Mischa Maisky and Lily Maisky, May 4, 2019 (Chamber Music SF)

This was a long and varied program by cellist Mischa Maisky and pianist Lily Maisky (Mischa's daughter). The first piece was an Adagio by Marcello as arranged by Bach for keyboard as arranged by Maisky for cello and piano, followed without a break by Bach's Largo from the Harpsichord Concerto No. 5 as arranged by S. Franco, followed without a break by Pamina's Aria from Mozart's The Magic Flute as arranged by Maisky. Many in the audience were confused. Maisky later explained that he thinks that some pieces should be "attached" this way.

Then they played the Brahms Sonata No. 2 in F Major, Op. 99. This has a very elaborate and beefy piano part, and there were many places where the balance was off, with the cello inaudible. Some of that, perhaps most of that, is Brahms' fault. If the piano is playing in the same register as the cello and it's marked forte, you're just not going to hear the cello. But in other sections, particularly when the cellist is plucking strings, pizzicato, the pianist should simply back off. Brahms is a great master, of course, but this was not my favorite piece of the evening.

(Speaking of balance, I am reminded of the time when the principal flute player of a major orchestra was once asked, "When do you have time to practice?" He replied, "During the loud parts.")

In the second half of the program, we heard another attached pair of pieces by Tchaikovsky, followed by what I consider the major work of the evening, the Cello Sonata in D minor, Op. 40, by Shostakovich. The texture in this piece was quite clear; there was never any smothering of the cello by the piano, even though the piano part was just as elaborate and beefy (and downright difficult) as the Brahms. This was the highlight of the evening for me, and it was vintage Shostakovich: a mixture of forthright statements, unbearable sadness, and raucous humor. I want to listen to this piece again.

The Maiskys played three encores. The first was Rachmaninoff's Vocalise, tender as always. The next was another pair of attached pieces, by Saint-Säens (Mon cœur s'ouvre à ta voix from Samson et Dalila, one of the beautiful arrangements of this piece I've ever heard), and a short, snappy piece by Debussy. The final encore was Fritz Kreisler's familiar Liebesleid. The crowd was quite pleased.

Castanets in Tannhäuser? "Wagner Love-Music" at the SF Symphony

One of the pieces on last night's program at the SF Symphony was the Overture and Venusberg Music from Tannhäuser. Once the Venusberg party gets going (the Bacchanal), various percussion instruments join in: tambourine, triangle, cymbals, drums, and ... castanets. I've heard this piece a zillion times and never noticed it, but I watched as Jacob Nissly, the Principal Percussion player, stood up, put one foot on a stool, and played the castanets on his thigh. It starts with one beat per measure (clack, clack, ...), then two (clackclack, clackclack, ...), then a triplet + 1 (clackety clack, clackety clack, ...), then all triplets (clackety, clackety, clackety ...), then four (clackclackclackclack, clackclackclackclack, ...), then non-stop, fast-as-you-can (clackclackclackclackclackclackclackclackclackclackclackclack ...) for a full minute or more. The guy has muscles and stamina, and probably a sore thigh. It was pretty funny to watch.

They also played the Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde; it was "Wagner Love-Music" night. That was the second half. In the first half, we had Mendelssohn's Ruy Blas Overture (rarely played these days but you'd recognize it) and Bruch's G Minor Violin Concerto (likewise) with James Estes, who was spectacular. He came out after the Bruch and played an encore by Eugène Ysaÿe (thanks to Stephen Smoliar for identifying this composer, who was unknown to me). It started slowly but got faster, and then it switched into double stops (two notes at a time, so the bow has to cross two strings, very difficult), and then it got really fast and wild. The audience went crazy. He did a second encore, a short piece by Bach, which restored Order To The Universe.

Although I bought the ticket to hear the Wagner and the guest conductor, Marek Janowski, I enjoyed the non-Wagner pieces more. The Wagner pieces were just too familiar. We all know every note of those pieces. Well, except for the castanets.

Cameron Carpenter, Davies Symphony Hall, March 10, 2013

Cameron Carpenter’s concerts are always a surprise, but never more so than when the program says, “Cameron Carpenter will announce the first half of his program from the stage” and the second half lists only pieces that have never been performed in the US before. (And he added a post-intermission encore to that.)

