Opera houses like the Boston Opera House, long since torn down, 40 or more years ago, had a sensational acoustic. Its interior was all wood ! I sang with the S.M. Chartock touring Gilbert and Sullivan Company there in 1948. Yes, I am a young 84 year old, active as a skier, mountain climber and runner. Music can keep one healthy and vigorous, particularly if one both creates and performs music. It helps us recognize the cultural potential within our own communities to develop as artists given the models of super star performers, instrumentalists and singers alike, seen performing live in our own communities. At the prestigious Isaac Stern Auditorium of Carnegie Hall. I have sung four solo concerts, three of them three hours long at that deservedly respected and honored venue. Born and living in Jersey City, NJ I had the distinct advantage of proximity to the Met Opera and the New York City Opera and to Carnegie Hall, Town Hall and Lewissohn Stadium to attend both rehearsals and performances of major orchestras and chamber music ensembles. I had started my professional career at age seventeen and was known sufficiently to receive entrance to rehearsals and broadcasts at Carnegie Hall by Mr. Turner, the house manager. Even at Toscanini’s Studio 8 H as well his Carnegie Hall rehearsals and broadcasts, access to the Toscanini events I had by my friendship at Juilliard with a violinist in the NBC Symphony who represented me as a family member. At age 10 I heard on WNYC a broadcast of the recording of Toscanini’s conducting the New York Philharmonic in the Rhine Journey and Funeral Music. This recording was made long, long before his recording with the NBC Symphony. That hearing encouraged me to borrow from our major library in Jersey City, on Jersey Avenue, the piano vocal scores of all the Wagner operas from Der fliegender Hollander to Parsifal and the full orchestra scores of the RING and TRISTAN. I started studying composition and composing from then on. . My study of voice with Friedrich Schorr, Alexander Kipnis, Margarete Matzernauer, Frieda Hempel, Martial Singher, Mack Harrell, John Brownlee and Karin Branzell, all leading singers at the Met Opera before they retired, prepared me for my rep decisions. Schorr, Kipnis and Singher I saw in performances at the Met long before I got to study with them. I studied composition with Pulitzer Prize winner Roger Goeb. I am a Wagnerian romantischer heldentenor, the director of the Richard Wagner Music Drama Institute, and an opera composer of “Shakespeare” and “The Political Shakespeare. My websites where one may download, free, 37 complete selections out of the one hundred that I sang in four main hall, Isaac Stern Auditorium, solo concerts, I repeat, three of them three hours long. My websites are WagnerOpera.com, ; ShakespeareOpera.com and RichardWagnerMusicDramaInstitute.com

It is now 3;09 AM on Monday May 14th. I am between streams of conscious musical composition for my third opera, "The Practical Shakesapeare." So, while this pause in my inspiration continues, I am commenting on your most captivating program that aired last Friday. Some of the most acoustically satisfying venues have been those carved out of existing rock formations or merely situated within those formations. The Red Rocks outdoor amphitheater with the huge red rock slab and the slope of the hill has extraordinary fullness and clarity of sound experience. The outdoor amphitheater of Catania, Sicily, with the evening glow of the still active volcano of Mt. Etna seen far off from this high perched venue incredibly verifies your comment that the atmosphere, the surroundings, do "perfume" the senses with an enhanced impression of the quality of the sounds. Ruins of man-made structures such as the Baths of Caracalla also further verify your comment. Surroundings and their romantic past do conjure up values that may not be fully there in fact. People like myself, a Wagnerian romantischer heldentenor, who sing opera know that certain opera houses have their own acoustical best positions on stage to best project one's voice. The Giovanni Bellini Opera House in Catania has a spot about 6 feet to the stage right and 3 feet upstage of the prompter's box that marvelously funnels the sound into the auditorium. The amphitheater Herodes Atticus under the Parthenon in Athens, Greece had/has such great acoustics that back 2000 years ago the leading poets of Greece and Rome read their poems from its stage to an adoring audience. One of my teachers, Maestro Fausto Cleva , the maestro with the longest ''tenure," 50 years, at the MET OPERA succumbed while conducting the overture to the opera version of "Orpheus" the Greek hero of mythology at that very same venue. Indeed, many structures that have existed before the science of acoustics, are better than the current crop. Carnegie Hall's vaunted acoustics have been diminished with the 1980s renovation which removed, filled in, an added dome-like space above the stage, which had been added to properly film in 1947 "Carnegie Hall" which starred Ezio Pinza, Artur Rubinstein, Jascha Heifetz, , Gregor Piatigorsky, Bruno Walter, Leopold Stokowski, Jan Peerce and the New York Philharmonic.