Good morning. It’s Friday. We’ll find out about a first-ever concert at Radio City Music Hall. We’ll also get details on New York State’s switch to cards that evade devices that siphon food-stamp money.
Soon after Sherry Sylar was hired as the associate principal oboist of the New York Philharmonic in 1984, her grandparents came to visit. They lived in a town in Tennessee with a population of just under 2,000. Her grandfather “was a little nervous about me in the big city,” she said.
When they returned to Tennessee, “they talked more about going to Radio City Music Hall than coming to hear me at the New York Philharmonic.”
Those two worlds — the one that is home to the high-kicking Rockettes and the one that is home to the symphony orchestra — will collide on Sunday when the Philharmonic appears at Radio City. The Rockettes won’t be there, unless they are in the audience, but Gustavo Dudamel, the Philharmonic’s music and artistic director designate, will be.
The Philharmonic says it is looking for ways to broaden its audience. “This is a sign of things to come,” said Adam Crane, the orchestra’s vice president for external affairs, who worked as an usher at Radio City when he was in college. (He said that he had seen the “Christmas Spectacular” so many times he could still sing parts of it.)
Radio City is, of course, flashy — it bills itself as the world’s largest indoor theater. It seats around 6,000 people, more than two and a half times the number that David Geffen Hall in Lincoln Center can accommodate. The stage at Radio City is 100 feet wide, half again the width of the stage at Geffen, and is framed by a proscenium arch that is 60 feet high. Geffen Hall doesn’t have a proscenium arch.
Everyone from Frank Sinatra to the Rolling Stones has appeared at Radio City, but it turned out that the Philharmonic had not. Matías Tarnopolsky, the orchestra’s president and chief executive, said he had realized that while brainstorming ways to promote Dudamel’s arrival next fall. “We asked ourselves, When did the New York Philharmonic last perform at Radio City?” he said. “And the answer was never.”
Then Radio City invited the Philharmonic to play on Sunday, using its new sound system. It’s unusual for the Philharmonic to be amplified indoors — its concerts in Central Park are miked and piped through speakers, but in concert halls the audience hears the orchestra with no help from electronics. Radio City says the system that was recently installed there uses the same technology as at Sphere in Las Vegas, for what Radio City calls “headphone-quality sound without the headphones.”
For the musicians, getting accustomed to the sound at Radio City is “probably the main purpose” of two rehearsals — the program is music the orchestra has played often. “I can’t wait to be on that stage,” said Carter Brey, the principal cellist of the Philharmonic. “It’s going to be a rush.”
He grew up in the New York area, but did not go to Radio City when he was a child — “It wasn’t on the radar screen,” he said. The only time he has been there was when he was in his mid-50s, for the concert celebrating Ringo Starr’s 70th birthday in July 2010.
“Being a boomer,” Brey said, “I had to grab my opportunity to see an actual live, breathing Beatle. It was a wonderful show, but in the back of my head — and the backs of the heads of everyone in that room — was the possibility that Paul McCartney might make a surprise appearance.” Starr brought “a bunch of guests up to sing ‘A Little Help from My Friends,’” Brey recalled, but McCartney wasn’t among them.
“We thought too bad, Paul didn’t show up,” recalled Brey, who had taken his teenage son along, “but then he bounded onstage and launched into ‘Birthday’ from the White Album.”
Brey turned to his son and said, “I can die happy now.”
Weather
Expect a mostly sunny day with temperatures near 36. Tonight will be mostly clear with a low around 12. A cold weather advisory will take effect during the evening.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Feb. 12 (Lincoln’s Birthday).
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“While we cannot control how much snow will actually fall this weekend, we can control how we prepare for and respond to this storm.” — Mayor Zohran Mamdani on a menacing winter storm that is expected to barrel into New York on Sunday.
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Will ‘chip-and-PIN’ cards deter scammers who steal food stamps?
New York is joining a small group of states in switching to cards that evade scammers’ efforts to siphon money for food from low-income people.
Scammers stole at least $52 million in New York State between 2023 and 2025 by “skimming,” or copying data from cards for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as SNAP or food stamps. Victims of skimming have no recourse: The federal government, which provides SNAP to the poorest Americans, no longer reimburses stolen money.
This month, Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, said that the state would upgrade from cards with magnetic strips to cards with what is known as chip-and-PIN technology, which is considered more secure. California has already switched to chip-and-PIN cards like the one shown above.
Hochul’s office did not provide a timeline or an estimate of what the upgrade to chip-and-PIN cards would cost. About three million New Yorkers receive food stamps each month, according to the New York State Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, which oversees the program statewide.
The switch to chip-and-PIN cards comes as the federal government takes aim at the social safety net by basing cuts to funds that states receive for food stamps on rates of fraud by SNAP beneficiaries. In fact, advocates say, food stamp users are more likely to be victims of fraud.
METROPOLITAN diary
Boy’s life
Dear Diary:
On a cold, gets-dark-at-4:30-p.m. Sunday, I took our dogs out for their last walk of the day. It had snowed that morning, and the sidewalk in front of our Upper West Side building was a slushy mess.
Stepping outside, I saw three college-age boys walking toward me and talking loudly.
My dogs started sniffing around, and I pulled them to the side as the young men passed. As they did, I picked up a snippet of their conversation.
“There’s nothing I love more than swimming in a river, or, like, a stream,” one said to the others.
One of the friends nodded seriously.
“That’s a banger,” he said.
— Morgan Savige
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you Monday. — J.B.
Davaughnia Wilson, Tara Terranova and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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James Barron writes the New York Today newsletter, a morning roundup of what’s happening in the city.
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