Birthday Weekend

It was wonderful to have my parents in town for my mom's birthday.

We took advantage of the Smithsonian free museum day to visit the Mount Vernon Hotel Museum and Garden (which is, somewhat counterintuitively, located in Manhattan).  It was apparently a place for city-dwellers to get away for the day from the hustle and bustle of the city proper.  The city has, of course, grown up around it, but it is still far enough east that the neighborhood is somewhat quieter than the main tourist spots.  We also got tickets to the Fraunces Tavern Museum, which we really liked.

After enjoying some green wine, we dined at Nanoosh and then went to  a  NY Philharmonic concert at Lincoln Center: Musorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain, Prokofiev's Piano Concerto #3 in C major, and Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade.  The pianist was Danil Trifonov, making his NY Philharmonic debut.  He was amazing - but also really young, maybe 20 years old.  Everyone applauded until he gave us a delightful little encore piece.  (He apparently did not do this for the Tuesday performance; I told my friend that he had most likely become jaded and cynical in the interim.)

In the program, they printed a few bars of music that represent Scheherazade and the Sultan, respectively, but my music-reading skillz are not what they could be, and I could not pick out those motifs.  However, I knew generally that some of the higher notes ("undulating phrases" from violins, esp. the concertmaster himself) were supposed to be our fearless heroine, while some of the lower notes ("low brasses and woodwinds, doubled by the strings") were supposed to be the Sultan.  So I finally stopped trying to discern the story and just let the music wash over me.

On Sunday, we explored the High Line from 14th Street to 30th Street.  Loved the cut-away sections where they've created little amphitheaters for folks to sit and watch the traffic roll on the street below.

It was so good to see them.