Thomas Oliemans came to New York to sing at the Metropolitan Opera. While he was here, he took a musical walking tour.
Thomas Oliemans came to New York to sing at the Metropolitan Opera. While he was here, he took a musical walking tour.
Thomas Oliemans came to New York to sing at the Metropolitan Opera. While he was here, he took a musical walking tour.
Good morning. It’s Thursday. Today we’ll take a walk with a Dutch baritone who visits the haunts of great composers when he is in New York. We’ll also look at what could be an opening move against one of President Trump’s adversaries, the New York attorney general.
Thomas Oliemans arrived wearing a baseball cap from Zabar’s on the Upper West Side. He said it got him reduced admission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which gives a price break to New York residents.
But he’s not one. He is a Dutch baritone who is appearing as Papageno in Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte” at the Metropolitan Opera. It is the same role that he sang at the Met two years ago when, on a day off, he walked 40 blocks to see where George Gershwin and Sergei Rachmaninoff had once lived. A jaunt like that was a way to decompress, he said then.
Now it was the morning after another performance, and he had new places to walk to. He wanted to see where Leonard Bernstein and Gustav Mahler had lived — two larger-than-life musicians and larger-than-life personalities who had both been music directors of the New York Philharmonic. Mahler presided in the early years of the 20th century, Bernstein much later.
Both were also composers as well as conductors. Bernstein once lamented that there was never “enough time and energy to do both things,” which was “one of the reasons why I’m so sympathetic to Mahler; I understand his problem.”