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.

I suppose we all have different ways of marking the seasons. For me, summer means time off, learning new repertoire, and outdoor concerts. Winter means performing at a whirlwind pace, complaining about the weather, and above all, catastrophic travel. For years, I’ve been entertaining friends with the most egregious of these stories. (The more miserable I am, the more amused they seem to be. Something to think about…) In that spirit, I offer you, Dear Reader, my two most exciting December escapades:

1) I had been visiting my brother and his wife in Chicago for a few days; it was probably the only entirely non-music-related trip I took all year. (In retrospect, this seems like already asking for trouble. I mean, do I really need to spend more time on planes than is absolutely necessary? This last year, I was twice - twice! - recognized by a check-in agent at LaGuardia, so frequent have my visits there been. Perhaps I should be paying rent…)

I arrived at the airport, went with my bag to the check-in counter, and told the woman there what my destination was (LaGuardia, naturally), to which she replied, “what are you doing here?” Perhaps this goes without saying, but I did not regard this as a good sign. By my rough estimate, there is approximately one reason to be at an airport, so her remark, while a bit vague, didn’t leave much to the imagination. The weather was bad in New York, it turned out. Why had the airline not notified me? They had the wrong number. This is fairly remarkable, as I have had the same telephone number for years, and I could have flown to the moon and back a few times with all the miles I’ve accumulated on the airline in question. (The airline wishes to remain anonymous, but is named after my country of residence and origin, begins with an A, and has its hub in Dallas, Texas.) Had I known, I could have made the earlier flight, which arrived on time in New York…

As the weather was quickly deteriorating, my options were limited. I was just considering a flight to Philadelphia when the agent noticed that there was a flight leaving for White Plains, in Westchester, in 30 minutes. I began to ask a question, and she interrupted me, saying “No time to think about it!” Fearless (=foolish) man that I am, I decided to take it. The bag was tagged and sent down the conveyor belt, at which point she said, “by the way, you’re standby, as the flight is full.” Again, not the news I was hoping for, nor the time I would have expected to receive it. I regarded her with displeasure, and she returned my stare with a look that was 50% “I did the best I could,” and 50% “I am profoundly disinterested in you and your petty little problems.”

So I trudged off to the gate, where the agent was announcing that he needed volunteers to not take the flight, as it was full, and there was some sort of problem to do with fuel and the weight of the plane - reassuring. I went and explained my situation to him, and he gave me a look that was 20% “it’s not my fault you made a stupid decision,” 20% “there’s no chance in hell you will get on this flight,” and 60% “Go away.” After that flight left - my luggage in tow - I was given a boarding pass for the next White Plains flight, two hours later.

The flight was delayed an hour, but it did leave. All progressed smoothly until about a half hour before what should have been our arrival, when the pilot announced that the weather made it currently impossible to land, leaving us in a holding pattern. (He did not announce that the plane’s sole lavatory was not working, but then again, he did not really need to…)

The good news was that we only held for one hour. The bad news was that when we stopped holding, we prepared to land not in White Plains, New York, but in Richmond, Virginia. The decision to divert the flight to an airport that was hundreds of miles to the south could probably only be explained properly by someone who works in aviation, or perhaps the Federal Bureau of Absurdity. Before proceeding with the narrative, however, I’d like to offer a brief scorecard:

* Point of departure: Chicago, O’Hare Airport.
* Intended destination: New York, LaGuardia Airport
*Scheduled flight time: 2 hours, 10 minutes
* Time elapsed since scheduled flight time: 8 hours, 20 minutes.
* Present position (passenger): Richmond, Virginia
* Present position (luggage): White Plains, New York

After about an hour at the Richmond airport - which, if I may offer a public service announcement, is not exactly a vacation spot - we were informed that flying to White Plains was still impossible, that it was unclear when it might become possible, and that therefore we were going back to Chicago.

Now, I realize, Dear Reader, that the “therefore” in the previous sentence seems a bit presumptious: why would it possibly make sense to fly us in the nearly exact opposite direction of our destination? Here, it becomes necessary to state the Suspension of Disbelief and Desire for Reason for the Sake of Sanity in the Frequent Traveler principle (SoDaDfRfrSoSinFT). This has prevented numerous ulcers, and perhaps even coronaries, over the years. How is it possible that our plane is delayed due to the lack of a crew, when the incoming flight just arrived, crew in tow? Invoke SoDaDfRftSoSinFT. How can the airline have lost your reservation when you are showing them an actual, paper ticket that they issued? SoDaDfRftSoSinFT to the rescue. And so on.

