I am at London Heathrow airport awaiting my flight home. Even this last morning in London was a whirlwind: breakfast with Christian, a hotel fire alarm, a very entertaining and equally expensive taxi-driver discussion about Obama while watching the changing-of-the-guard band marching by, extravagant tea drunk in more extravagant 300 year-old porcelain, a listening with Mitsuko of the slow movement of Beethoven violin concerto played by Adolf Busch, and finally the ride to the airport. All of that in three hours.

Everybody had the look of having a BBT tour hangover this morning. Or was it an overload of Messiaen and God? I mean, how much transporting to another world could we handle in a week? This whole experience of Messiaen, from the rehearsal period in April through the initial US performances in May to this past week in Europe – it has been completely satisfying, not one ounce too little or too much. One of the miracles of this project was the bridging of the different musical perspectives. You could hardly assemble a group of personalities with such different personal and musical backgrounds:
the one-woman melting pot of a Japanese-born pianist raised in Vienna but adopted by London; the Cadillac-driving Swiss cellist who also studied in Vienna, lives in Belgium, but really wants to be in Mexico this week; the Swedish clarinetist who could be a snake-charmer on rollerskates; and wonderful Llyr who is a caricature of himself, each efficiently-uttered line becoming an instant classic, somehow managing to be reserved and straight to the point at the same time in his Welsh brogue. Throw in the free-swinging Iowa-born Korean-American New Yorker (me) and the carnival was complete.

Franco Buitoni and Ilaria Borletti created the BBT with the specific goal of encouraging younger (allow me refer to myself in this way one last time before returning to my life of helping truly younger people!) artists, and they have already quickly accomplished this with their small army of talent. But the greater effect of their support, whether intended or not, is that each of us gains from these experiences and then goes back to our separate lives spreading the flame with audiences and other musicians. They are providing a gift to the world. Thank you Franco and Ilaria.

What a day.
The Concertgebouw is one of the most special cradles of music in the world. Some halls sound beautiful; others look beautiful. Then there is the inexplicable mystique associated with certain places like Carnegie Hall, Wigmore Hall, the Musikverein, something awe-inspiring about the history of concerts in that particular space; millions, perhaps billions, of notes must have permeated every wall, floor, seat, and the spaces between. The Concertgebouw has all of the above.

We played in the smaller of the two halls which is truly a gem. It is amazing how the hall affects the performance for the performers and the audience. Some halls give us good odds as if we were the home team; others are pitted against us before even a note has been played. Playing at the Concertgebouw is like beginning a game with a three-touchdown lead. Everybody in the group had played in the hall before, some of them countless times. But from the moment we walked into the rehearsal and played the first notes, everybody still marveled at the place. The hall was like a living organism interacting with our sounds and our hearts like that inspiring person who brings out your best qualities.

But our concert was not the headliner of November 4. My good friend John Canning and I will never forget watching the election results at the Amsterdam Hilton, the excitement crescendoing to a climax around 5:30am our time when Obama made his victory speech. I was thrilled to have just played at the Concertgebouw but I would have been just as happy dancing in the streets of Harlem.

Perugia is stunning. I wonder why the rest of the world outside of Italy was ever created when we could eat this pasta and drink this espresso eternally. Both are incomparable. Perhaps Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time was an expression of his longing for this caffeine high. My final Louange of the piece certainly carries me to this state of ecstasy.
Simply to look out my window makes me happy, the pedestrian brick boulevards opening into mini-piazzas with secretive vicoli shooting off in every which way, each one telling its own mysterious story. All-Saints’ Day brings crowds of people to the streets despite the steady drizzle.

Pasta and more pasta. The first time I ordered pizza to diversify my experience, I regretted it as I listened to my colleagues chewing their fresh pasta. At one meal a tasting menu of three pastas, all with very forgettable names but unforgettable flavors.

At the theater in Perugia the dressing rooms must have been built at a time in human evolution when people were six inches shorter. The extra violin in the Bartok threatens to slide right off the chair and into the audience because of the sloping stage; this also results in Mitsuko’s right hand being lower than her left hand on the piano. But the hall sounds wonderful and looks even more magnificent. The screen behind us on the stage is awesome, an enormous tapestry of a crowd that dwarfs and seemingly envelops us.

After the months apart since our performances in May, we are becoming reacquainted with one another on stage, old teammates gauging each others’ timing. There is an occasional blip but the essence of the performance remains the same: a spirit of loving support coming from Mitsuko and the BBT, and a feeling of awe and appreciation from the four of us boys.

Goodbye Perugia, on to Amsterdam!

Perugia, Italy

This is actually Day 2 of the trip for me because I groggily discovered myself in London on the morning of October 30 after a redeye flight. After I did nothing that first day other than wandering the city searching for (and finding!) an extra violin for Bartok Contrasts, the group convened yesterday at London Heathrow airport for the flight to Rome followed by the 2-hour car ride to Perugia. This group already performed a few very happy concerts together in the U.S. in May, so everybody was happy to reconnect. I was astonished to confirm that every romantic rumor I heard about our cellist Christian Poltera was true! Usually there is some inaccuracy or exaggeration. He said I knew so much about his life that he should ask me about what he just did. We can thank Facebook for all of this important knowledge that I acquired.

