this concert's for kip

Frederic Chiu, the pianist of whom we'd been speaking, brought his all-transcriptions recital program to town on Sunday. Lieutenant Kijé and Beethoven's Fifth on the piano, sounds cool. I snagged a ticket by the simple expedient of asking my editor if I could review it.

And the results are here. Sound bite:

If you wanted subtlety, you should have gone somewhere else. But if you wanted to see a man pound the heck out of a piano, this was the place.

When I read this bit over the phone to my editor, she said, "Oh dear, I'm so sorry." "No, no," I replied. "It was fun." Hey, I listen to the Michael Nyman Band: classical music-making of this kind does not scare me.