I have an imaginary friend with whom I trade quips.  After a morning drive trying to reach our Association’s Accountant’s home (she is recuperating from

Surgery) we ran into a motorcycle event on the highway we needed to find her.  The cyclists were donating toys for kids and proceeding slowly on the highway with masses of people parked along the verge to wave to them and to witness the spectacle. This took a lot of time and we were late. When we got there we had to let her conduct her business with a computer and printer in her own time – which she did very nicely despite having vertebrae in her neck fused and some other work done also less than a week ago.  She was a marvel and we got our paper work done a day early (her day with us is tomorrow – she did not miss one day.)

We found that the motorcycle parade was over and the highway open so we made it down to Lincoln Road in Miami Beach in record time and found a parking space, a place for a small lunch and plenty of time to get into our seats for a concert of the music of W. A. Mozart.  This turned out to be a special day and we were treated to a special performer whose like we have not seen since Leonard Bernstein.  This was Robert Levin, a talented pianist but also a lucid, clear and interesting lecturer who explained the kind of music he would be playing for us. During his time on the microphone, the “C” note popped into my head. I dredged up a memory when Arthur Godfrey asked his radio orchestra to “give me an “A” – they responded with an Italianate “EH”.  I thought that was funny.

Now, the New World Symphony is an orchestra of graduate instrumental students and was led today by the conductor, Nicholas Gegegan. Before they began to play, a slide show was projected on the wall behind them with paintings of Mozart and facsimiles of his musical notations.  The explanations were great although these were “canned”, featuring a recorded voice.  Robert Levin was absolutely perfect in explaining without reading notes, why the piano was in the midst of the orchestra in the center of the stage and that Mozart was the composer of the music we were to hear. Mozart, acknowledged as a child genius, was the pianist in many of the concerts featuring his musical compositions. Mozart was also an improviser on the piano in interludes while the orchestra waited not knowing what they would hear.

This was the same with Robert Levin.  He asked people in the orchestra and the audience to jot down (if they were musically trained) some melodies and he would play a selection of them and weave them into a composition in the mode of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.  He was sensational. He energized everyone from the orchestra, the conductor and the audience. I punched my imaginary friend on the shoulder and asked him to “gimmie a ‘C’ note”. I thought that was funny. Nevertheless, that is how my mind works during concerts. It was also a GREAT concert.