He began the concert by walking on stage and, without saying a word, launching into the Prelude from Bach’s Suite No. 1 in G Major for Unaccompanied Cello, played on the pedals alone. This was not simply an impossibly difficult solo for pedals; for this piece, he redefined “fleet of foot.” The opening line is an arpeggio in three voices. Take a look at the first three notes: a low G, a D four notes above that, and a B five notes above that:

Now consider how you would play those distantly separated notes with two feet! Then add the other notes, and keep a brisk tempo. Impossible.

After finishing the Prelude, he proceeded to play it again, this time “accompanying” the unaccompanied piece with a full-on Fantasia.

He then spoke of the recent sad loss of the San Francisco Symphony’s principal oboist, William Bennett, in whose memory he then played one of Bach’s Leipzig Chorales, Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland, which features a solo line that he played on the organ’s oboe stop. This was a “straight” performance, note-wise, but exceptionally free and beautifully ornamented, as an oboe player might play it. It was very moving.

This was followed immediately by a ferocious Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor (BWV 542). Completely over the top, as one expects from Carpenter. My favorite moment was in the pedal at measure 31 of the Fantasia, where Bach writes a line that descends – logically – four octaves. Of course, there aren’t that many octaves in the pedal, which contains only 32 keys, so in the written score, you play one octave and then start over again from the top. But for a given key on the organ, you can use a stop that plays the pitch for that key (a so-called 8-foot stop), or the pitch one octave higher (4’), one octave lower (16’), or two octaves lower (32’). So by starting with just 4’ stops and then adding gradually adding 8’, 16’, and 32’ stops, Carpenter produced a 4-octave descent! It makes perfect sense. I doubt that he was the first organist to do this, but it’s the first time I’ve ever heard it done, and I’ve known this piece since I was a teenager.

Carpenter did introduce the next two pieces on the program, the Chorale No. 3 in B Minor by César Franck, and the Variations on a Noel by Marcel Dupré, which Carpenter described as a “fashion show,” which was both funny and apt.

This was a revelation for me. We’ve all become accustomed to organists’ taking certain liberties with the registration, if not the notes, of Bach’s organ music, since Bach rarely wrote what stops he expected the organist to use, although every organist knows standard registrations.

But for French Romantic organ music, we have much more specific information. Franck and Dupré wrote registration-indications in the score, and the instruments for which these pieces were written are still in use today. We have recordings of Marcel Dupré, and some of us, myself included, were privileged enough to hear Dupré play in person. We know the churches, we know the acoustics, we know “how they’re supposed to be played.”

But Carpenter, succeeding in his grand quest to make us all re-think this instrument and this music, did not follow these traditional registrations. Instead, he picked new sounds, appropriate to Davies Hall and to the Ruffatti organ, and surprised many of us. I’ve heard these pieces played countless times; this was not better or worse; it was new, different, and delightful. It reminded me of a performance I saw, years ago, of The Tempest at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, in which Prospero was Miranda’s mother. It changed everything, and I’ll never think of that play again without remembering that performance. Carpenter’s performance was like that.

After intermission, we were expecting five pieces from Carpenter’s work in progress, Science Fiction Scenes, but he started, again without commentary, by playing The Academic Festival Overture by Brahms, as a sort of mid-concert encore. The five Scenes that followed have been performed only once before, in Berlin. There were interesting themes in the first and fifth scenes, and a perpetual-motion figure in the pedal of the third movement. The rest I didn’t find very interesting as compositions. The program notes say, “Carpenter draws on the vast emotional array not only of science fiction itself, but also of the concept of large-scale epic music as essential to the cinematic science fiction experience.” OK, if you say so. I heard harmonic wisps of show tunes, which was jarring in a performance by the hard-edged Carpenter. But these are new pieces, and perhaps this is what the Scenes are about. Time will tell.

There is no doubt in my mind, however, that Cameron Carpenter is one of the greatest organists I’ve ever heard, and I’ve sat on the bench next to Marcel Dupré.

Paul Jacobs, Davies Symphony Hall, January 22, 2012

Paul Jacobs gave a recital in the Organ Recital Series in Davies Symphony Hall today, almost exactly a year after his previous one, and in reviewing what I wrote then (here), I can say that this one was much more successful, although there were startling similarities at the very beginning and the very end.

