Flight of the Concord

From the Classical Vault Dept.: Here’s a piece I wrote about a youthful vocal ensemble that made its debut recording for the Dorian label in 1999. This wasn’t written as liner notes, and I can’t recall where it was intended to land, if indeed it was used anywhere. So I share it with you, along with a recommendation that you seek out and listen to this recording.

                                                                                         

BEAUTIFUL VOICES SOUND GOOD ALMOST ANYWHERE, but place them in one of the world’s finest concert halls and the effect can transcend all expectations. As the Concord Ensemble stands in a semi-circle on the stage of the Troy Music Hall, in a once-prosperous manufacturing city near new York’s Hudson River, they sing to an auditorium of empty seats, facing a pair of microphones.

Over the course of the past few hours, the microphones had been aimed and re-aimed countless times. Now they stand near a tall stepladder a few feet from the Music Hall’s high stage. Dozens of yards of black fabric muffled the balcony and orchestra seats when the ensemble arrived to begin the recording tests; now it’s gone, removed to give a brighter sound to the ensemble.

“It’s just you and the room and my mics,” says Craig Dory, co-founder of Dorian Recordings and designer of the microphones. “But it’s still going to take us a while to decide the best setup.” He paces the stage. “Please sing out as we’re doing this – don’t mark. And don’t worry about the noises you might hear. If the hall creaks or a truck goes by, we may be able to remove that. All you have to do is sing.” He pauses and grins. “This is going to be very intensive. You will want to hate me. You will discover that I’m a big, lovable teddy bear.”

Kiss the Ground

WE’RE FEELING THE HORRIBLE EFFECTS of a global climate crisis. We’re wracked with guilt over the lousy food we consume – or we should be. There are solutions, but how do you persuade the public to change its ways?

Get celebrities to give those answers. Or so believe filmmakers Joshua Tickell and Rebecca Harrell Tickell. Their engaging documentary “Kiss the Ground” boasts a host of celebrity actors and musicians, beginning with narrator Woody Harrelson, who also has a small but significant on-screen presence. Does Patricia Arquette’s enthusiastic encomium for composting toilets prove persuasive? Does a song by Jason Mraz help make up your mind? Is a word from recent Super Bowl-winning quarterback Tom Brady enough?

If it works, great. But the true celebrities here are those who are out in the fields, farming and teaching other farmers. The message of “Kiss the Ground” is simple: We’re destroying our land with industrial farming methods, and when you destroy soil, you create an inhospitable climate.

Ray Archuleta is a Certified Professional Soil Scientist with the Soil Science Society of America. He spent over thirty years with the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), and then founded Understanding Ag, LLC, [https://understandingag.com] to teach strategies for soil improvement on a national scale. He also founded Soil Health Academy [https://soilhealthacademy.org] to share regenerative agriculture principles.

Mr. President: Be Seated!

IN HONOR OF PRESIDENTS DAY, surely one of the most misused moments of patriotic prejudice, here's a short film I made with Musicians of Ma'alwyck.

Gershwin à la France

From the Classical Vault Dept.: ... and what about summer concerts? Are they coming back this year? Will they be as fun-filled as the all-Gershwin program I reviewed over a decade ago at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center?

                                                                                            

EVEN AT THIS (RELATIVELY) LATE DATE, Gershwin’s music tends to keep concert company with so-called pops stuff, itself typically lightweight American fare. Which isn’t the worst thing in the world, but Gershwin’s struggle to get admitted into the Classical Academy is rooted in some canards deftly disproved by last week’s all-Gershwin program at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center.

Jean-Yves Thibaudet

He’s termed a tunesmith who, when confronted with opportunities for thematic development, just throws something new at us. But the same has been said of Schubert and Dvořák, and, anyway it’s just not true, as his “Concerto in F” nicely demonstrated..

With Jean-Yves Thibaudet at the 88s, the technical requirements of the piece were brilliantly accounted for. The three-movement work, commissioned by the 1925 version of the NY Philharmonic immediately after the premiere of “Rhapsody in Blue,” is in classical form, with the seeds of most of its melodic ideas planted at the top of the first movement and, of course, a consistent harmonic language throughout.

