Tag Archives: Francis Morrone’ graphic lessons

New York Mysteries Jan. 21-Jan. 27

The Camerata RCO was founded by members of Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw. On Sunday, Camerata RCO played Hummel and Schubert. For the Frick concerts, it was a large ensemble: eight musicians playing violins, a viola, a clarinet, a bassoon, a horn and a bassoon. Franz Schubert’s Octet in F Major, D. 803 (1824) is euphoric. In addition to the mailed tickets, the Frick includes an art appreciation paragraph connecting the concert’s musical selections with the Collection’s art. This week Thomas Gainsborough’s Mall at St. James’s Park (1783) is described as jubilant. The fashionable figures glide through St. James’s Park. The park resembles an enchanted forest. Under the majestic trees, ladies and their dogs glide along broad paths. Frick bought Mall at St. James’s Park in 1916 for about $300,000.

As you approach the Metropolitan’s Michaelangelo , Divine Draftsman and Designer exhibit you see one word writ large: MICHAELANGELO. How apt. Commemorating the 500th anniversary of his birth, it’s an enormous display of the variety of Michaelangelo’s work. There’s even a mock up of the Sistine Chapel.

Monday night supper in a computer generated Japanese restaurant on First Ave. was followed by a rush to the Jefferson Market Library on Sixth to hear Francis Morrone, the architectural historian, talk to a packed house about NYC’s early book publishers. Names like Brentano, Noble, Scribner’s brought back the vibrant book trade as the companies moved uptown, merged, went bankrupt. Many in the room sighed at the thought of Scribner’s Beaux Arts Building on Fifth Avenue. Now it’s an athletic apparel store.

 

Graphic Lessons: Recent thirty-five-year-old widow Millie Fitzgerald applies for a private school teaching job, faints on a stabbed and dying man in the school kitchen, deals with the only witness to the stabbing – a troubled nine-year-old, develops a crush on a NYPD detective and her dog dies.

Graphic Lessons: Nine-year-old Dana is the only witness who overhears a person fighting with George Lopez, the soon to be stabbed Windsor School kitchen worker. Who can she tell? Her mother who never listens or accuses her of lying? Her father who’s started a new family in Singapore? She tells Millie.

Graphic Lessons: Something’s eating at NYPD Detective Steve Kulchek: a failed marriage? surviving a car bomb? his girlfriend marrying his corrupt boss? screwing up an important case? It doesn’t matter because he’s relentless.