Small victories and memories

Today I stole an hour from the travel demons and mounting angst over our upcoming trip.  I said what the “heck”, and went down to St. Mary’s College for the first of this year’s series of Piano Talks by Brian Ganz.  Me and about 19 other lucky folks were treated to a rewarding hour of beautiful music by Chopin, along with Brian’s instructive comments and illustrations.  Today’s selections were “The Mazurka’s Humor, and The Nocturns’s Heartbrake.  Brian talked about what makes “humor” in music, non sequiturs, unexpected resolutions, and so forth.  Of course he lost me rather quickly, but he used passages from the five mazurka’s he played to demonstrate.  He does have the habit of trying to involve the audience by asking questions..”which of the two pieces I just played illustrates humor by changing modality?”.  Some of the students hazarded a guess, but I kept quiet and tried to learn.  Oh, at one point he asked if anybody was familiar with the works of Leonard Cohen.   Given the age of most of the audience, I was not surprised that not many hands went up..  He said that Cohen used some of the same techniques as Chopin.  He gets around!

After the “humor” he played two nocturnes, (B major; Op 62, No. 1, and Lento con gran espressione).  Both were just beautiful.  There was just something nice about a few folks in a mostly empty auditorium with Brian filling the room with music.  One begins to see what real talent is, a question I have asked in the past.  These things are worth the trip, the next of which is October 4^th (at noon).  Brian can sell out Strathmore in an hour, we are so lucky to have him for free and share his expertise.

What made this concert special and melancholy for me was that the seat next to me was empty.  I had a good friend that I attended most of these talks with, and he always sat in the last row, aisle seat on the right side facing the stage with me beside him.  I came to find out he knew a lot about the music, although he never spoke much about it.  He was also the same person I shared many a long lunch with at Courtney’s.  A really unique person, I felt lucky to know and share time with him.  At the end of any performance he would always shout “Bravo!” in a lusty voice.  At the end of today’s session there was no Bravo.  He passed unexpectedly last month.   I did sit in the seat next to his as I always did, and I’m sure although it was not verbalized so we could hear, it was there.  Rest easy, my friend.