[Cough.]

It’s been a while, and the blog, an alert reader points out, has gathered moss.  (This particular moss was never visible to me on my computer, so I can only hope it has been successfully eradicated.) Writing on the blog has always been something I’ve enjoyed, but over the last few months — during which time I’ve been particularly unmossy, or unmoored, myself — at moments when I’ve been inclined to post, the question has tended to be “should I write on the blog or practice another hour?” or “should I write on the blog or sleep another hour?” and, well, in my life practice and sleep tend to win most of their battles. (When they face off, things get interesting.)

But now, I’m sitting on a plane from Tokyo to New York, and I’m at that point in the transpacific flight at which I’ve eaten, slept more-or-less a full night (day? who can tell…), read a Russian novel,  mentally reorganized my closets, eaten again, learned ancient Greek and read the Iliad, and it seems like an excellent time to get back to blogging. In the unlikely event that this flight eventually lands, I will even post what I write.

It’s been an eventful few months. In addition to the concerts, which kept me occupied (and then some), I made a recording, live at the Wigmore Hall, of Schubert sonatas, paired with some Kurtag. I’ll be writing plenty on that subject soon enough, as it was a pretty remarkable experience, which again reshaped my feelings about recording. (Not to mention Schubert…) But for now, while I gather my thoughts, I offer you a list of recent events which could have been, should have been, and in certain cases, still might be blog fodder:

• Playing the Schumann Concerto, without a conductor, in Saint Paul, and subsequently rethinking the relationship of a soloist with an orchestra
• The man with a snake on the A Train in New York/woman with a rabbit on the Hibiya Line in Tokyo. (I was thinking some sort of modern day Aesop fable/cultural diversity combo deal.)
• The experience of walking into the dressing room of the Sociedad Filarmonica in Bilbao and being surrounded by signed photos of Casals, Rubinstein, Schnabel, Menuhin, Cortot,  Szigeti — and my mother and grandmother.
• My intrepid Japanese manager’s successful effort to rebook us — on a different airline! — onto a flight from Osaka to Matsuyama which was leaving precisely 29 minutes after our arrival at the airport. And luggage was involved!
• The ordering process at a Japanese-operated Korean restaurant visited by me and two friends — one Korean, and one a limited speaker of Japanese. My contribution to the process was to veto selections once they had been made, which usually took 10 minutes and involved a combination of two languages and some frantic hand gesturing.
• The always enlightening (sometimes in surprising ways) experience of taking a month away from performing after going at a whirlwind pace for half a year — a bit, I suspect, like quitting smoking cold turkey, though I hope and suspect that the performing is slightly less hazardous to my health.

In short, it’s been intense/exhilarating/insane. This state of affairs looks set to continue for the foreseeable future: expect more frequent reporting from the trenches.