Noises Off Greece

From the Literary Vault Dept.: Sometimes you want to indulge yourself with a no-holds-barred farce, and the prolific Michael Frayn has been happy to oblige, in plays, screenplays, and novels, like the one reviewed below.

                                                                                                

MICHAEL FRAYN KNOWS THE ELEMENTS of a mistaken-identity farce. He summoned one of the most rip-roaring festivals of confusion to the stage in his play “Noises Off;” his novel Headlong wove a farce around the discovery of a long-lost Brueghel painting. Frayn’s intellectual prowess was brought to the stage in “Copenhagen,” a compelling drama about the scientific pursuits of Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr.

Skios, Frayn’s latest novel, has its heart the keynote address acclaimed scientist Dr. Norman Wilfred is due to deliver at an influential research center on the fictional Greek island of Skios. But a series of missteps sparked by longing and the island’s terrible taxicab system cause someone else – a ne’er-do-well opportunist pursuing one relationship while fleeing another – to almost inadvertently assume Dr. Wilfred’s guise, thus finding himself the cynosure of the research center’s posh, pretentious attendees.

It’s unimaginable, of course, that our plugged-in era could allow smartphone-clutching travelers even a moment of such disorientation, but Frayn works the mechanics of the story like a master puppeteer. His island isn’t friendly to cell phones, and even less friendly to the wrong kind of charging adapter. A language barrier persists, giving us the term phoksoliva en route, and there’s the reliable human trait of seeing in someone only what you ardently wish to see. And, in a straight steal from the movie “What’s Up, Doc?” and who knows how many earlier door-slammers, there’s the matter of supposedly unique suitcases that look too much alike.

See How You Like It

From the Theater Vault Dept.: Summer theater is being threatened all over the country now, and our local festivals are gearing up with outdoor performances and innovative repertory. To celebrate, here’s a look back at Shakespeare & Co., production from a decade ago.

                                                                                        

A SMALL BANJOLELE emerges from the upstage curtain of the thrust stage, and the player gives the opening chords to “It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie.” The curtain parts and the ensemble strides onto the stage, some with other instruments in hand. They’re garbed in ’20s gear, nicely put together by costume designer Arthur Oliver, and as a crooner takes to the microphone to warble the chorus, the cast breaks into the Charleston.

Kelley Curran, Jonathan Epstein, and Merritt Janson

Does it matter that the song is actually over a decade younger than the era portrayed? It does not. The success of this production – and it’s very successful – lies in a clearness of purpose, faithfulness to the clues of the text and beautifully paced energy. Director Tony Simotes leads a versatile cast through the play’s manic vicissitudes with few of the would-be improvements that can mar high-concept realizations.

There’s a joke at the heart of the play’s setting, which can be taken to be either the Ardennes region in France (where the playwright’s source material was set) or the Stratford-area Arden. Set designer Sandra Goldmark puts us in Paris at the top of the show, with miniatures of the Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe, Notre Dame Cathedral and the Panthéon among the functional set pieces on an otherwise bare (but blue) stage. The forest, such as it is, is an upstage jumble of pipes and trees with a second level that will inspire impressive acrobatics from Orlando (Tony Roach) and Rosalind (Merritt Janson).

A Piece of Roast Beef

Guest Blogger Dept.: It’s Robert Benchley time again, and the estimable essayist today grants us a look at one of the dietary staples of my youth, even as I try to get my youth to eat something else every once in a while.

                                                                                     

PERSONALLY, I CLASS ROAST BEEF with watercress and vanilla cornstarch pudding as tasty articles of diet. It undoubtedly has more than the required number of calories; it leans over backward in its eagerness to stand high among our best proteins, and, according to a vivid chart in the back of the cookbook, it is equal in food value to three dried raisins piled one on the other plus peanut-butter the size of an egg.

Drawing by Gluyas Williams

But for all that I can’t seem to feel that I am having a good time while I am eating it. It stimulates the same nerve centers in me that a lantern-slide lecture on “Palestine – the Old and the New,” does.

However, I have noticed that there are people who are not bored by it; in fact, I have seen them deliberately order it in a restaurant when they had the choice of something else; so I thought that the only fair thing I could do would be to look into the matter and see if, in this great city, there weren’t some different ways of serving roast beef to vary its monotony.

