A week or so ago, a story appeared online about a woman who refused to change her first-class airline seat so that a family could be seated together.* She stated that she had paid full-fare and that the other party should have planned ahead in order to stay together.
The majority of TikTokers who commented on the issue sided with the refusenik. Much as I hate to be associated with a pile of TikTokers, I have to admit that I agree with the woman’s stance, for I was once in a similar position.
I was flying on Copa Air to Panama City (where I would connect with a flight to Buenos Aires) when I was approached by a rather pushy fellow who asked me to change seats with him so that he could sit next to his friend. As I was seated in the bulkhead aisle seat of business class (there was no first class on that flight)—a seat I had purposely selected—I declined to move. The fellow then had his friend change seats to sit farther back with him. And I got to have a nice companion—a woman travel agent from north Jersey—to converse with on the trip.
*
On the other hand . . .
About 18 or 19 years ago, when I was attending a recital by the pianist Richard Goode at Avery Fisher Hall, I was asked by a woman if I would switch seats with her so that she could sit next to her friend. Her own seat, she explained, was on the aisle and closer to the stage. I willingly moved from Z102 to the other seat, up front and across the aisle on the left.
During the intermission, the two persons in front of me—a young woman and an older man—turned and began a conversation with me. The man introduced himself as (I thought) Maxwell Cox and explained that he was Richard Goode’s recording engineer. I told him that I had several of Goode’s recordings (especially of Bach), and he was amused when I admitted losing track of what I had bought and had added duplicates to my collection.
(Let me break off here to reveal that “Maxwell Cox” was a mishearing on my part. I discovered sometime later, when reading the liner notes of a recording on RCA by the quartet Tashi, that the recording engineer was Max Wilcox.** A mishearing like “Maxwell Cox” for “Max Wilcox” is known in language circles as metanalysis.)
Wilcox told me that he was involved with the selection of the winner of the prestigious Gilmore Artist Award, which is presented to
an exceptional pianist who, regardless of age or nationality, possesses profound musicianship and charisma and who sustains a career as a major international concert artist.***
Wilcox, I later learned, was the favorite recording engineer of the great Artur Rubenstein and was known, I read somewhere, as the “golden ears of RCA Victor.”
I met Wilcox again in September 2004 at a recital given by the young woman, Julie Mech, who had attended the Goode concert with him. He was, once more, a delight to talk to, explaining how the Gilmore Award judges operated; they never revealed to the artists they were listening to that their playing was under scrutiny. It was a completely secretive process. And a successful one, considering that among the recipients of the Award were Igor Levit, Ingrid Fliter, Piotr Anderszewski, and Leif Ove Andsnes.
*
Several years later, I was at Carnegie Hall for a recital by the renowned pianist Murray Perahia. At the intermission, a patron in the row ahead of me turned to his friend and said,
Perahia is not the best American pianist; he’s not even the best pianist from the Bronx.
I took him to be referring to Richard Goode.
*
[Goode's] discs rank among the least-hyped and most beautifully made of all piano recordings, the bulk of them produced by Max Wilcox, who was Arthur Rubinstein’s partner in the studio.****
***
* https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/woman-refused-first-class-seat
** https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/31/arts/music/max-wilcox-dead.html
*** https://www.kronbergacademy.de/en/artists/person/kirill-gerstein#:~:text=Kirill%20Gerstein%20is%20the%20sixth,a%20major%20international%20concert%20artist.
**** https://www.steinway.com/news/features/richard-goode-balancing-act
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