Daily Prompt

Richter at 100

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

There are many videos available online of the great pianist Sviatoslav Richter at work. In the “comments” section under many of the Richter videos one will often find a person complaining or simply stating that the recording is “fake” or appears to them to be “speeded up.” In this age of photo editing and video editing software, this era in which we assume lies are being told and fakery is afoot, it is something of a backwards compliment being paid to Sviatoslav Richter, who was born 100 years ago today.

Anyone who could cover the keyboard that completely, that quickly, could not have been real. He could, he did, and he was.

Below is a clip of Richter tearing into the Étude Op. 10, No. 4 by Chopin, which is written to be played very fast, with passion; the sheet music itself overflows with notes. In Richter’s hands, it is volcanic.

 
Imagine the floor under that piano.
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Home Is Where You Hang

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

There are about a half-a-dozen “I almost lived there” cities that sit in my memory like books unread on a shelf in a library I no longer have a membership card to. Two suburbs of Boston, Massachusetts; Jersey City, New Jersey; Sheboygan, Wisconsin; Nashville, Tennessee.

Each one of those place-names sounds to me like a bullet whistling past my head, an anecdote of a disaster that I did not have to watch unfold in front of my eyes as if I was a bystander in my life instead of a participant. I had quite a few disasters in the places in which I actually resided; and, yes, I might have found recovery in any one of those fine cities and be celebrating many more years of recovery than I now have, but I did not. Life is perfect where I reside, even in its many imperfections. I may have made a lot of errors, but no mistakes.
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A Life in Comedy

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

For reasons that bore me, I am one of those lucky few whose brain does not retain jokes. Neither knock-knock groaners nor shaggy-dog tales; there are not many punchlines that are still connected to the matching set-up.

Which is in itself funny, as I have written and performed radio comedy on and off for as long as I have been an adult. A quarter of a freakin’ century.

Each Wednesday night at 7:30 p.m. (alert: this is tonight), the Magnificent Glass Pelican half-hour is broadcast on 88.7 FM WFNP (“The Edge”) in the Rosendale-New Paltz, New York, area. The Pelican is a live half-hour radio comedy show that my friends and I have written, produced, and acted in since 1990. Lately, it has been an improvised half-hour, produced by us and scripted live on-air. We have an unwritten rule that no rules should be written.

For those who do not live there, the radio station streams the show live here at this link. Click on it and turn down your volume, as the station usually has its settings maxed out. This is at 7:30 p.m. Eastern time, and the broadcasts are not archived, so if you can check us out live tonight, thank you.

I no longer live in New Paltz, NY, so I have not been a live participant in a year. But the show still goes on.
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