Roast beef is not the same price in all eating-places. What makes the difference? What does a diner at the Ritz get in his “roast prime ribs of beef au jus” that makes it distinctive from the “Special to-day – roast beef and mashed potatoes” of the Bowery restaurant?

Keeping It Edible

WE THINK OF FARMS as massive multi-acre enterprises, such is the pervasive image that corporate farming gives us. Ben Stein and Alicia Brown are entering their third season of providing fresh produce to a growing customer base, and their business has been growing unexpectedly well. And they’re doing it on one acre of land.

Photo by Alicia Brown

Edible Uprising Farm was born in 2019 as a passionate partnership between Ben Stein and Alicia Brown. Both of them have long pursued sustainable attitudes and practices where food and agriculture are concerned and wanted to turn that into a project that could income-sustain them as well. Although they envisioned a rural environment for their farming, they took an offer of an acre of land in the more urban Troy, NY.

“It has worked out very well here,” says Stein. “We were unsure about it – I’m from rural Vermont and always farmed in places where there’s not a big population around. We didn’t know if it would work on the edge of a large urban center. But it has been amazing. And we’ve been able to give people access to food they otherwise wouldn’t be able to get.”

Cyberotica Antiqua

From the Locked Vault Dept.: We haven’t visited my onetime alter-ego, Dr. Barry Tetons, since I offered this column from an unsavory magazine for which I used to write. Here’s a piece from the January 1996 issue, so astonishingly far from us now in terms of technology that the piece below seems laughably quaint.

                                                                                          

BASED ON A RECENT Time magazine cover story and the rantings of certain people in congress, you’d think that the Internet was a teeming electronic maelstrom of smut. Fortunately for us, it is. But the good stuff isn’t as easy to find as Time and the others would have you think.

A few columns back we looked at the specifics of getting to certain smut-rich areas. But the Internet is changing quickly, growing at an astonishing rate. It’s not for nothing that computers run on silicon chips.

Let’s tour the Internet and find out where things tend to be placed. It’s a huge club, in a way – once you find your way into one room, you’ll learn where else to go. Web sites give you addresses of more web sites; discussion groups point the way to everything. If all else fails, get over to a chat area for real-time advice.

So let’s start with the chat channels. IRC – Internet Relay Chat – originated in Finland as a way of bringing groups of like-minded people together in real-time discussion. Now it draws folks from all over the world. To keep it somewhat orderly, it's divided into channels, each of which has a name that reflects (or tries to reflect) something about its special interest. Each name is preceded by the number sign (#), so that #Big_Bitches_with_Big_Tits is one of the more alluring channel names I've seen recently.

A Beethoven Serenade

Let's take a look at a short film I made with Musicians of Ma'alwyck
to honor the big Beethoven birthday just passed.

Three to Get Ready

NOVELIST WILLIAM BOYD has long been fascinated by the movies. His 1987 novel The New Confessions combined a nod to Rousseau with an effective evocation of filmmaking in the 1920s; he has also adapted two of his novels for film and two for television. As if that weren’t enough, he wrote and directed the British war drama “The Trench” in 1999.

His is a protean talent: he has also written spy thrillers, one of which was an estate-sanctioned James Bond novel; his fiction has covered topics ranging from art to travel, war to international politics. And he does with a sense of humor in the Evelyn Waugh manner (whose work Boyd has adapted for television).

Boyd’s latest novel, Trio, takes us to world of motion pictures again, where he settles in very comfortably to give us a portrait of three movie-world participants and the variety of characters they have to deal with along the way. We’re in Brighton in 1968, where a company is filming “Emily Bracegirdle’s Extremely Useful Ladder to the Moon,” which seems very typical for a time that brought us such fare as “Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?,” “The Magic Christian,” and “The Bed Sitting Room.”

Threeness abounds in this book. We follow the protagonists through three different book-sections: “Duplicity,” “Surrender,” and “Escape.” Each has some manner of significant other, but another other soon comes on the scene. And the action cuts from one story to another with the deft rhythms of a good suspense saga.

Red Beans and Rice-ly Yours

From the Food Vault Dept.: Schenectady’s restaurant profile has never matched its demographics, but every now and then a dining establishment pops up that strays from the white-bread norm. How nice to see a New Orleans-inspired eatery appear a decade ago on a stretch of Union Street that was threatening to become a vital restaurant row; how tragic to see the place shuttered a few years later because of unpaid taxes. At the space now is a restaurant called Malcolm’s, diligently struggling through the pandemic.

