MOZART'S 250TH: I was beginning to feel like a little boy who knows there's a birthday party happening but had not received an invitation. Relieved when Raphael invited me to the last of the Berlin Philharmoniker's concerts at Carnegie Hall celebrating the miracle of Mozart. Rapture!

[Also relieved I didn't have work out meeting Philip, after his inelegant dinner invitation. Ha!]

Interesting programming: a young Brit called Thomas Ades and Maurice Ravel to round off the program. New York audiences so embarrass me with the self-congratulatory and obligatory standing ovations and drawn out applause. Even Simon Rattle, who i assume is more the reserved Englishman back home, hammed it up to the gallery. But we got a lovely Satie as encore. So the audience's lolling labrador behavior did yield a dividend. I felt ungenerous.

End of a full day. A grest conversation taking up where I left off with Evelyn in Lexington last November about the Appalchian Center perhaps being the stage for a study of the Northeast. Has possibilities.