For those of my gentle readers who live in the San Joaquin Valley of central California, if you didn’t attend yesterday’s Fresno Philharmonic concert, all I can say is, you’ve missed it. Under the baton of guest conductor and music director candidate Sameer Patel, it was a masterful performance, and a delight from beginning to end. With Maestro Patel the first of the candidates to appear through this concert season, the consensus amongst the cognoscenti is, he’s set the bar very, very high for those who come after him. Well, done, Maestro Patel and I mean this in the best performing tradition, break a leg.
Maestro Patel
As a man of a certain age, but not so old I don’t enjoy an evening out and appreciate, as it were, the afterglow perhaps as much as the act itself, it is a melancholy denouement, following an extraordinary sensual experience, to find that our alternative yesterday following the concert was only to get into the car and drive home. As it happened, turning on the TV on our return, I was pleased to find the Whit Stillman film ‘The Last Days of Disco’ on cable, and I was able, vicariously, to enjoy the characters’ afters, wandering from clubs to bars to late night coffee shops, but then sadly reminded of the dearth of such places locally. It was not always so.
Downtown Fresno, which used to be replete with watering holes and places for the hanging of out, is now bereft of them. Where are the French Café, the Pleasanton, Corbett’s, Dee’s and even more recently, Wall Street West, when we need them? Or, at least, when I need them? Mind you, most of these are of distant memory, even for a superannuated soul like me, but what of The Tower House or The Daily Planet? What I seek, frankly, is a smartly peopled, dark-ish bar where one might sample some healing waters, and then, perhaps, have a light-ish meal, nothing to interfere with the beverages, mind, but just a little something.
So, my choices are geographically limited to venues very near to Fig Garden Village or beyond, so once there, the glow has worn off and I might as well go home- which is what I did.
The Daily Planet, now only of blessed memory
Of course, that the orchestra concerts are now in the middle of the afternoon on a Sunday doesn’t precisely help matters, with possible afterglow candidates, limited though they are, shuttered. What I’ve written so far makes me seem not much more- no, precisely no more- than a philistine looking for a good evening out. Philistinism, in this regard, is something I will happily admit to, and in their private moments, a majority of my readers would, if pressed but slightly, admit to being of the same mind.
Believing that progress is wrought by putting one foot ahead of another, the extraordinary concert performance yesterday might be the first step in establishing an expansion of the concert series in season’s to come to include, as in day’s past, evening concerts- to follow, we can hope, with the opportunity for conviviality and blessed refreshment at a few smart watering holes.