I put my hand in here, I put my hand in there

Journalist Matthew Gurewitsch remembers our mutual PR friend Helene Kamioner, who died last weekend, aged 72:

… She flew totally solo, often by the seat of her pants. Mapping out publicity campaigns was not her style. Her Holy Grail, always, was that elusive Sunday feature in the New York Times. But the breaks that were her bread-and-butter showed up much more often in less prestigious media or on the radio, whose gatekeepers she bombarded relentlessly with press releases, backup materials, and breathless phone calls, often—as well she knew—far past the point of diminishing returns. To mix a few more metaphors, the little black book was thick with the debris of burned bridges. Her dustups with friends could be nuclear, too, but there, she often mended the fences.

Even so, Helen built a distinguished roster. Among her headliners we find the genre-defying soprano Constance Hauman, the fiddler without borders Daniel Hope, and the high-strung dramatic tenor Neil Shicoff. The Beaux Arts Trio was in her portfolio, alongside the Bavarian State Opera, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, and Salzburg Marionettes, not to mention the Tannery Pond Concerts in bucolic upstate New York, a pet project of her friend the celebrity photographer Christian Steiner…

Read on here.