Back in Chicago, after a 30 minute wait for a gate agent to appear and give us instructions/assistance, and a short but ugly interlude where the airline (anonymous, you’ll remember) tried to avoid providing hotel rooms, which led to a sort of hyper-effective mob rule, I was booked on a flight to LaGuardia for the next morning. At this point, I went to deal with my luggage, and was told that I couldn’t file a claim for a missing bag until I reached my final destination. This led to the following exchange, reproduced here verbatim:

JB: Which final destination, LaGuardia or White Plains?
Agent: …
JB: Because as you can see, my flight tomorrow is to LaGuardia.
A: Then LaGuardia.
JB: But my bag is tagged to White Plains.
A: Then White Plains.
JB: …
A: Sir, I can’t help you.
JB: I don’t understand. Either the bag is still here, in which case you should give it to me, or it’s in White Plains, where I will not be going, in which case it’s just as easy for you to file the claim now as it would be tomorrow.
A: Sir, I can’t help you.
JB: Can you explain why not?
A: No.

And SoDaDfRftSoSinFT was invoked, for the second time that day. Perhaps we are ready for another scorecard:

* Point of departure: Chicago, O’Hare Airport.
* Intended destination: New York, Laguardia Airport
* Scheduled flight time: 2 hours, 10 minutes
* Time elapsed since scheduled flight time: 13 hours, 0 minutes
* Present position (passenger): Chicago, O’Hare Airport
* Present position (luggage): White Plains, New York.

Early the next morning, I flew to LaGuardia, and after a brief exchange with an understandably confused baggage representative, filed the claim for the missing luggage. A few hours later, I called: no news.

Later that afternoon: no news.

A third time that day: no news.

The next morning, I called again, and asked for all of the notes that had been entered into my file. After all of the customary information, was a curious remark: “Luggage handle broken, not liability of A_____ Airlines.”

After taking a deep breath, I asked, “Leaving aside, just for the moment, the fact that my luggage handle was not broken when I left it, can you tell me when and where that note was made?”

Dear Reader, it had been made the previous morning - after I had returned home. The person making the note, however, had not condescended to mention where the bag was.

Summoning my last vestiges of calm, I asked the woman on the other end of the line, “So, someone from the airline broke my luggage, noted their un-liability in your computer system, and then declined to provide the one piece of information that would be useful to me?” To her credit, she did not disagree with this view of events, though that did little to improve my mood…

A few hours later, I made Call Number 5: no news. In a fit of pique (understandable, I might suggest?) I announced that I was not getting off the phone until I heard something more interesting. First of all, I demanded, she should call the White Plains Airport.

I was put on hold for approximately one minute, at which point she came back on the line, and said, “What do you know, your bag is in White Plains. It was probably there the whole time!”

Oh, the things it must have seen…

2) Towards the end of the month, I flew with my brother to Israel. Or rather, I flew from New York to London, he from Chicago to London, and we were to proceed from there to Israel. In a brief, highly uncharacteristic, and as it turns out, ill-advised moment of generosity, I had bought him a mileage ticket. This story, as you might imagine, is shortly to take on a decided “no good deed goes unpunished” flavor.

At Heathrow, we met at the gate, and when boarding was announced, handed the gate agent our passports/boarding passes, then proceeded down the jet bridge. No sooner had I remarked to him how unusual it was for me to be traveling with someone, than the agent came barreling down the ramp, and asked to take another look at his passport. We were then told to head back to the gate and wait, which we did, trepidatiously.

Five minutes later, a supervisor came back, informed us that to enter Israel, one’s passport needs to be valid for six months, and that since his was due to expire in May, he was not going to be able to take the flight. At this point, intrafamilial differences began to reveal themselves: my brother calmly expressed his surprise at various aspects of this story, and I became hysterical.

(In my defense, I was looking for any way to make this situation go away. But nothing I did seemed to have much positive influence on the agent for the airline, which, again, wishes to remain anonymous, but is the flagship carrier of a European island nation which is not Ireland, nor Cyprus nor Malta, and whose capital is London.)

Given that someone else’s welfare, rather than my own, was at stake here, SoDaDfRftSoSinFT did not, and does not apply, and so I will compress the conversation, to keep that ulcer at bay. Suffice it to say that I suggested that given that the airline was being paid to facilitate the trip, it didn’t seem too much to ask that it inform its passengers of the documents needed at the destination. (Or, failing that, raise the issue at the point of departure, not 4500 miles later.) His response was that the airline’s only responsibility was to get us from point A to point B. This, it seemed to me, begged just the response I gave: “In that case, you don’t seem to be doing a very good job of it.”

