Random Act
Sunday, I played my last concert of a month-long European tour. A month is longer than I’m used to being away from home at a stretch, and I’ll admit that by the end of it, despite having been in many wonderful places, I was very ready to go home.
The concert was in beautiful Schwetzingen, and the circumstances were close to ideal: the venue was aesthetically beautiful and acoustically even better, the piano was excellent, and the audience was as good as one could ask for — attentive, appreciative, obviously musical. As I finished the concert, I thought to myself that it was the best possible way to cap the month. And then the trouble started.
I was flying home through London, and Schwetzingen is more than an hour from the Frankfurt airport by car. I didn’t have much extra time to get to Frankfurt, my connection in London was fairly tight, and there was no later flight as a back-up - in short, plenty of opportunities for things to go wrong.
Which is precisely what happened — immediately. I went to the appointed place to meet the driver who would be taking me to the airport, and he was not there. (Probably no one’s fault - just a wires-crossed moment…) Schwetzingen on a Sunday afternoon is not the sort of place where one calls a taxi on the spur of the moment, and I didn’t have any phone numbers in Germany that were of much use at that moment, and so I saw the whole house of cards that was the day’s trip falling down.
A few minutes and a few phone calls later, I had run completely out of ideas. It was at this point that a man approached me.
“You need to go to the airport, yes?”
Affirmative.
“And you’re in trouble, aren’t you?”
Again, affirmative.
“OK, I have a car, I’ll take you.”
When I recovered my power of speech, I happily accepted. It turned out that he had been at the concert with a friend. They had planned to have lunch in town following the concert, but when they overheard me, they decided to offer, as they were going to Frankfurt later in the afternoon anyway. So what looked to be turning into a nightmare say ended up being a pleasure - an afternoon drive with two extremely friendly, interesting people. And to top it all off, an on-time arrival at JFK hours later.
I’ve written before about the frustrations of travel, due to weather, human error, mechanical problems - the works. But in my experience, travel today is frequently unpleasant because of the behavior of people - needlessly unfriendly, unhelpful, inflexible. At the end of a month which had been exhausting in every possible way, this small and completely unselfish act of kindness made me feel just slightly better about not only the traveling lifestyle, but about the world we live in.
May 9th, 2008 at 5:49 pm
Ah, but it also shows how COMMUNICATIVE a pianist you are! I can well understand how your audience feels as if you’re a friend, and as if they know you.
I am very much looking forward to hearing you play with your mother this coming Wednesday–we tried to get tickets for the Met concert too, but even though we went the day they went on sale, nothing but crummy, under-the-overhang seats were available, so we won’t get to hear you play the Schumann.
I’m so glad you have this Web site now–it used to be very difficult to keep track of when you were going to be playing within car-shot of me.
I’d give you a lift to the airport any day. Any day.
(I’m the fat, bearded man that first heard you at the Barge that time. Yeah, that one.)
May 10th, 2008 at 6:23 am
Thank you, Robert, for the very nice words.
Unfortunately, I have to report that the concert at the Y (as well as the one at the Kennedy Center, on Monday) has been cancelled, due to an illness in our family. If you’ve purchased tickets already, I’m sure the Y will be able to help you deal with that.
Hope to see you soon at another concert.
May 12th, 2008 at 7:37 am
We were all broken-hearted that this wonderful program you and your mother were planning had to be cancelled, of course, and our hearts go out to you and your mother, since obviously, whatever happened is very serious.
I just hope you and your mother will repeat that same program for us at another time. Just the program alone delighted all of us, and I sat right down with the scores to get my mind around all that dense, fascinating music…we were commenting how, in a way, the only place where we would have been able to relax a LITTLE was the Janáček–and the rest of the way we’d all have to have our listening ears in high gear!
Again, I hope things take a turn for the better, and we’ll hope to hear you again and a later date. It’s an endless fountain of immortal drink pouring unto us from the heaven’s brink, and you and your mother have all the power of music, which, as Olga Bloom puts it, has all that power to HEAL and REVEAL.
May 25th, 2008 at 11:03 am
Dear Jonathan,
I’m glad that your travel was ultimately sorted out because it was my great pleasure to hear you play the Beethoven 3rd PC with the Toronto SO in the first week of May. I live in Spain, but I have been on a month-long trip across Canada (today is the last day), punctuated by concerts in Montreal (Louis Lortie), Toronto, and Vancouver. The Beethoven 3rd PC is one of my favourite concertos (my favourite performance on CD is by Arrau), and I found your performance at the Roy Thompson Hall quite electrifying. The first movement you played with an energy and tautness that was entirely new to me, and provided a wonderful musical experience. Thank you for providing such a splendid highlight to my travel.