                                                                                    

RECOGNIZED – AT LAST! I maintain an impressive anonymity at this job, despite frequent in-print descriptions of my size and usual dining companions, not to mention a scattering of likenesses in the webosphere. But, compared to many other markets, Capital Region restaurateurs don’t worry as much about reviews. They don’t post photos in kitchens; they require no need for pseudononymous credit cards.

Photo by B. A. Nilsson

So it was with a mixture of pleasure and regret that I saw many eyes turn towards me at Café NOLA a few nights ago, sudden surprise in their eyes followed by a sense of wonder. And even as I began to allow myself to bask, I realized that their focus was on a spot somewhat above and to the side of my left shoulder. I turned to look.

Perched, or I should say newly landed on the service counter, across which all of the restaurant’s finished dishes are passed, was a strange amalgam of flying saucer and hero sandwich. It was large – about 12 inches in diameter, and half of that high if you measure to the top of the toothpick securing each of the sandwich’s quarters.

This is the muffuletta, a sandwich that may exemplify New Orleans better than any other single item. It’s a true melting-pot item, for starters, one that literally came together at the French Quarter’s Central Grocery early in the 1900s, named for the style of Sicilian loaf used for the sandwich or for one of its original customers.

Vienna Then, Brooklyn Now

From the Classical Vault Dept.: Capitol Chamber Artists presented 50 seasons of intimate works throughout the Albany, NY, area. Not surprisingly, their activities were put on pandemic hold. Here’s a look back at one of their charmingly themed events, this one from 1985.

                                                                                       

Capitol Chamber Artists continues to prove that you don’t need to import a glamour group from Europe for a fine chamber-music performance. In fact, the community-based ensemble provides a sense of neighborly informality that contributes a lot to the fun to the group’s concerts.

Aaron Copland

The ensemble amended its Sunday afternoon program at the Albany Institute of History and Art from “Vienna Then, New York Now” to “ ... Brooklyn Now,” because the two New York-based composers represented both hail from that borough.

Introduced by violinist Mary Lou Saetta and flutist Irvin Gilman, the opening work was Louis Haber’s “Six Miniatures for Flute and Violin.” Haber, himself a practicing violinist, wrote the piece while working on the Broadway show “Subways Are for Sleeping,” Gilman explained.
The six movements, which range from a march to a pastorale to a delightful South American dance, combine the instruments quite skilfully, and offer each a chance to display its voice. The performance, all the way through the fast perpetuum-mobile finale, was first-rate.

Valentine for Handel

From the Classical Vault Dept.: Another sweep of the classical-music offerings in the Albany, NY, area in early 1985. And you can see my review of the Munich Chamber Orchestra concert here.

                                                                                   

WE’RE BEING GIVEN a valentine all this year thanks to a year that was “portentious to the annals of music,” as an old source book (from which I once copied a school-assigned report) began. In 1685. Bach, Handel, and Scarlatti were born, and this year the classical-music boys are going berserk with celebrations.

George Frideric Handel

There seems to be more of a hangup about anniversaries with classical music than with any other creative field I’ve noticed – these 40th-anniversary-of-the-end of-World War II type of things seem more journalist-on-deadline-inspired than anything else – and make me wonder if there’s some problem in offering the music solely on its own artistic merit. You don’t need an excuse to listen to Bach (unless it somehow embarrasses you for social or political reasons, but this is the sort of pontifical twaddle that informs too much classical music writing).

There’s a Handel Spectacular slated for this weekend, a tribute to the big German-English composer by the Capitol Chamber Artists. (They say that Handel was in a restaurant in England once where he ordered a huge meal, then waited and waited for it to be served. He asked the waiter about the delay. “I thought I should wait for the rest of the company,” the waiter explained. “De gompany!” Handel bellowed. “I am de gompany!” (This story comes from the same source book from which I stole that phrase in the opening sentence.)

Eliza’s Husband

Guest Blogger Dept.: We welcome, at his debut in this blog, the very prolific Barry Pain (1864-1928), whose series of Eliza books are among the funniest books in the English language, certainly influential precursors to P.G. Wodehouse and Jerome K. Jerome. Here’s the opening chapter of the first book.

