Excuse the lengthy pause between blog entries; I have been (and still am) in the Caribbean, performing at the St. Barts Music Festival, and computer access has been a bit limited. My absence also means I have not been in Columbia for the beginning of the SC Mozart Festival, the ambitious undertaking of Jared Johnson, organist and music director at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, and Peter Hoyt, professor of music history at USC. They have organized an astonishing array of concerts, lectures, theatrical and film presentations to celebrate the 250th birthday of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Here are some links to the State newspaper's coverage of the festival.

I am very happy to be doing my bit for this festival, with a couple of performances coming up for their daily lunchtime series of short programs at Trinity. The first of these takes place this Monday, Jan.30, at 12:30 PM, when I'll be joined by USC wind faculty Rebecca Nagel, Robert Pruzin, Douglas Graham, and Carol Lowe for a performance of the Mozart Quintet for Piano and Winds. This is one of the few pieces for this combination (piano with oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn) by any composer, and one of Mozart's finest chamber works, period. In fact, shortly after the work's premiere in Vienna, he told his father in a letter that he felt it to be "the best work I have ever composed." That might have been a bit of a stretch, perhaps the enthusiasm of the moment, but it is a marvelous work, full of high spirits, a bit of comedy, and plenty of lovely harmonic manipulations and striking sonorities. Come take a break from your work day next Monday at 12:30 and join us for a delightful half-hour of music.

If you're planning a trip to Paris, allow me to recommend two places well worth a visit for those of you with an interest in music and/or art. You won't find them at the top of the lists of most famous "must-sees" but my wife and I  found them engrossing and fascinating and were glad we searched them out.

The first is the Musee Marmottan, backed up against the Bois de Boulogne, near the La Muette Metro stop. We saw about 50 of Claude Monet's works there, including many very late ones which push the murkiness of his brand of Impressionism almost past a border into abstraction. If you want to have a comprehensive understanding of this artist, this museum is a must.

The Cite de la Musique (out to the northeast fringe of the city, near the Porte de Pantin Metro stop) contains a wonderful 700-seat hall where we (the Philip Glass Ensemble) played, and other groups such as the incredible Ensemble Intercontemporain are based there. But within that complex is the Musee de la Musique, which possesses a remarkable musical instrument collection (click on this link to view a virtual tour). Especially memorable for me was seeing a Pleyel piano that was rented to Chopin for several years when he lived in Paris, and an Erard piano on which Franz Liszt performed in Lyon and to which he affixed his signature. You wear headphones when you tour the museum and wireless signals near different display cases convey music played by the instruments you are viewing, you don't have to push any buttons at all.

Finally, if you are about to travel to Paris, you must check out Chocolate and Zucchini, a website created by a twenty-something Parisian woman named Clothilde who is a true foodie, and who will clue you in as to where to get the best hot chocolate in Paris, or a delightful little hole-in-the-wall which features 10 delicious soups daily, or how to find the places where the pros buy their kitchen tools and utensils,  and on and on. This website is a treasure trove of information for food-lovers, and after all, food is half the reason for going to Paris in the first place!

This is the last week to see "Renaissance to Rococo: Masterpieces from the Wadsworth Atheneum," a very special exhibit that has been at Charlotte's Mint Museum of Art since September. I went just after Christmas, and have to say it might be worth the drive from Columbia just to see the one Caravaggio in the show, an astonishing "St. Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy." Others represented in the collection of some 60 paintings on display include Frans Hals, Canaletto, Michael Sweerts, Goya, Zurbaran, Tintoretto, Orazio Gentileschi, Francois Boucher, Tiepolo, and an almost-Impressionistic landscape by Gainsborough. I haven't yet been to the collections at Bob Jones University but that museum notwithstanding, the Mint's exhibit is a rare chance to see this many Old Masters in this part of the country.