they could feel the love. This surprised me, because I couldn't feel the love. Maybe I was distracted by the audience noise, which I interpret as disrespect, but is really just lack of acclimation to the hall. Still, it was a lovely concert. Stephan and I found Betsy (his high school mentor, who is extremely cool), and hung about waiting for Alan to get out of his mingling duties and hang out with us, but he found us and talked a bit and then had to go make an appearance at a board-member meeting mingly thing, so he told us to go get coffee somewhere and he'd call when he got out.
Luckily, there was a coffee place right next to the hall, and Stephan and Betsy and I had scintillating conversation (mostly Stephan) and embarrassing stories (mostly me, about Stephan) and learned discourse (mostly Betsy and Stephan) till Alan, showed up, still in white tie and tails. It was highly amusing, and the dessert (I got exotic sorbet flavors, though we all shared everything) was spectacular (if exorbitantly priced). Betsy had to go after awhile, but then Alan's friend Jen showed up, so our table kept the full complement of corners for as long as we stayed.
Eventually the time around a table got to us, and Jen had to go, so Stephan and Alan and I found our way (with a surprising amount of trouble, after midnight) to the level of the parking garage we'd left the car on. Walking through a parking garage, rather than taking stairs or an elevator, leads one to appreciate its acoustics. Alan is a virtuoso whistler, and he did beautiful performances of the Brahms Lullaby and Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas before we got to the car.
The suggestion (Alan's, don't look at me! Though I support the idea) was to go find some eye makeup to put on him, since the gay complement of Chanticleer attacked him with it once and took phone pictures and he sheepishly admitted he liked the result. The downfall of this idea was that there's nowhere to buy makeup after midnight in downtown LA. So we took him back to his hotel.
The valet guy was unbelievably kind, taking Stephan's car as a personal guest and letting us stay an hour with no charge, so we went up to Alan's room and tried to guess where the 5-7 sexuality split in Chanticleer falls (and failed), before starting a a game of rummy. Stephan won, but just barely (I crashed and burned, since I only remember the rules for Liverpool). Before too long, Stephan had to take me back, so we said goodbye and discussed the evening thoroughly in the car on the (remarkably empty, at 1:30am) freeway drive home.
It was an extremely high-energy day and evening, and I hadn't slept very well on Stephan's floor, so it was all just slightly dampened; my neck and shoulders were sore, my mind was not on top of things, but I wasn't so much sleepy as just tired. That changed to thorough exhaustion once back at Stephan's, but his mom and stepdad came in around 4:30 with the news that his dad (who is 73) had been taken to the hospital after a fall and was vomiting blood. They went, I stayed and tried not to think too hard about anything, and eventually fell back asleep. Turns out, the collapse was from dehydration from the fasting he'd been doing for health purposes, and the blood was from an ulcer with the same cause. He'll be okay, but it was pretty scary. I'm going back to sleep, as is Stephan.
We went to have lunch with Alan yesterday afternoon after their plane got in, and ended up faffing around in Amoeba, the biggest record store ever, when it was delayed an hour and a half. I bought David a Christmas present.
Navigating downtown LA proved to be a greater challenge than Stephan expected, but we found the Omni Hotel okay (swanky swanky) and picked up a joyous Alan and went to find lunch of some geographically compatible variety. One circle of downtown, one accidental entrance into a private parking lot with a door that closed behind us, and one upside-down map later, we got to the Daily Grill, where we had a very snide, very late lunch and wavered over how much to tip the incompetent but charismatic waiter. Stephan was in full mockmode, Alan was a dopey puppy, and the food was only sometimes good. We did end with time to spare, and only got lost a little bit on the way back to Disney Hall.
However, after dropping Alan off (Chanticleer had a rehearsal at 5:30), we decided it would be unwise to go anywhere else before the 8:00 concert, so we killed two and a half hours. We went over the bookstore with a fine-toothed comb (some good recordings, pretty picture books about the gorgeous hall, and a spectacular box of mints called Oral Fixation, which Stephan couldn't resist), marveled at the architecture, and then sat in the lobby and played Botticelli. This is a game much like 20 questions, except only about people (historical, fictional, or otherwise), and with no limit on the questions. I got pretty good at the end, there; it took him over half an hour to figure out Little Red Riding Hood.