                                                                                    

“SUPPOSE,” I SAID to one of the junior clerks at our office the other day, “you were asked to describe yourself in a few words, could you do it?”

Barry Pain

His answer that he could describe me in two was no answer at all. Also the two words were not a description, and were so offensive that I did not continue the conversation.

I believe there are but few people who could give you an accurate description of themselves. Often in the train to and from the city, or while walking in the street, I think over myself—what I have been, what I am, what I might be if, financially speaking, it would run to it. I imagine how I should act under different circumstances—on the receipt of a large legacy, or if for some specially clever action I were taken into partnership, or if a mad bull came down the street. I may say that I make a regular study of myself. I have from time to time recorded on paper some of the more important incidents of our married life, affecting Eliza and myself, and I present them to you, gentle reader, in this little volume. I think they show how with a very limited income—and but for occasional assistance from Eliza’s mother I do not know how we should have got along—a man may to a great extent preserve respectability, show taste and judgment, and manage his wife and home.

My Little Dumpling

From the Food Vault Dept.: Albany’s Dumpling House was a revered institution during its two decades of operation, an old-school sit-down restaurant a little off the beaten path, but near enough to a Interstate exit to make it a convenient destination. Here’s a snapshot from two decades ago. The “Ron” who’s named as dining companion in the piece was actually Metroland’s founder and then-publisher, Peter Iselin.

                                                                                     

THE STORY OF CHINESE FOOD in America, like that of most other cultures whose cuisine is here embraced, is one of evolution. To put it another way, it becomes less about Asia and more about what this country likes to eat.

This was the basis of a backstage discussion I had recently with my friend Ron, a fellow actor in a show we’re currently rehearsing. He was lamenting the lack of the truly authentic, while I wondered if there were an authentic benchmark left anywhere in the world, so pervasive has our culinary so-called culture become.

Take the case of General Tso’s chicken. An immensely popular Chinese dish, it was born in the U.S., although it still (as far as I could determine) has a murky history. According to one source, General Tso is a historic figure who has taken on the aspect of a bogeyman – “Behave yourself, or General Tso will get you.” Another source suggests that the recipe originated in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

I once worked with a chef who studied Asian cookery and decided that you could make a reasonably authentic-seeming Chinese dish by sauteeing garlic and ginger with a dash of sherry in a wok, add meat and vegetables, season it and finish with a little cornstarch. I suspect that this philosophy was behind the creation of the Chicken of General Tso.

Bad Boy Goes Good: George Antheil

From the Classical Vault Dept.: Here’s a little snapshot of the Albany, NY-area concert scene at the beginning of 1985, when the Albany Symphony was weaving more recent works in with the classics (as it still, admirably, does), and when top-flight artist would land in the area for a performance or two.

                                                                                           

GEORGE FRIDERIC HANDEL doesn’t share the reputation as troublemaker which both Beethoven and George Antheil had; still, his “Royal Fireworks Music” shares a place in the popular repertory with Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, a place that Antheil’s Sympbony No. 4 doesn’t enjoy. So you don’t have to be a troublemaker to insure lasting attention to your music, although it might help.

George Antheil

Antheil’s symphony was written during the European beginnings of World War II; the piece was intended as a response to some of the brutal events that were taking place. First performed in 1944, with Leopold Stokowski conducting the NBC Symphony, the piece won enthusiastic critical response, yet it hasn’t received a place of any permanence on the schedules of symphony orchestras since then. Perhaps Antheil’s reputation, sparked by a single piece, has dogged him and aided this obscurity. The piece, “Ballet Mechanique,” scored for eight pianos, anvils, bells and a host of other contraptions, was written in the 1920s when machinery was being widely celebrated in music: Carpenter’s “Skyscrapers” and Honegger’s “Pacific 231” were among the other such works.

But Antheil outdid them for sheer noisiness. He spent many years in Europe, particularly with the Berlin State Opera. When he returned to the U.S. in 1933 he worked for a while as a journalist before traveling to “Mecca” (read “Hollywood”) to compose for movies, although his most often-heard score was for a British film, Ealing Studio’s “The Lavender Hill Mob,” which starred Alec Guinness and featured scenes in a fiery casting foundry.

