My evening last night began with drinks and chatter with LA-based actor Jason Vande Brake, who is currently “Daddy” in Bryan Reynold’s Woof, Daddy, playing through Sunday as part of the Fringe Festival. I’m excited to see the show on Sunday, and, perhaps, more excited to develop our nascent conversation concerning whether the “avant-garde” might be revived now that it has its own critical discourse to disparage it. (Personally, I’m a big fan of the rather banal but elegantly simple “experimental theatre” or “experimental performance”—nothing fancy, just, well, a matter of taste.)
I then trekked out to Red Hook with sharkskin boy to attend the first installment of pianist Jacob Greenberg’s “At Close Range” series, held, Happening-esque, in his one-bedroom apartment. We were early, though, so we popped into Hope and Anchor, “a new American diner,” and, lo and behold, we have a new favorite restaurant. There are not many places in the city where you can confidently order a shredded Vietnamese salad and a plate of pierogies—served with homemade apple sauce no less!—and even fewer where they don’t come with a side of semisweet pretension. I’m a big fan.
Arriving fashionably late to the salon—but in time to partake of some yummy snacks and conversation—we settled in with a few but devoted other guests and spent the rest of the evening listening to Jacob perform Stravinsky, Mozart, and Schubert. An ambitious program, no doubt, the intimacy both of the apartment and Jacob’s sweet but scholarly for sure introductions to the pieces created a compelling space in which to revisit my (often dormant) love of classical piano music.
Jacob is a brilliant player, and, having of recent been more familiar with his performance of contemporary 
repertoire, “At Close Range” episode 1 was a pleasant reminder of how the virtuosity and attention to detail I’d become so used to in twentieth- and twenty-first-century composition is in fact grounded in slightly more aged rep. What was most enchanting was the proximity to that very same technique: to be able to be all of three or so feet from Jacob’s hands was a visual and tactile experience one loses in the more usual venues, and I’d forgotten how much pleasure there is in watching the gracefulness of a player’s hands on their instrument. Musciologists Lawrence Kramer and Richard Leppert have both written about the significance of the visual in the reception of classical music performance, and it is an aspect of the genre not lightly dismissed—if too easily forgotten.
There’s a scene in James Lapine’s 1991 film Impromptu about Chopin’s brief but passionate affair with George Sand (otherwise known as Amantine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin, Baroness Dudevant) in which she lies beneath the piano while Chopin plays. While this would, certainly, shift the perspective, and perhaps make audience members I might not know very well a bit uncomfortable (and maybe Jacob more so), there’s something strangely compelling about giving into one’s only slightly post-adolescent fantasy and crawling beneath the piano for a different view.
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