This recital started with the Elgar Sonata in G Major, a long and multi-colored piece. There is the stately, oh-so-Brittania opening, elegant soft passages, and happily overcooked cadences, amidst orchestral textures that require an organ and an organist with great resources. Jacobs' opening was more spritely than stately, and the similarity with last year is that in such a dry acoustic as Davies, you need the lush sounds of Elgar to last longer. The triplets in the very second bar were so quick and detached that we barely had a chance to hear them before they were gone. Things warmed up, happily, after that.

Jacobs explained that the Bach Trio Sonatas, one of which followed the Elgar, were unusual compositions for the organ in giving independent lines to the right hand, the left hand, and the feet. Think of a string trio, two violins and a cello, each playing a separate line, each as difficult as the others, and nicely interwoven. Now imagine one person having to play all three such parts, and you have some idea of the complexity of the Bach Trio Sonatas for Organ. They're a delight for the audience but something of a terror for organists. Jacobs mentioned that Bach had written these pieces as instruction pieces for his son Wilhelm Friedrich, and he surmised that given the difficulty of the pieces, he must have detested his son.

Difficulties notwithstanding, Jacobs played the three-movement work with exceptional clarity. In my mind, this was the highlight of the concert. The Trio Sonatas are well known to fans of Bach organ music, but I heard new things in these old works, and that's the best part of concert-going. (If you never hear anything new, you might as well just listen to your recording at home.)

Jacobs ended the first half by returning to Elgar, playing the ultimate Elgar warhorse, Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1, a "favorite" at graduation ceremonies, which is to say, hardly an actual favorite piece at all. (At a graduation ceremony I attended recently, there was no band, and they simply played a recording of this brief piece, over and over and over...) I'm not sure why Jacobs programmed it. Coming after the Bach, I thought it took us from the sublime to the ridiculous, but it provided a pre-intermission chuckle.

The second half included three rare pieces, all by women (rarer still). The Suite for Organ by Florence Price ("the first African-American woman to gain prominence as a symphonic composer," according to the program notes) was written in 1940. It contains four delightful movements, strongly reminiscent of French Romantic composers, structurally familiar (including a fughetta), but with more than a few jazzy elements. The program notes say, "The closing broaches the boundaries of Gershwin." That's one way to put it. Suffice it to say that it's easy to hear Gershwin's approach to the African-American tradition of song in this work, but perhaps only because we know Gershwin so well.

In an odd but brilliant bit of programming, Jacobs concluded the program by interleaving the final two pieces, Nadia Boulanger's Trois Pieces and three of Jeanne Demessieux' Transcendental Etudes: the first movement of the Boulanger, then the first movement of the Demmesieux, then the second Boulanger, and so on. The Boulanger pieces are slight but beautiful. Boulanger, a titan of music teaching for generations of composers, wrote very little, preferring to promote the music of her younger sister Lili, but these pieces are well worth hearing. I was especially moved by the two-part canon, and Jacobs played it with great charm and affection.

The movements of the gentle Boulanger alternated with the terrifying Etudes of Demissieux. To say that these pieces are difficult would be an understatement, and just watching Paul Jacobs manage the wild, non-stop sixteenth notes in the pedal was enough to make you stop breathing. I knew of Demessieux from her recordings of Franck, but I had no idea that this "crazy woman," as Jacobs described her, had written such brilliant tours de force. Jacobs played the opening Etude at breakneck speed, risking but averting disaster at every turn.

It is worth mentioning that Jacobs played this entire recital without a score. A half-hour Elgar piece requires an astounding memory. One might expect to memorize the Bach or the short Elgar piece, but memorizing the rare pieces of the second half would defy nearly any musician. As Jacobs mentioned in his remarks from the stage, much of the task of organ-playing is the sheer management of the overwhelming mechanical details of this most elaborate of musical instruments. This particular instrument has five manuals plus pedal, 147 ranks, and a dazzling array of couplers, which link the divisions of the organ, and pistons, which turn on and off arbitrary sets of stops. Organs vary from hall to hall. Jacobs spent many hours programming the instrument for a two-hour recital, and yet he navigated his way through the hundreds of changes as if it were his home instrument. We heard one recital on  this series last year, by an organist with a typically impressive biography, who had not done her homework. She had two basic settings, loud and soft, and her technique was only so-so, resulting in a performance totally lacking in nuance and color. In the hands of a master like Paul Jacobs, the Rufatti organ in Davies can do amazing things.

