Zeneba and Matt Featured on CBS Sunday Morning 2020

During the 2020 coronavirus lockdown in Italy, we were confined to our little apartment for months. Luckily we have a lovely view of our town from our little balcony, so we decided to do a nightly performance in hopes of lifting spirits in our town. We ended up doing 62 concerts in a row before restrictions were relaxed. The folks at CBS Sunday Morning got wind of what we were doing, and they made us a part of their story about balcony concerts that they broadcast last year. Zeneba shares some thoughts, a year later, in this article…

A year ago we were featured on CBS Sunday Morning, which was the realization of a dream for me -- I had been watching that show for 20+ years and had a pipe dream about my chamber ensemble ALIAS being on it. Over the years I sent a few cold-call pitches to the show, which undoubtedly ended up in the "round file", but I kept plugging away. If I had a nickel for every (unsuccessful) "cold call" I've made.....

So I was "chuffed", to put it mildly, when one day in April 2020 I got a message in my Facebook inbox from the show, inquiring about our balcony series. I almost deleted it, thinking it was spam.

They wanted to send a camera crew to our town, but rules at the time were extremely restrictive and we really did not want to bother our town's officials with a bunch of emails and calls to sort out getting a crew here -- they had enough to do in that time of crisis. So over the next few days we worked with the producer of the show to try and figure out how we could do the camera work ourselves, on our stupid smartphones. At this point in the lockdown, we were leaving our 500sq ft house only once a week. ONCE A WEEK! And even then, only one of us could go. Plus every night at 6, we were broadcasting live, all kinds of music. To say we were a little stir crazy is remembering it kindly.

Two lighthearted takeaways from the experience: Dreams realized are still good even if they aren't anything like you pictured them; and professional camera crews really do great work.