“HBK!”
Finn joined us on Monday evening to celebrate my birthday. Diana had been busy earlier in the day with the traditional pavlova preparation. The mixer made a rare trip from its custom cupboard to the counter top. Oh, the complexity of a new oven and the micro-adjustments necessary to create the perfect meringue.
I think it turned out perfectly – crunchy and then the lovely chewiness of the inside. The other traditional birthday fare is meat pies. The regular recipe had been “misplaced”, and so a new one was attempted – I think with even better results. Finn was enlisted for an extra pair of hands in completing meat pie prep – dough shaping and egg washing – he’s always happy to help with cooking tasks.
What a perfect birthday treat. I love the Mardi Gras frame that Diana picked up in New Orleans for our Mardi Gras Day picture – one of my favourites from the recent residency.
Another one of her gifts was an excellent book – “Booze and Vinyl.” A selection of great albums from the last four decades with suggested cocktail pairings and snacks. This is a wonderful book – the authors clearly love vinyl records and cocktails very much. There’s not a bad album in here and the pairings make a lot of sense. Maybe we’ll work our way through this, one album per week, when we’re both retired.
Finn gifted me a “Tenicle 360”. This is a phone mount like an octopus – the arms allow you to mount your phone to almost anything, with strong suction cups. I laughed because Finn and I had seen this on Shark Tank and thought it would be a great product.
Will found a compact travel wallet for me. Apparently after much research and consultation with Diana. I think it’s great – just enough space for the essentials, and with a tracking card that shows you the wallet location on a map and then beeps as you home in on its location.
And then there’s a special gift. My Dad had suggested to Mum that they get me a valet as a present. I loaded it up for this picture, but couldn’t find my Rolex watch – more on that later.
Another lovely birthday.
We had planned to travel to San Francisco on Wednesday, to spend the long weekend with Clorinda. Unfortunately she tested positive for COVID earlier in the week, and we had to delay that adventure. Thankfully she had a couple of days of minor symptoms and is now fine and testing negative.
Diana convinced me to go for a run on Saturday morning, before it got too hot. I ran for 15 minutes, first time in a couple of months, and my legs are still achy today. Note to self – need to go running more often to avoid the two day thigh aches. We followed that with a trip to filtered for coffee and a quiche – something we haven’t done in a while. Penelope was happy for the trip with her top down on a lovely, sunny day.
I made my new Thai chicken dish on Saturday night and Finn joined us to sample it. He gave it a hearty thumbs up. Diana always enjoys my mise en place activity before making this dish – all my ingredients lined up in little bowls – like a TV cooking show.
Finn’s car is looking brand new after the ceramic coating that Will organized.
I dragged my achy thighs to the pool for a swim on Sunday morning – not too bad – I suppose swimming must use slightly different muscles, that or I just didn’t kick very hard. I’m guessing the latter.
On Sunday evening, we walked across the street to our neighbours, the Ennens, to celebrate the high school graduation of their twins. We had a pleasant time chatting with Mary’s brother and his family about travel, scuba diving and the like. One of the graduating twins, Tanner, was kind enough to check on the house and Penelope while we were on our New Orleans residency.
Have you watched any of “Somebody Feed Phil” on Netflix? I stumbled upon it recently (thanks Vince) and am really enjoying Phil Rosenthal’s exploits as he travels to a new city in each episode. Rosenthal was the creator of “Everybody Loves Raymond”, and you can certainly see the sense of humour that was so successful there coming through in this show. Highly recommended.
Now, about that lost Rolex. I assumed I had hidden it during the bathroom remodel – a while ago, I know. Several attempts to locate it in places I might have hidden it came up empty. Where do you think I found it? I’ll give you a minute to come up with some ideas, and still don’t think you’ll get it. I found it in a pocket of my work bag while cleaning it out for my travel this week. I must have been carrying it around from place to place for at least a year. Good grief!
I was proud of this Phrazle accomplishment on Sunday morning. My first time to guess in two tries. I just had to see “Never” at the end and then it fell into place.
My book this week was “Every Good Boy Does Fine (A Love Story, in Music Lessons)” by Jeremy Denk. This is one of my favourite reads in a while. Fair warning though – I’m not sure it would be particularly enjoyable to someone who doesn’t enjoy classical music and hasn’t struggled with the piano at some point in their life.
Here’s the bio on Denk:
“Jeremy Denk is one of America’s foremost pianists. Winner of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship and the Avery Fisher Prize, Denk is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He returns frequently to Carnegie Hall and has appeared with ensembles including the Chicago Symphony, New York Philharmonic, and Los Angeles Philharmonic. His recordings have reached #1 on the Billboard classical chartsa nd have been featured on many best-of-the-year lists. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Guardian, and The New York Times Review. Denk graduated from Oberlin College, Indiana University, and the Juiliard School. He lives in New York City.”
How can a world class pianist also by an excellent writer. Doubly not fair.