So, then was the concert. In the most acoustically live hall in the universe. With one of the worst audiences I've ever been in, although their noise was certainly amplified by the unique acoustics. We had cheapish seats behind the stage, rather than in front of it, but the sound wasn't so much muffled as dynamically reduced while maintaining quality. You could hear everything, all the time; before the show started, every conversation in the audience was clearly audible, if you had the ability to focus on it; there was no dull road, but a multitude of individual voices. This was not helpful during the concert when a cell phone rang (more than once, which boggles my mind; how do you let something like that happen, after it's already happened to someone else once in a night?) or an elderly deaf couple whispered to each other or the ushers had a conversation or the lady in front of us twiddled her thumbs with her jingle-bell bracelet on.
Also, as Alan told us over lunch, the stage can't hear itself. It showed up in the performance as the occasional tuning problem, totally unexpected in an ensemble of Chanticleer's caliber, and slightly shocking. But it stayed very occasional, and the blend and dynamic sensitivity and tone quality (except for a few things, but that's more personal preference than objective evaluation) and the musicianship were all to die for, as they ought to be. So it was as nearly an a capella religious experience as the King's Singers concert in London was. They sang a Christmas program, of course, and began with a perfect-unison plainchant entrance onto a darkened stage, each with a candle. Gimmicky, sure, but effective. The other moments that stand out are the Latin American pieces (Stephan was bubbling with excitement), the Renaissance pieces, and the gospel encores. As well as the Biebl Ave Maria, which was their second encore. That's the first piece I obsessed over in the Rice Chorale, when I was in seventh grade or so and Karim was the tenor in the solo trio. It melted me thoroughly.
I heard from everyone talking about the show afterwards that the audience was captivated, there was a crazy supportive atmosphere, and that they could feel the love. This surprised me, because I couldn't feel the love. Maybe I was distracted by the audience noise, which I interpret as disrespect, but is really just lack of acclimation to the hall. Still, it was a lovely concert. Stephan and I found Betsy (his high school mentor, who is extremely cool), and hung about waiting for Alan to get out of his mingling duties and hang out with us, but he found us and talked a bit and then had to go make an appearance at a board-member meeting mingly thing, so he told us to go get coffee somewhere and he'd call when he got out.
Luckily, there was a coffee place right next to the hall, and Stephan and Betsy and I had scintillating conversation (mostly Stephan) and embarrassing stories (mostly me, about Stephan) and learned discourse (mostly Betsy and Stephan) till Alan, showed up, still in white tie and tails. It was highly amusing, and the dessert (I got exotic sorbet flavors, though we all shared everything) was spectacular (if exorbitantly priced). Betsy had to go after awhile, but then Alan's friend Jen showed up, so our table kept the full complement of corners for as long as we stayed.
Eventually the time around a table got to us, and Jen had to go, so Stephan and Alan and I found our way (with a surprising amount of trouble, after midnight) to the level of the parking garage we'd left the car on. Walking through a parking garage, rather than taking stairs or an elevator, leads one to appreciate its acoustics. Alan is a virtuoso whistler, and he did beautiful performances of the Brahms Lullaby and Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas before we got to the car.
The suggestion (Alan's, don't look at me! Though I support the idea) was to go find some eye makeup to put on him, since the gay complement of Chanticleer attacked him with it once and took phone pictures and he sheepishly admitted he liked the result. The downfall of this idea was that there's nowhere to buy makeup after midnight in downtown LA. So we took him back to his hotel.
The valet guy was unbelievably kind, taking Stephan's car as a personal guest and letting us stay an hour with no charge, so we went up to Alan's room and tried to guess where the 5-7 sexuality split in Chanticleer falls (and failed), before starting a a game of rummy. Stephan won, but just barely (I crashed and burned, since I only remember the rules for Liverpool). Before too long, Stephan had to take me back, so we said goodbye and discussed the evening thoroughly in the car on the (remarkably empty, at 1:30am) freeway drive home.
It was an extremely high-energy day and evening, and I hadn't slept very well on Stephan's floor, so it was all just slightly dampened; my neck and shoulders were sore, my mind was not on top of things, but I wasn't so much sleepy as just tired. That changed to thorough exhaustion once back at Stephan's, but his mom and stepdad came in around 4:30 with the news that his dad (who is 73) had been taken to the hospital after a fall and was vomiting blood. They went, I stayed and tried not to think too hard about anything, and eventually fell back asleep. Turns out, the collapse was from dehydration from the fasting he'd been doing for health purposes, and the blood was from an ulcer with the same cause. He'll be okay, but it was pretty scary. I'm going back to sleep, as is Stephan.
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How long are you staying?
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