A long, long time ago, boys and girls, there was a very funny TV series called Get Smart, starring a Borscht Belt comic named Don Adams as a brain-addled superspy named Maxwell Smart and a cute-as-a-button gamine named Barbara Feldon as his trusty sidekick, Agent 99. This was before most of you were born.

Adams left the building for the big Grossinger’s in the Sky a long time ago but Barbara Feldon, Agent 99, is alive and well and appearing this Wednesday night at 8 pm with the early music ensemble Parthenia, a Consort of Viols, in Hot Off the Press, a concert of new music and poetry at Picture Ray Studio, 245 West 18th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues) in Manhattan. Other guests will be Paul Hecht, and soprano Kristin Norderval.

Scheduled works include Max Lifchitz’ Night Voices No. 15 (2008), for 4 viols, David Thompson’s 2:4 (2008), a fantasy for 4 viols, David Glaser’s Fantazy (2008), a duet for tenor and bass viols, Frances White’s Like the Lily (1999) for two bass viols and electronic sound
(arr. for Parthenia 2008), Paul Richards’ A Twelvemonth and a Day (2007) and Kristin Norderval’s selections from Nothing Proved for four viols, soprano and interactive audio processing (2008). Check out the program notes. $10 “rush” tickets at the door subject to availability. For tickets and more information, contact Parthenia at 212-358-5942 or visit them online.

I’m guessing that Agent 99 will be reading poetry rather than fiddling. She has a marvelous speaking voice and is nobody’s dummy. I’m sure I’m one of the last people alive to remember that she won $64,000 on The 64,000 Question in the category of Shakespeare.

I get a lot of review CDs.  Most of them I listen to once, or not at all, and pass them along to the four or five people who have proven to be reliable reviewers.  It is rare that a recording makes me stop everything and listen.  Jenny Lin’s new recording of two major piano works by Ernest Bloch with the SWR Rundfunkorcheter Kaiserslautern, under Jiri Starek, is one of those rare moments.  I must confess that I didn’t know the Concerto Symphonique but I’m inclined to take the word of David Hurwitz at Classics Today who has pronounced it “one of the 20th century’s great masterpieces for piano and orchestra,” and this CD “easily…its finest recording to date.”

Jenny’s performance is extraordinary. Intense, sensitive, nuanced, and perfectly executed.  You wonder how a 97-pound human being could possibly create a sound this big and enveloping.  Her account of Bloch’s much more familiar Concerto Grosso No. 1 is just as spectacular, in a quieter way.  You come away from the CD with the realization that Bloch was even better than you thought he was and that Jenny Lin, who has until now been best known for her willingness to take on new and gnarly works, is an A list pianist in the late romantic repertory as well.  

New York Philharmonic.  North Korea.  Discuss.

p.s. Steve Smith is on the scene. WGBH will air one of the concerts live online on Sunday, March 2, from 3-5 pm.

Tuesday Update:  Great picture of Steve at the airport in North Korea.

The Yale at Carnegie concert series will honor distinguished faculty member Ezra Laderman at Weill Recital Hall at 8pm on March 3 with a program that features a career-spanning range of Laderman’s chamber works, from his 1954 Bassoon Concerto to the New York premiere of Interior Landscapes II for two pianos, written in 2007.

Laderman (b. 1924) continues the line of distinguished composer-pedagogues at Yale, which has included Paul Hindemith, Krzystof Penderecki, and Jacob Druckman. His ties to the Yale School of Music run deep; after joining the YSM community as a composer-in-residence in 1988, he served as the Dean of the school from 1989 to 1995, and currently holds the position of Professor of Music in the Composition department.

There’s a podcast of a live performance of Laderman’s Concerto for Clarinet and Strings with David Shifrin, clarinet and Ransom Wilson, conducting members of the Philharmonia Orchestra of Yale, on Yale’s fabulous netcast page. If you haven’t discovered the Yale School of Music Netcasts page, get on over there. It has more than 100 downloadable podcasts of music and interviews with music luminaries, dating back to Aaron Copland.

And those of you who know Professor Laderman, leave your mosaltovs here.

I wouldn’t have gone but if I had gone I wouldn’t whine about it later from the safety of my keypad.

I’ll start:

Fog Tropes – Ingram Marshall

When Crows Gather – Lewis Spratlan

Remember Galen Brown’s piece “Waiting in the Tall Grass” which was premiered by Relâche last November?  Sure, you do.  Here it is in two parts on YouTube:

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