It is difficult to remember if that is the precise moment that he declared the conversation over and walked away. What is very easy to remember is that given that it was Christmas, and that the embassy was closed, my brother had no choice but to board a plane straight back to Chicago. Leaving Chicago, it seems, is hard to do. Or else we are brothers: my suitcase, after all, left the city with no difficulty whatsoever.

in which I am back, with a vengeance. Partially by design, and partially by chance, my busiest-ever season was followed by one of my un-busiest summers: as of August 30th, I had gone a full five weeks without playing a concert - my longest hiatus, if I’m counting correctly, since I was 16 years old. It’s not that I stopped playing - the vast majority of my time was spent learning new pieces and getting reacquainted with old ones. But being off the stage - and in my apartment with some regularity! - allowed me to temporarily live a life quite different from my normal one. Since my return, the pace has been quick - 11 pieces in 4 countries over the last 10 days - allowing me to make a kind of direct comparison between these parallel existences. Some early conclusions:

* Time off is good. Anyone who’s delved this deep into my site probably already realizes that I am, ahem, enthusiastic about what I do; passion is a quality that I tend to value more highly than balance. That said, the benefits of being away from concert-giving life for a while turn out to have been enormous. Most importantly, I’m finding that coming back after a long break, my emotional receptivity is greater - to music, in general, and to the rather extraordinary dynamics of the concert hall. The first thing I performed after my time off was Schoenberg’s Six Little Pieces, and the meaning of each interval - the way in which each note conversed with its predecessor and its follower - seemed not just stronger but more specific than it ever had to me before. (This is, quite apart from the vicissitudes of my schedule, a quite extraordinary aspect of Schoenberg’s music - but that’s a topic for another post.) And my awareness of the electricity in the room - the silence which follows the initial applause, and the way the first notes of the concert rise out of that silence - was sharper than ever.

* Traveling on a regular basis involves internalizing a great deal of stress. However great the value of having a break may have been, I did miss performing. I also missed visiting familiar and unfamiliar cities, going to museums, seeing old friends and meeting new ones. Things I did not miss: packing my suitcase; unpacking my suitcase; discovering, upon unpacking of said suitcase, that I have forgotten to pack hangers/cufflinks/toiletries; being asked to remove my shoes and belt, in the manner of a patient in a mental institution, in the security line at the airport; phoning everyone I know in the United States when it’s 4:30 a.m. in Europe and I’m up, jet-lagged; asking airline employees why, 45 minutes after the scheduled departure of a flight, no announcement of a delay has been made; airport food; the price of airport food; the gnawing feeling that an airplane has not been cleaned during the last few presidential administrations. I’m ending the list here only because I can feel my blood pressure rising…

* This is not strictly related to my time off and its effects, but it’s been much on my mind the last week: one huge fringe benefit of making a recording is what it does to the experience of playing the piece subsequently. Recording forces you to be remorselessly clear about your musical intentions - any hint of uncertainty about the shape of a piece is magnified by the microphone. In the studio, this can feel a bit constricting, but in the concert hall, it has almost the opposite effect: knowing precisely how a phrase fits into your larger conception of a piece gives you the confidence that no matter what direction you choose to take with it on the spur of the moment, it will retain its inner logic, which in turn gives the feeling of immense freedom. Playing Beethoven sonatas last week, for the first time since recording them, I felt them moving in unexpected and exciting directions, which I’m sure is at least partially the result of the experience of playing them in the studio, and which makes the prospect of playing them - living with them - throughout the coming year all the more thrilling. Which brings me to my last point:

* One of the pieces I played for the first time last week was Beethoven’s strange and wonderful song cycle, An die ferne Geliebte (To the distant beloved). The opening of the cycle’s final song is quite faithfully and extremely movingly quoted in the first movement of Schumann’s Fantasy. (The words are: “Nimm sie hin denn, diese Lieder/Die ich dir, Geliebte, sang.” Roughly translated: “Take these songs, then, which I sang to you, beloved.”) The first movement of the Schumann begins with a nearly shapeless version of the Beethoven theme - more a searching for it than a rendering of it - and gradually, as the movement progresses, we move increasingly close to it, until the near-quotation comes at the end. Having lived with the Schumann for so long, it was, then, very touching to finally play the Beethoven itself - a sort of reunion with the distant beloved, which I had previously seen only through a dense fog. And given that the last year of my life was heavily tied up with Schumann, and that the one I’m just embarking on is equally centered around Beethoven, the song represented a very apt and very beautiful transition.

All of which is to say: music is wonderful, and it’s very good to be back.