As much as we enjoy returning to live on our boat in Connecticut, the worst thing about summer is leaving my piano behind. If I was a professional, or played nearly at that level,
it would be intolerable. But I remember having
once worked with the great harpsichordist, Ralph Kirkpatrick (in the capacity
of publishing and cataloging the works of Scarlatti), visiting him at his home
in Guilford CT which was populated by harpsichords and grand pianos. He had made lunch for us, with some wine, and
before we got back to work I timidly asked him whether he might like to play a
piece. He looked at me as if I had lost
my mind, saying he never gives private audiences and especially not after a
glass of wine. I wondered, doesn't the
love of music transcend everything else?
Contrast that experience to the one I had with Henry
Steele Commager, who was the dean of American intellectual historians. I used to visit him in Amherst and we would
work in his study on the second floor. On
the first floor he had a baby grand piano and one day, again after lunch, I
asked him whether he played. He raced to
the piano and I quietly sat listening to him play a Beethoven sonata, and very
competently. For Commager, playing the piano was his creative outlet and during
that moment historian took second place.
I understand that.
My piano has been good to me this past year and in fact
we've been partners, preparing programs that I performed at the Hanley Center in
West Palm Beach, a rehab facility, and at The Waterford in Juno Beach, a
retirement home. Actually, most of the music I
played at the Hanley Center was impromptu from fake books but at the Waterford
I gave musical presentations with some commentary (Ann frequently helping me
with the latter), something I really enjoyed doing, and now have programs for
the music of Rodgers and Hammerstein, George Gershwin, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Claude-Michel
Schönberg, and songs of the Great American Songbook as immortalized by Frank
Sinatra.
Next season, I'll do others and perhaps record another CD
at a professional studio.
Of course I have no illusions about the enduring value of
such recordings, other than having goals keeps one young, and it is a joy to be
able to play. Luckily for me, my kind of
piano playing -- reading the melody line and improvising with chords -- is sort
of like riding a bicycle; once you know how to ride, you can do it anytime
without frequently practicing. So, a
summer away from my friend doesn't really set me back in terms of my ability to
play.
Nonetheless, as we prepare to leave, I look at my piano
with a melancholy regret and I tend to play pieces that reflect that mood.
Recently, I found myself playing some Bill Evans songs, constantly reverting to
his "Time Remembered" -- a piece with abstract, floating harmonies,
not exactly melodic. It reminds me a
little of Debussy, but in a more abstract form, so I found myself fiddling
around with some classical music, not one of my musical strengths, but what
better piece to play than Debussy's "Reveries" as a bookend for the
Bill Evans piece. From there I turned to
one of Stephen Sondheim's most beautiful ballads, "Johanna" from Sweeny Todd, much more structured than the Evans piece,
but all three musical compositions share this sense of the plaintive.
I set up my camera and recorded the Sondheim piece, a
brief rendition (BlogSpot has restrictions on video size). It is less than two minutes. and as I never
play a piece the same way twice, improvising much of it, when recording (especially
video with just a digital camera in our echoing living room), some self
consciousness encroaches. Nonetheless, I
include this below as a musical statement of the moment and particularly
because "Johanna" most accurately captures my mood. Whoever
said Sondheim can't write a beautiful melody is crazy as this is one of the
most haunting songs I know. It is also one
of his few outright love songs.
We'll be on the road soon and the blog will go quiet for
a while.