BB Trust (www.bbtrust.com) tours begin and end with one person: Susan Rivers. She is our mother hen whom we follow mindlessly at all moments. It is wonderful for all of us not to have to think after we are so accustomed to retrieving our own e-tickets, finding the appropriate gate, locating ground transportation upon arrival… train times, hotel, directions to the hall, restaurants, you name it - it is accounted for. Itineraries are sent months ahead of time detailing each minute of the day, making our lives absurdly easy. Susan, I am disappointed that I have to actually brush my own teeth and wash my own hair. Maybe you can arrange that for the next tour? 

At the airport our musical fairy godmother Mitsuko Uchida was running at merely 90 mph instead of her usual dangerously exciting 110. She claimed it was because of all of the music she played in Berlin the previous week, but I knew it was because she wasn’t popping chocolate truffles into her mouth every five minutes as she usually does. Everything was back to normal this morning at Messiaen rehearsal – our dressing rooms were stocked with dark, darker, and yet darker chocolate. I drink coffee before concerts to keep me going; Mitsuko eats chocolate. “Before, at intermission, and afterwards!”

Two years ago Christian and I did another BB Trust tour with violinist Christian Tetzlaff.
Christian T. and I quickly discovered that we may have met our competitive match in one another. Competitive with what, you may ask? EVERYTHING. On that tour it was mostly with card games, games that lasted all night long despite performing in six cities (Aldborough, London, Brussels, Amsterdam, Hamburg, and Vienna) in six days, a typically manic Tetzlaff schedule. We played (cards) in houses, planes, trains, airport cafes, and hotel room floors across the EU. We played in the dressing rooms of Queen Elizabeth Hall, the Concertgebouw, and the Konzerthaus. One disturbing car ride we discovered that we had lost our deck of cards. So Christian T. taught us a simple numbers game called Jewish Poker (I have since renamed it Korean Poker because I so dominated him). In this Whatever-Ethnicity-You-Want-To-Name-It poker, the two combatants simultaneously say a number from 0 to 10. The higher number wins unless there is a difference greater than 2 between the numbers, in which case the lower number wins. So on the ride yesterday from Rome to Perugia, Christian P. and I challenged Christian T. to a round of phone-texting Korean Poker. We simultaneously texted each other our numbers: ours was a 3 and his was a 7, meaning that we won. We gloated in our subsequent message. But then came his reply:

“No, you forgot about the 10 rule – I win.”
“What 10 rule?”
“I added the 10 rule six months ago. If the two numbers add up to 10 then the
higher number wins.”

Christian T. beat me and claimed this title: Cheater Most Desperate To Win.

I sit here on my sofa at home, still jetlagged from my Korea trip, about to leave in 24 hours for Europe. Ironically the 10pm-5am recording sessions during my last four days in Korea helped to prepare me for European time. So perhaps in a couple of days I won’t be suffering during afternoons and will be back on schedule.

MIK spent the last few days recording Schumann’s piano quartet and quintet. Recording is hard; recording overnight is harder yet; and recording overnight on three hours’ sleep each night (yes, jetlag) borders on the absurd. Perhaps that drunken sleepless state took the edge off the stress of the process. That microphone normally stares at me like an evil eye dangling in mid-air, an eye that selectively hears my worst qualities and never forgets them – unless you explode it into pieces like the Terminator. During these sessions it seemed as if a friendlier, more benevolent face hung there smiling down at us. It also helped that some very loyal friends were there in the hall with us during the recordings to get us coffee, kimbap, and look inspiringly pretty during the romantic slow movement. The post-recording pre-dawn soju celebration capped the recording and the trip before I headed straight for the airport.

JFK is always a shock when arriving from Korea. Everything begins peacefully after leaving the plane and the army of Korean Airlines stewardesses greeting me off. The ground feels familiar. And as much as I love the Korean language, I look forward to being able to communicate myself in more than half-sentences. But then I turn the corner to take that last short escalator down to the immigration checkpoint - and the noise blasts me in the face. It is an Ives-ian palette of the murmur of an impatient crowd waiting in long lines with the voices of immigration officers trumpeting above the din, ordering and jostling people every which way even if we are in the right line. Instead of the bookishly dressed woman who stamped my passport upon entering Korea, I am greeted here by a barrel-chested ex-wrestler with pistol holstered in plain sight. At baggage claim Ives adds more layers to the texture, the cranking sound of the old carousel struggling to make its rounds, and the computerized voice from above cheerfully welcoming us to the U.S. with the prospect of being thrown into jail for 20 years if we are spotted opening our cell phones. Exiting the building is a mere color change, not a relief; now there are cab horns blaring, rogue taxi drivers yelling and trying to grab my bags, the wind swooping down through the pick-up area tunnel. Finally, a moment of silence upon entering the cab while the driver puts my suitcase in the trunk. And then the coda: cab driver enters the car and shouts animatedly into his cell phone in Arabic. I’m home.