From Munich with Hans

From the Classical Vault Dept.: Back when daily newspapers covered classical-music events, I often had the assignment both to preview and review an event. That’s what you see here. First the review, which had to be kept annoying brief, then the preview, which, with no interview available, became a rewrite of a press release. I’d say, “It was a living,” but I didn’t even make a living off of writing this stuff.

                                                                                             

THE PERFORMANCE by the Munich Chamber Orchestra at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall confirmed what listeners who’ve been able to find this group’s recordings already know: It’s a superb little group, led (as it has been for the past 30 years) by Hans Stadlmair. Although best known for performances of music from the Baroque and Classical periods, the orchestra also presented a very contemporary work in this concert, giving a nice variety to its programming.

Hans Stadlmair

Michael Haydn, brother of the illustrious Franz Josef, has gained a reputation for his prolific output only in recent years. His Notturno in F, which opened Tuesday’s concert, is a short, four-movement symphony with a lot of charm and nothing terribly memorable about it; it benefits most from skillful execution, and so it came across well.

Bach’s “Ricercare for Six Voices,” from “The Musical Offering,” requires very precise playing, laying bare, as it does, so many individual instruments. Again, the orchestra served it well, but so slowly that it verged on a dirge rather than a royal celebration.

Violinist Young Uck Kim has gained a notable reputation during the past 20 years, but his performances of Mozart’s Concerto No. 5 wasn’t the sort from which good reputations are made. Perhaps he’s more at home in the romantic works for his instrument. Mozart seemed to get a heavy dose of the romantic laid upon him, whereas a more successful approach would be to treat the piece as you would a Mozart aria: Discover its character and sing it through the notes rhather than try to twist the notes into a foreign characteristic.

Nevermore the Twain

From the Theatrical Vault Dept.: At the beginning of 2019, the 92-year-old Hal Holbrook announced that he was retiring his one-man show, “Mark Twain Tonight,” probably the grandaddy of all solo shows, and certainly the one most people think of when they consider the genre. Holbrook performed it for 63 years, accumulating enough material – all truly culled from Twain – that he could vary his performances at will. Now, a year after that announcement, Holbrook has joined Twain in wherever it is such talents posthumously meet. Here’s my review of an appearance in Schenectady 35 years ago.

                                                                                    

HAS HAL HOLBROOK’S ONE-MAN SHOW “Mark Twain Tonight” been overexposed? It’s been on TV, there was a commercial recording, and his presentation of it at Proctor’s Theatre Thursday evening was his third Twain appearance there.

Well, there are those, such as myself, who hadn’t seen the act before. And, based on the excellent quality of it, there must be those eager to see it again.

Because of the nature of the show, it is possible for Holbrook to vary his material so he has the freedom of a stand-up comic to play to the particular house he is addressing.

But that improvisational nature is tempered by the material itself: it’s all Twain’s. It’s up to the actor to affect transitions and delivery but he must be true to his sources.

The Raindancer Reigns

From the Culinary Vault Dept.: Now it’s 40 years for the Raindancer Restaurant in Amsterdam, NY, an area institution that is holding its own in these pandemic-straitened times. A modest, reliable place for a casual meal or more fancy fare, it offers seating – but check the website so you’ll know the current protocol. Here’s my review from a decade ago.

                                                                                  

IN MY NECK OF THE WOODS, which is to say rural Montgomery County, the big city is Amsterdam. Don’t even start with me about “Smallbany.” For over 30 years, the Raindancer Restaurant has dominated Amsterdam’s culinary scene, and with good reason. It’s a classic steakhouse, clinging to a tradition that has otherwise vanished. It has reasonable prices, contrasting ironically with the recent area phenomenon of pricing the stuff out of sight. And it’s family run, which gives it a friendly personality that chain restaurants never can achieve.

I wrote about the Raindancer 20 years ago and again ten years later. Except for the pricing and some physical expansion, little has changed. The salad bar still goes strong. The prime rib ($30) is still a hearty seller. The lighter-fare menu that was in place a decade ago gives lighter alternatives. A new emphasis on wine means that more of it is available and that periodic wine-tasting events are well attended.

The youthful servers are friendly and attentive, so there’s a comfortable sense of being in good hands. So let me quickly get out of the way the one problem I encountered.