Archives for December 11, 2013

• Cars
• Seeing the sun rise (I’m a sunset man myself)
• New Year’s Eve
• Chess
• Fancy restaurants (I like good food, but it never excites me prospectively)
• The release of a new movie
• The outcome of any sports event
• Jukebox musicals
• Buying new underwear (but go here for a persuasive contrary opinion)
• Zombies
• Snow

Rudolf Serkin, Herbert Blomstedt, and the San Francisco Symphony play Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto in 1986:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)

“Serkin told me a story once about a monk. He was playing in Japan, I believe, and after a couple of hours of practicing somewhere in a monastery that happened to have a piano, he suddenly became aware that somebody was there. It was a monk, who told him that he had been observing for two hours and said, ‘I think I recognize what you do; it seems to be very much like what we do.'”
Richard Goode (quoted in Stephen Lehmann and Marion Faber, Rudolf Serkin: A Life)