Following up on my effort to share with you my joy-in-confinement exercise yesterday, I had a day of browsing today that was a whole lot of fun. Just wandering from one thing to the next without any direct purpose after yesterday's attempt to discipline myself by making lists.
I started out this morning with Nick Poelwijk, a young guy from Portland I'm now going to add to my "up-and-coming" list - another of those artists whose talent showed up when he was young and who had the advantage of good parental mentoring.
I found him when I came across a Guardian article this morning about the pianist, Angela Hewitt and her "best friend," her piano, the one she had done all her recordings on since way back. Moving from one place to another, piano movers dropped her piano and smashed it to pieces. Heartbreak. The piano manufacturer, Faziola, got wind of the disaster and created five pianos for her to choose from. And the insurance company picked up the tab for the new piano, so this is a story that ends well.
In the Guardian article is a mention of Gershwin's "Love Walked in," which sent me in search of a recording, which led me to young Nick. Here he is, playing "Love Walked In."
That led me to an interview with him, in which he totally charmed me, partly because it turns out he's from Portland, and I like to think of the West Coast cities of Seattle, Portland and San Francisco as oases (oasises???) in an increasingly uncivilized place one of my friends like to refer to as "South Central North America." Also because he's a cutie and because he lists Brahms as his favorite composer, as do I.
When asked his favorite composition, he said Brahms' First Piano Concerto, "especially the second movement". That sent me running to YouTube. Of the many offerings available, all by piano greats, I chose the one by Yuja Wang. To my utter delight it turned out to be a concert played in the open air in Munich in the summer of 2017. And that brought back a flood of serious nostalgia for my first experience with a big city. I was twenty years old when I went to Munich to study. It opened my life to the pleasures of Europe's great cities. I lived a twenty-minute walk from this place and got to combine this powerful music with the images of the Theatinerkirche and Feldherrenhalle, where the orchestra was set up, got to watch Yuja perform between the hindquarters of two magnificent lions, with the Frauenkirche and the spire of the Peterskirche all in the background when the cameras moved back. What a way to spend an hour after breakfast! If you can't find the time to listen to the whole piece, listen to the second movement, the Adagio, at least. It begins at minute 23:05. But the whole thing is only an hour and it's much more effective if it flows out as part of the whole.
The connections go on and on. The lions, turns out, were created by a sculptor named Rümann, from Hannover. My grandmother's maiden name was Rühmann (OK, there's an h added - the pronunciation is the same ) and she too was from Hannover (OK, not Hannover itself, but from Celle, but that's all close enough for my imagination).
This is life in the lockdown, the freedom to let the spirit wander wherever the internet will take me.
Other excursions in the past couple of days include feeling sadness over the death of Fou Ts'ong, the brilliant Chinese interpreter of Chopin. He was on my list of greats, along with Yuja Wang. He died a few days ago of Covid.
Fascinating story there. He went as a young man to Warsaw to study, no doubt because of his love of Chopin and the fact that he was selected to compete in a musical competition in Warsaw in 1953. Once he had tasted the freedom of being out of China, he escaped to England and eventually made it his home. For this the Chinese came down hard on his family, and his mother and father eventually committed suicide from the harassment. His younger brother attempted suicide as well, but failed three times. Imagine the guilt Fou Ts'ong had to contend with. And consider how many other Chinese lives were destroyed by Mao's Cultural Revolution.
And how about this piece about Igor Levit playing that idiotic Vexations piece by Satie - support for the notion that pianists have to cultivate their masochistic sides to get good at what they do?
Or skip the masochism for now and tune in to something completely different, this crazy Tom and Jerry number by Cateen, known for having fun with the piano and his performances. (remember his "Happy Birthday" number in twelve keys, one for each month of the year? Or his brilliant "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star?" This one is pure joy when he gets to his cadenza. Hope Liszt has a sense of humor and is not rolling in his grave. I, for one, want to stand up and holler over this one:
Not bad, for a Monday in January, I'd say...
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