Lately I have been greeted mornings by the clouds from The Simpsons title sequence.

I sanction every­thing but the music in this video (thanks to @ukeleleuser for the tip).

If you’re a longtime Sibelius user, like me, your favorite person in the world is probably Daniel Spread­bury. This morning he posted a new blog at Stein­berg, where he and the former Sibelius team are working on an entirely new notation program. Pretty thrilling stuff.

But did you catch this epic dig at his former employer, Avid, basi­cally implying that they have aban­doned Sibelius entirely (despite their insis­tence to the contrary)?

…the number of compa­nies actively working on profes­sional music notation software is very small, and perhaps now numbers only two (one being Stein­berg, the other MakeMusic).

Ouch.

The Polon­aise-Fantaisie is to be classed among the works which belong to the latest period of Chopin’s compo­si­tions which are all more or marked by a feverish and restless anxiety. No bold and bril­liant pictures are to be found in it; the tramp of a cavalry accus­tomed to victory is no longer heard; no more resound the heroic chants muffled no visions of defeat—the bold tones suited to the audacity of those who were always victo­ri­ous. A deep melancholy—ever broken by startled move­ments, by sudden alarms, by disturbed rest, by stifled sighs—reigns through­out. We are surrounded by such scenes and feelings as might arise among those had been surprised and encom­passed on all sides by an ambus­cade, the vast sweep of whose horizon reveals not a single ground for hope, and whose despair had giddied the brain, like a draught of that wine of Cyprus which gives a more instinc­tive rapidity all our gestures, a keener point to all our words, a more subtle flame to all our emotions, and excites the mind to a pitch of irri­tabil­ity approach­ing insanity.

—Franz Liszt, Life of Chopin.

This morning I happened on the wonder­ful “BikeNYC” portraits by Dmitri Gudkov, of New York cyclists and their bikes. This collec­tion is the strongest case I’ve seen in support of expanded bike infra­struc­ture around the city; the subjects of Gudkov’s portraits repre­sent the true range of cyclists I see in the bike lanes, espe­cially here in Bed Stuy. Many are emphat­i­cally normal-looking; there are some oddities, too, though not in the ways you might expect. The impres­sion you get is that cycling is a routine, prac­ti­cal activity, not just the domain of fixed-gear scorchers and insane people with toe-coozies. The photos them­selves are nicely done, too.

Luis The Super is one of my favorites. My god, this guy needs his own protected bike path. He’s blind in one eye and rides around with a giant bucket hanging from his handlebars.

Thomas Adès’s Mazurkas are, I believe, the finest Mazurkas yet to be written in the 21^st century. I’ll be playing all three of them on my Lincoln Center show on Sunday, February 24^th; in the meantime, I made a little home-record­ing demo of the second one. I’ve got another month or so to practice, so listen up and tell me how I could be doing better:

Thomas Adès: Second Mazurka

Timo Andres, piano

He dressed in more or less Ivy League fashion casually, infor­mally, and yet with an occa­sional touch of flam­boy­ance. As soon as he could afford to do so, he indulged his interest in good clothes freely and took inor­di­nate pride in his tailor. He often dragged along his friends to fittings which came to be known as “Lenny’s dress rehearsals.”

—From Leonard Bern­stein: A Biog­ra­phy for Young People (1960) by David Ewen.

Popped over to Ft. Greene last night to hear Dave Kaplan play the Gold­bergs. Dave’s playing, like his custom­ary bow tie and corduroy suit, is instruc­tive in the best way, without being overly didactic—his inter­pre­ta­tions have a clarity which allow you to notice things you hadn’t before. 

I’ve noticed that my inter­pre­ta­tions (espe­cially of “standard rep”) tend to swing between poles of natu­ral­ness and didacticism—constant reacting and re-reacting to oneself, rather than a process of winnow­ing down to a consis­tent ideal. Probably not the best way to be a “concert pianist”, but it keeps things inter­est­ing, and anyway, as Victor Borge might say, “That’s just the way I’m built”.

After­wards we all went to Die Schwarze Kölner, one of my favorite bars (Schnei­der Aventi­nus on tap!), then home, to assemble Linzer cookies. Truly the best of Germanic culture, right here in Brooklyn.

Did every­body catch that article a couple of weeks ago in the New Yorker about the virtuoso pick­pocket, Apollo Robbins?

In the video above (I know, it’s flash, terribly sorry) he demon­strates some of his methods on Adam Green, who wrote the article. What’s espe­cially amazing to me is that even after he’s revealed his “secrets”, the routines appear, if anything, more impres­sive and just as impos­si­ble, because of the amount of tech­nique involved. We should all be so lucky.

Just a quick note to say: I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox I have posted two new record­ings up on here:

A complete & much improved version of It takes a long time to become a good composer, from my show at LPR last May;

and the première of Comfort Food, from Milwau­kee last weekend.