In a bizarre twist, Jacobs played the exact same encore as he did last year, the A Minor Fugue, BWV 543, and unfortunately, it was played in the same way: with increasing speed and volume, resulting in cacophony. As I wrote last year, he should leave that approach to Bach to Cameron Carpenter. But apart from that one unhappy moment, this was a brilliant recital, and I hope Paul Jacobs returns every year.

Louis Lortie, March 12, 2011

Pianist Louis Lortie played an "immersion" concert this evening: the 12 Etudes, opus 10; the 3 New Etudes, Op. Posth.; the 12 Etudes, Op 25; and for an encore, the Nocturne in D♭, Op. 27 No. 2; all by Chopin. With such a program, one discovers both differences and similarities: the vast differences in size, length, and complexity, and the surprising similarities between pieces written years apart, particularly those in the same key. Most of these pieces were quite familiar to me, while others seemed (and may well have been) new to me. In that sense, the concert was a success. I came away with a renewed appreciation for a great composer.


I really like Lortie. I've seen him play a few times before in San Francisco, but only in Davies Hall with the Symphony, and he always struck me as a pianist's pianist: incredible technique but not flashy, wearing tails but no sequined LL on the lapel. I was eager to hear this recital.


But things got off to a bad start, due to overpedaling, which turns even the best playing to mush. The pedal is there for a reason, so how much is too much? The best way I can explain it is in terms of information theory. Using the pedal is like removing the spaces between words. IfIwriteawholesentenceortwowithoutspaces,itgetshardtoreadbecauseyoucan'tquicklytellwhereonewordstopsandthenextonestarts. Now, sometimes that's OK. If I write hellooooooooooooooooothere, it doesn't matter precisely how many o's I used, because it's just an acoustic effect on one word' the extra o's provide no new information. Likewise, if I write thegiantswontheworldseriesthegiantswontheworldseriesthegiantswontheworldseries, what you understand is one message, repeated several times; there's no new information with each repetition. Call it a "lexical arpeggio." If I write abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz, you see one alphabet, not 26 individual letters; it is the lexical equivalent of a chromatic scale.


So the idea is that when there is a lot of information, you need the acoustic space between the bits in order to hear it. Lortie used such heavy pedaling in the first half that we lost the substance of the music, and all that remained was the superficial aspects, typically very fast and often very loud. For some audiences, that's all they want, but my impression of the audience at this concert, sponsored by Chamber Music San Francisco, was that they're a little more sophisticated and wanted more -- or less.


Not everything in the first half (the Opus 10 etudes) was mush. My favorite piece in this half was the Etude No. 9 in F Minor, with lightning-fast runs played pianissimo and secco, without pedal. Indeed, I've heard very few pianists who can play pianissimo as well as Lortie, and it's such an exciting moment because the audience suddenly goes quiet, almost leaning forward to hear better. Fireworks are exciting, but so are anti-fireworks.

While I remain mystified that Lortie had such a lead foot for most of the first half, things got better in the second half, and I could just revel in the beauty and skill of his playing. The Etude in G# Minor, Op 25 No. 6, was my favorite in this half. It was dazzlingly difficult, like most of the program, and maybe I was overwhelmed by it because, in part, it was unfamiliar. The monster piece of the set was the Etude in B Minor, Op. 25 No. 10, but here I felt that Lortie reverted to the dark side of the force. On the other hand, if I had the technique to play like that, I might just succumb to the temptation to let loose. When you got it, flaunt it. Overall, this was a memorable concert, flawed though it was.


I wonder what modern composers, or performers for that matter, think about MIDI devices. In particular, Yamaha makes a grand piano that's outfitted with a MIDI interface, so that you can hook it up to a computer that tells it which notes to play, when, how long to hold each note, how to pedal, and so on. There is no limit imposed by ten fingers, and there's nothing to prevent the piano from playing as fast as its action will allow. I'm sure that there's a MIDI score for some of the Chopin preludes, so what would we do with this? There's no reason to suppose that it would have to sound "mechanical"; you could introduce as much variation in tempo and dynamics as you liked. Perhaps you could bootstrap this process by taking an actual recording, or even a piano roll like the ones Rachmaninoff made. Then you proceed to tweak it so that it sounded just the way you wanted it. You could even define some variations, perhaps random within certain limits, to prevent every performance from being the same.


