Salisbury writeup

...posted.

As I wrote there, this was probably the finest piano on the tour so far...even though I thought that I don’t believe there is such a thing, as instrument quality is not on a one-dimensional scale.

As I did not write there, I was not able to take full advantage of the piano’s crystal sound and exquisite responsiveness due to sleep deprivation. My wife and had been out until 2 am the night before: on returning home from the Ferrisburgh concert Friday evening, already played out but at a reasonable hour, we found that our recently spayed puppy had torn a stitch, and we spent the next several hours in the emergency vet hospital waiting to get her stapled back up. 

But an extraordinary instrument helps make everything sound good, so it was maybe lucky that I had such a fantastic partner to help me along in my dazed state. I just wish I’d been alert enough to really nail the Mozart Sonata K.545 (which I played entire, not just the Rondo as written on the program) because it was the ideal Mozart piano—I would have loved to get that on video. 

I also kind of pawed my way through James Scott’s Frog Legs Rag. I learned it as a gag because the concert beneficiary was the Vermont Reptile & Amphibian Atlas. But it turns out it’s a classic for a reason—it’s extraordinarily catchy both to the ear and the fingers, and really merits greater preparation. Well, I’m going to keep working it up, and in fact I have occasion to play it in the Starksboro Piano Crawl this Friday because it was written in a year I needed, as I'm pegging my repertoire to the building construction and piano manufacture years, and I needed a piece from 1906. Two actually, one for the old Town Hall’s Witney piano and one for the Baptist church’s Albrecht. The other will be Charles Johnson’s Dill Pickles, the second rag (after the Maple Leaf) to sell a million copies of sheet music.

Ferrisburgh writeup

 ...is posted.

Ferrisburgh was my first of Vermont’s seven “burgs”, and is one of the three that has resolutely held on the to final “h” in spite of the push in the 1890s from the U.S. Board on Geographic Names to drop it. 

And at the end of the month I’ll play Starksboro, my first “boro”. To my knowledge no Vermont town has persisted in resisting the Board on Geographic Names to the point of retaining the three extra letters in “borough”—though if what George R. Stewart wrote in his 1945 classic Names on the Land is on the mark, those letters didn’t go down without a fight:

Vermonter or Missourian alike might not care a penful of ink between ‑borough or ‑boro. In fact, as a practical man, he might even prefer ‑boro. But if anyone told him he must use ‑boro, he was likely to invoke all the shades of the Founding Fathers in asserting his inalienable right to ‑borough.

In addition to accompanying resident soprano Helen Lyons, I yielded the bench to Ferrisburgh native David Oliveira to play two of his solo piano Nocturnes. This atypical “collaboration” made the grade because David was my composition student at UVM, and I’d even given some feedback on one of these nocturnes. I had originally thought to play them myself, but as the concert approached I knew he’d do a much better job. It’s not just that during the teaching semester I find myself pressed for time even with just 2-3 concerts a month; David’s rendition of his own music is amazingly sensitive and expressive.