tickling them ivories old school style

I paid a visit to the one and only Carnegie Hall for a piano recital.

J.S. Bach! Maurice Ravel! Franz Schubert! Leoš Janáček!

Waitaminute. Leoš Janáček?! Who the hell is Leoš Janáček!? They always throw in a wild card. Well, three out of four is batting .750 and that’s pretty darn good.

The acoustics in that place are mind-blowing. When they come to a quiet passage, you can actually “feel” the silence on your skin. It’s a phenomenon. I can’t describe it.

Brief, one-sentence rant: People who cough during the quiet passages of Bach’s Partita No. 2 in C minor should be punched in the throat for breaking the spell.

The arc of my taste in music is pretty strange. It seems like it was just the other day I was listening to Rush’s Fountain of Lamneth off of their seminal third album Caress of Steel. Now look at me! Digging a recital by a world-class, award winning British pianist with a bunch of Upper East Side high-brows and European tourists who probably never used a copy of 2112 to clean the stems and seeds out of their weed! What a bunch of losers! I should turn in my bong and be done with it.

God, it was good. Simply beautiful. Close your eyes and drift away…