My point is that very few people have the time, energy, talent, perseverance, and hands to play Chopin as well as Lortie plays, while relatively many people could use a computer to work on a MIDI performance. I did not handwrite this article in Times Roman for you, and while it is not as visually beautiful as a great calligrapher and a great typesetter could make it, it's pretty good, courtesy of a computer. If I were a youngster just starting to learn to play the piano, and I faced a choice between spending hours every day, for the rest of my career, practicing scales and playing the same repertoire over and over, versus learning how to use a computer to construct a performance, I think I would do the latter. Moreover, that's what I would encourage a kid to do today. This isn't possible for singing, or even tuba-playing, but I think it is possible for keyboards.


It's not that one shouldn't spend one's life practicing the piano. There are enough people on the planet that we can spare a few thousand to do this -- or almost anything else. For example, consider an Olympic diver. Is there anything more bizarre than spending a significant portion of your waking life, in your physical prime, jumping into a pool of water, over and over? It's not evil. It's far less useful, for pure entertainment, than learning to play the piano; even bad pianists can lead happy crowds in song. But divers do something that we consider beautiful, however brief, and diving is an abstraction, a quintessence, of something anyone who ever jumped into a pond can understand. There aren't enough divers in the world that it costs anything important. So why not?


Compare that to people who spend their lives preparing to wage war with the folks who live on the next hill because, well, they live on the next hill and must therefore be done away with. Now that is evil and a waste of a life. In some better, parallel universe, we would spot people with this tendency, take away their weapons, and hand them -- tubas.
  

Jenny Lin, February 27, 2011

In an intriguing program, pianist Jenny Lin selected five Preludes and Fugues this afternoon from Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1 and surrounded each with a pair of Preludes and Fugues from Shostakovich's Opus 87. The story is fairly well-known: Shostakovich heard Tatiana Nikolayeva play all 48 of the Bach Preludes and Fugues (Books 1 and 2) in 1950, and suitably inspired or challenged, wrote his own set of 24, one in each major and minor key. So interleaving the Bach and Shostakovich in a performance has a certain appeal. Will we hear more than a superficial connection? A lot has to do with the particular choices in each Shostakovich-Bach-Shostakovich trio, and Lin's choices worked quite well, with neighboring pieces in nearby keys, sometimes nearer than you might think. The Bach E minor Fugue, for example, ends on an E major chord, so going directly into the E major prelude of Shostakovich was easy on the ear.

So was Ms. Lin's playing. She came out on stage looking cool, calm, and collected, making eye contact with the audience (unlike some players), and sitting comfortably at the keyboard, all of which puts the audience at ease. It would be inaccurate to call her playing "relaxed"; "completely confident" would be better, and considering that this was her debut recital in the Bay Area, that was a good sign. I especially enjoyed the clarity with which she brought out inner lines, even in the thick of 4- and 5-voice textures.

The transitions were sometimes illuminating, but not always. Exiting the Shostakovich C major fugue, which contains only white notes and therefore keeps a certain simplicity, and entering the Bach C major prelude, with its white-note arpeggios (for 5 bars, anyway) seemed not to be a 200-year jump at all. On the other hand, following that with the Shostakovich A minor prelude, played at breakneck speed, seemed jarring, despite the harmonic connection. (A similarly troppo presto tempo seemed to derail the Bach E Minor fugue for a few bars.)

One naturally thinks of the influence of Bach on the Shostakovich pieces, but the performer must also consider the effect of Shostakovich on the Bach. For example, the Bach pieces are often played with varying nontrivial amounts of ornamentation, mordents and trills and grace notes and so on, whereas the Shostakovich is not, so if you're juxtaposing them to bring out their similarities, you would likely play the Bach fairly straight. Lin did that, except in the C# minor prelude, where the ornaments seemed overdone, even though they would be mild for most Bach performances.

(Actually, the older I get, the less ornamented I like my Bach. An ornament draw attention to a note, and some performers get so carried away that the ornaments cease being the icing on the cake and become the cake itself. That wouldn't be an issue for, say, Couperin. I heard a brilliant concert earlier this month by Juho Pohjonen, who played pieces from Couperin's Fourth Book for Harpsichord, followed by Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin, where the point was to highlight the difference between the original and the homage, and moreover, where the icing really is the cake.)

