To my readership of a few I am so sorry about my silence these last few months. I offer no particularly good excuse other than never having time to do even half of the requisite things in my life. But as we all know that is no excuse at all for anything that is not done. Hopefully now that I have the ball rolling again I will keep my compositional juices flowing.

While several people have encouraged me in the last few weeks to return to writing, the ultimate inspiration was my old friend Lisa Ferguson whom I ran into at the Movado Hour performance I gave the other night. As a classical musician who gets around and knows many people who get around I have learned not to be surprised by chance meetings. Anywhere. For example I ran into Doug Didyoung, writer and chef extraordinaire, on the corner of Something-Street and Another-Something Street on the Lower East Side yesterday. I know Doug from his summers working at Marlboro and he lives in Philadelphia. And I never go to the Lower East Side. (I was on a search for great gelato and for that one must go to il Laboratorio del Gelato.) Anyway running into Lisa was no small feat since she lives in Italy.

While seeing Lisa always brightens my day it was an especially meaningful meeting, one where the music transcends its “mere” beauty and becomes hopelessly tangled in the web of our lives, experiences, and relationships. On that evening I was performing Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklaerte Nacht, one of the highlights of my entire season because of the colleagues involved. I am not a Schoenberg fan but there is something undeniably moving about this piece. Every once in a while a composer really “nails it” and Schoenberg nailed that one. I still vividly remember being overwhelmed by the experience of performing it for the first time thirteen years ago. Lisa was the second violinist in that performance; playing the second part the other night with her in the room was therefore momentous for me. I realized later that I have seen Lisa several times since 1994 and I have played Verklaerte Nacht many more times since then. But we all experienced something magical thirteen years ago and Friday night was the first time that all three of us had a chance to relive that magic together.