Each chapter covers Denk’s experience and relationship with a piano teacher, from early childhood through concert pianist. I particularly enjoyed the “playlist” at the start of each chapter – covering music discussed in that chapter. I did my best to play along on Spotify. The highlight of the book for me was the detailed way that Denk described portions of the pieces he is playing – the rhythm and melodies – in such a caring and nuanced way.
The first teacher:
“At this point (according to my parents) I asked for piano lessons. They were surprised because of my passionate rejection of the violin, but I’d been banging away at the spinet here and there. As it happened, a teacher lived right down the street: Mona Schneiderman. (Has a more perfect piano teacher name ever been invented?) And so a new weekly routine began, in lieu of medication or therapy. Mom was relieved it didn’t involve more driving. I have unreliable memories of Mona’s face – just a general kindness, light brown hair, glasses. Her upright piano stood just off the kitchen, sharing space with a formal dining room.
Mona gave me a book of sheet music: Very Easy Piano Pieces for Children. On the cover, I scrawled in my loopiest script: “Love the piano.” I got assigned my first piece, “Wonderful World”, on March 10, 1976 (I was five and three-quarters). It had lyrics.”
A synopsis of the fifteen year old Denk:
“My resume: straight A’s, probable valedictorian, fifteen years old, a year’s worth of college already under my belt, and no chance of my ruining all this by knocking up anyone. I’d won the Chemistry Olympics, with a super-precise titration. I had gushing recommendations from my English teachers and my calculus professor. Bruce Streett arranged for me to meet with Ivy Leagues alumni around town. He accepted that I wasn’t going to go to Oxford, or become a Rhodes scholar, because I needed to focus on piano, and yet he still wanted to help.”
On studying Beethoven’s Sonata in F Minor, op. 57 at Oberlin college in 1986:
“After a few weeks of hitting the “Appassionata” first movement hard, Joe asked me to start the second. I opened the music in my practice room. on the page, it looked innocent: a hymn, one basic chord after another. I felt this was a scam. You often encounter a boundary in Beethoven, when he prunes music to the fundamentals: you think he’s gone too far, but then you realize he hasn’t. I hadn’t evolved to that second stage. I was more than willing to call out Beethoven for being a hack.
My lesson rolled around. After I played the theme and one variation, Joe said, “What’s going on? What happened to you?”
A bad comment – maybe one of the worst. I decided to confess. I told Joe I thought the piece was boring, even a bit cheesy. Joe didn’t order me out of the studio, or lecture me on how this is one of Beethoven’s holiest visions, inhabiting a space between childlike wonder and deep reverence. He gave me the look that Jerry Seinfeld give George Costanza when George proposes some new morally vacant scheme, and then shook it off with a sigh, and decided there was nothing else to do but approach the problem practically. God, what I wouldn’t have given for something impractical, I was so tired of sighs and rolled-up sleeves.”
On his love of Brahms:
“If you forced me at gunpoint to pick a favorite tune, I would choose the beginning of Brahms’ first Piano Trio, op. 8, in B Major. I first heard and played it at age fourteen, and in my mind it still lives there, thinking fourteen-year-old thoughts. Brahms begins this tune in the piano, in its richest, most chocolaty-register – what’s called the tenor. The melody launches from a low preamble note, then climbs, one note at a time. For the first few notes, it’s just a major scale, nothing memorable. But then Brahms decides to skip one note. This act is crucial and defining: the melody acquires identity and purpose.”
More on Brahms. I love this description of the horn opening:
“Brahms B-flat! A comical choice for an injured pianist, like deciding to ascend Everest with a broken leg. It is one of the most difficult pieces in the piano repertoire, more difficult in many ways than Rachmaninoff no.3. But I kept going over it in my head. I couldn’t stop obsessing about the opening, a horn call, a rising scale with a little curlicue creating a subtle upward energy, the sense of a question. And after the horn ascended, how the piano came from the unexpected other side, from the deepest bass, creating a cushion of sound around the horn, a foundation beneath a foundation. The timbre of the horn, the sense of space, the call in the mountains resounding over the valley (“He wrote it in Italy!” one conductor reminded me; another cellist friend said, “Here is the universe”).”
I have many more dog-eared pages in this book, but you get a sense of it from those quotes. I will have to delve in again and spend more time listening to the “playlists” from each chapter. There is a section at the end of the book where Denk lists out his favourite recordings of each piece – through the wonder and curse of Spotify they are all right at our fingertips.
As Monty Python would say, “And now for something completely different.” At least on the music front.
A couple of songs from Govt. Mule’s latest, “Heavy Load Blues”:
I always loved Whitesnake’s version of this. Such a shame Coverdale’s amazing voice was wasted on silly rock ‘n roll songs:
And finally, back in the piano realm. The sublime Keith Jarrett from a recording that I’ve been looking for for many years, and finally tracked down “Moth and the Flame”:
Stay safe, compassionate and kind to everyone!