The Bach C# minor fugue is a grand, stately affair, one of my favorites, and stylistically, it is closer to the Shostakovich D minor double fugue than to the A Flat major or D Flat major preludes that surrounded it. Similarly, the Bach D major fugue, with its flight of quick 32nd notes followed by slow, dotted eighths, is closest to the Shostakovich B Flat minor fugue, with similar figures. That may be the strangest piece in the entire Shostakovich Opus 87: one might call it "dreamy," following no discernible rhythm. Indeed, it's hard to imagine a fugue, Western civilization's most structured art form, as such a free-flowing piece. In this enlightening performance, it suddenly occurred to me that this fugue sounds like bird calls: they're all the same melody, but they're completely asynchronous and tonally unrelated. It's not every piano recital of Bach or Shostakovich that reminds you of Messiaen.

Rafal Blechacz, February 20, 2011

Rafal Blechacz is a 25-year-old pianist from Poland with a long list of awards, and he is particularly known for his Chopin. His recital this afternoon at Herbst Theater, sponsored by Chamber Music San Francisco, had lots of Chopin but started out with the "9 Variations in C Major on Lison dormait" by Mozart, "L'isle joyeuse" by Debussy, and the Sonata No. 1 in C minor, Op. 8, by Karol Szymanowski. The Mozart is a 20-minute work, pretty, but surprisingly lightweight for the 22-year-old Mozart, well into his maturity. Blechascz' playing was crystal clear; if anything, he made it sound too simple for a recital. It reminded me of the time I heard heard Arkdai Volodos play a Schubert piece, a strange choice for someone with keyboard-crushing technique and repertoire.

The Debussy was brilliant, perhaps a tad fast, but a pleasure to hear. The Szymanowski was the major work on the first half. Written when he, too, was 22, the 30-minute work sounded less to me like Chopin (an influence on much of Szymanowsky's music) and more like Godowsky: richly harmonic, and pianistically grand-scale. The opening movement ends with such a flourish that some members of the audience started applauding; Blechacz even acknowledged it by standing and taking a bow, which was unusual. The piece is in C minor; the second movement is in A-flat major, but there are ominous low C's near the end, reminding us of where we came from, and where we will return in the final movement. The cheery third movement alternates between E-flat major and B major, but the fourth movement has us back in C minor, and with a grand, exciting fugue. Near the very end, there's a full-keyboard glissando, leading to a bright conclusion in C major, which is where this recital began. The last few bars are a little odd: trills in both hands slow down the action, when the scale of the piece would seem to demand something simpler, bigger, and louder. But Blechacz did a wonderful job with this unfamiliar piece, and was richly applauded.

The second half began and ended with two of Chopin's four Ballades, in G minor and F Major. In between there were two Polonaises, Op. 26, and four Mazurkas, Op. 41. (The 4th, in A-flat Major, was incorrectly listed as A-flat minor.) I know the Ballades well, but the Polonaises and Mazurkas were new to me. However, they sounded rock-solid, old-hat here, and one understands why this pianist has done so well with Chopin: it's in his blood, of course, but it's also in his head, his hands, and his heart. I actually found the F Major Ballade a little rushed and pedal-heavy for my tastes, and I've seen lesser pianists crack under the strain of this piece. Perhaps Blechacz will approach it differently in ten years' time, when there's less pressure to dazzle with sheer technique and more time to savor the richness of all one zillion notes.

Blechacz played two encores, one by Chopin (I should know which one it was -- it has themes that also appear in one of the Piano Concertos), and one probably not by Chopin (Haydn?). The pianist, who's young, tall, and handsome, was very popular with many of the younger members of the audience, who had to be reminded by the series director not to take photos, to film the entire concert (I've seen that done in Herbst), to send text messages, to watch the Simpsons, "et cetera." From my seat upstairs, I'm also noticing that the ubiquitous smartphones, with their brightly lit little screens, are now joined by iPads, with their brightly lit large screens. Fortunately they were dark during the performance. Unfortunately, there were a couple of ringing phones and a lot of coughing, but the pianist played bravely on.

I look forward to hearing Blechacz again.