To the editors:
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I very much enjoyed Dennis Polkow’s interview with Georg Solti [February 3]. It was a pleasure to join mentally with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in this way, since actually attending CSO performances to hear the music is out of the question. People talk to each other and sing to themselves, crunch on cough drops (to prevent them from coughing), and rustle the pages of their programs in order to read about the music being played, thus turning the music into a species of conceptual art, especially for them. At 9 p.m. electronic watches go beep-beep. Beep-beeps not on the hour are doctors’ pagers. At least one neighbor falls asleep, snores, and falls over against my shoulder. A lot happens at the parochial level around my seat; the cosmopolitan level of the music is hard to reach.
N. Halsted
