Instead of typical concert shots, Elterman took his camera backstage and elsewhere to snap candids of some of the era's greats, riding in cars, eating french fries, exiting port-a-johns in general, being like anybody else.
Studio guests such as John Tusa responded sagely to an exhaustingly swift succession of queries on everything from programme starting times (7pm, please) to whether concerts should really take place in swimming pools and railway stations (seriously) instead of stuffy old concert halls.
Instead of becoming a concert pianist, though, he decided to write novels.
So far, the companies have been individually negotiating with the government instead of acting in concert.
So instead of a park concert, with its unavoidable compromises (and humidity to boot), listeners had the benefit of a finely wrought evening of chamber music.
(It's still produced in partnership with Jazz at Lincoln Center, but at the organization's house nightclub instead of its main concert hall).
One enjoyable aspect of this late-night series, always a highlight of the summer season, is the chance to savor the playing of first-class musicians in an intimate setting instead of a vast concert hall.
But instead of ending the concert with it, as is typically done, he tucked it between two Mozart choral works: the brief, inspirational "Ave Verum Corpus," to open the program, and the "Vesperae Solennes de Confessore" ("Solemn Vespers of the Confessor"), a work not performed at the festival since Robert Shaw presented it in 1982.
Events will include: a ballet featuring 11 tonnes of bone dust instead of dancers; a concert inspired by the poems of Michelangelo; and a performance of Percy Bysshe Shelley's savagely political 1819 poem The Masque of Anarchy – within a stone's throw of the site of the Peterloo massacre which inspired it.
