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.

Sorry for not writing. For a year and a half. I blame my utter disappointment in my sports teams for the writers’ block.

I am on the other side of the world in Seoul, expectedly jetlagged and sleep-deprived but with a truly content stomach that has been fed my favorite cuisine in the world for a few days. It isn’t impossible to find a bad restaurant here but it is seemingly difficult. While even in New York I hesitate to try an unrecommended restaurant (especially at risk of dropping $50 on a completely disappointing meal), I feel safe walking into any old place on the street here. Even the pre-packaged breakfast on the train hit the spot. Almost every time I pack to come to Korea I wonder why I am putting my body through this traumatic experience. And every time it takes me one meal with friends to remember why I previously agreed to make this trip!

I am playing a concert here in Seoul tonight with my piano quartet-ish ensemble M.I.K. Don’t ask me what the acronym stands for – the party line is that it’s just a name. And if you do your google research and find something that you think it might be, please remember that it was our management who came up with it. MIK has convened about once a year for five years with the intention (and some success) of bringing a passion of playing and experiencing chamber music to the younger generation of Korean students and audience members. This also includes introducing them to newer works; our first CD was of four commissioned pieces of young Korean and Korean-American composers. The other guys in the group are like rock stars in the Korean classical music scene, a world that is even more tightly-knit than in the US because of the size of the country. One member has already starred in a mainstream film, one is a radio host personality and model, and one is among the most prominent professors in the country. I feel like a tag-along. Meanwhile it is a fun ride because the concert atmosphere is so vibrant and charged by the youthfulness of the audiences. The average concert-goer’s age here must be about 1/3 of that in the US, and they are overwhelmingly female. They make a lot more noise here after the piece is done! Interestingly they also make less noise while the music is being played.

Western classical music wasn’t regularly performed here until a little more than 50 years ago, so in that way the music is also young. The Schumann piano quartet that we are playing tonight hasn’t been experienced by the audiences here for 150 years. Perhaps that is also why the pop and classical worlds seem to be (still) interconnected. Much as I’d love for Christina Aguilera to come to my concert and then come out afterwards and sing for a group of friends at a fancy karaoke bar, it is beyond the realm of possibility in New York. Here in Seoul pop singers and actors/actresses are old childhood friends of their classical music counterparts. This adds a bit of a glam factor to the concerts and it certainly doesn’t hurt audience-building.

MIK rehearsals reflect this co-existence of various musical styles. There is, of course, the repertoire that we will perform – from Schumann and Beethoven to Francaix, Murray Schafer, and the aforementioned Korean composers such as James Ra and the noted new-age Yiruma. But these rehearsals are often interrupted by inspired outbursts of tango, K-pop, horrible jazzy versions of Bach, and concerto performances with completely improvised 3-man orchestral reductions. I go from here to playing with Mitsuko Uchida at the Concertgebouw in a couple of weeks. She would probably wince to hear these rehearsals! But there is something wonderfully refreshing about it, reminding me that classical music should not be isolated from the other musical styles of our time. It is all music. Mozart WOULD have rapped, on a level that only Jay-Z could match. Can you imagine the lyrics he would have come up with? They probably would have been unfit for Howard Stern.