moving to the beat. “Tell me, WTF is wrong with them?” H is face reflected his complete bewilderment. Then he walked off.
Michael Tilson Thomas in 1976
As the year went on, the Philharmonic musicians came to be friendly colleagues. I even got the chance to sit down and have dinner with music director, Pierre Boulez. It was a bit like a scene in the movie, “My Dinner With Andre”. Two of the bass players from the orchestra, Michelle Saxon and Jon Deak invited Boulez to have dinner with them in a trendy Chinatown restaurant. They invited me too. Michelle Saxon orchestrated this event. Ms. Saxon picked up Boulez in her car. He lived, at that time, in a luxury building in the West 60’s that was adjacent to Central Park. When the group arrived in Chinatown, Boulez was at his most relaxed and gracious. He seemed to be having a great time. We talked about music, astrology and formative life experiences. Most interesting of all, Boulez talked freely about his teenage years in the occupied France of the early 1940’s . He admitted to finding the hordes of marching Nazi soldiers in their brown shirts, somehow “fascinating and compelling”. He even said that he felt “magnetically drawn and even attracted” to them. That was a strange and interesting moment. Not awkward at all but interesting.
The highlight of the evening for Boulez, though, was definitely the drive uptown. We drove through Tribeca. It was bleak and uninhabited fifty years ago. Boulez became
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