by Sedgwick Clark
I’m off for a two-and-a-half-week safari vacation in South Africa with PK and our favorite traveling buddies. From Cape Town and the wine lands to Kruger National Park to Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe, it will undoubtedly be a far cry from the MGM back lot and grainy second-unit location images impressed upon me since I was a kid. Whatever I’ll encounter, I may be sure it won’t be Maureen O’Sullivan, Grace Kelly, or Ava Gardner, although The African Queen and all those shots and malaria pills have made me a bit apprehensive of the smaller wildlife thereabouts.
One stop will be outside Cape Town to the Hout Bay Music Project, which teaches string and percussion students. We’re taking scores and sheet music from Schirmer Inc., t-shirts from the New York Philharmonic, caps from Lincoln Center, and plenty of CDs I’ve received over the years. I’ll bet the kids especially appreciate three of the multi-CD chamber-music sets released annually by Music@Menlo, which contain 73 works from the baroque to 21st century. But I’m also bringing CDs by Musical America honorees David Finckel and Wu Han, Gil Shaham, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Joshua Bell, and undoubted future honorees.
Steve J. Sherman graciously offered to show us how to use PK’s new digital single photo and video camera, so I’m hoping you will be seeing some photos of the music school next week. In the meantime, its Web site is www.houtbaymusic.org.