Weekend update

The Rock is recovering slowly but surely. He still looks about eighty years old when he goes to sit down, and is still downing the narcotics like Liza backstage at Carnegie Hall, but he's definitely on the mend. Thanks for your continued best wishes.

My mom and her husband are in town for a few hours, on their way to Europe for a three-week honeymoon in Switzerland, Germany, and Austria. Currently they're napping, after mom forced me to play just about every piece of piano music I know for her.

Tomorrow I give a recital for the MN Society of Architectural Historians, in a beautiful home in Roseville. The home was built in 1960, designed by the architects Elizabeth and Winston Close. It's an interesting place, very much of its time, with a 2-story atrium around which all the rooms of the house flow. The piano, a 1906 Mason & Hamlin, sits in the atrium. My short recital will include works by Francois Couperin, Claude Debussy, and Malcolm Williamson, and my accompanying remarks will reflect on the links with architecture found in the music I'm playing. In fact, the set of Williamson preludes are based on line six of the Wordsworth poem "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802:"

Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This city now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky.
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that, mighty heart is lying still!