Tuesday the Richland County Council voted 9-2 in favor of a $12 million allocation to Columbia's Township Auditorium for renovation purposes. The prospects for the 75-year-old Township have seesawed back and forth in the last few years: a grander plan for much more extensive renovations fell through when Columbia City Council backed out of a agreement to split the cost with County Council, and there had been some recent talk of converting the property to condominiums. The vote this week keeps the Auditorium alive as a performance venue, which I believe is the right decision for our community. 

I'm at a disadvantage talking about the Township since I've never set foot there in the few years I've lived here. Most events that are now booked there don't particularly interest me, except for the big-name comedians who have played there recently like Jerry Seinfeld. But a 3200-seat hall of historic significance is worth saving if at all possible; once it's gone, it's gone.

It's not for the sake of classical music that I think fixing up the Township is a worthwhile endeavor; 3200 seats is too large a hall to fill in this market for any classical act that I can think of. And, again, I don't know the hall's acoustics or other physical idiosyncracies. But I can imagine it being put to more use for really high-quality pop acts, R&B, jazz, country, bluegrass, world music, etc...in other words, "mid-size market" events for which Colonial Center is too big but which call for more atmosphere than can be found at the glorified high school auditorium known as the Koger Center.

Bravo to County Council for deciding to move ahead on its own on this issue.

One of the joys of being a pianist  is the secure knowledge that you'll never run out of new adventures on which to embark, the adventures that lie ahead each time one sets forth to learn a new piece of music. New to one's own repertoire, that is. For a pianist, there's way more music than a single person can ever learn in a lifetime. During the time I taught at the University of Michigan, I made lists while listening to juried student performances each semester. Each piece I heard went into one of four categories: works I'd already learned (never, of course, a finished process), works I could happily go to my grave never having played (Schumann's Davidsbundlertanze, a lot of Liszt), works that I don't have anything against but probably just aren't high enough on my priority list to learn (Ravel Valses Nobles et Sentimentales, about 500 out of the 555 Scarlatti Sonatas), and works that I passionately love and want to learn and live with till the day I die.

Johann Sebastian Bach's Partita No. 4 in D Major has been in that last group for some time. Please join me this Wednesday, Dec. 6 at 12:30 PM at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Columbia and share this journey of discovery with me. I'll be playing the Partita on Trinity's user-friendly lunchtime concert series: the music is free, but they serve a really nice lunch in the fellowship hall for $5 either from 12 to 12:30, or after the 30-minute concert, at 1:00 PM.

Is there any music more life-affirming in its first seconds than this Partita? It is literally uplifting, as a glance at the three rising flourishes by each voice in turn, in each of the first three measures, confirms. In glancing at some interesting links on the Partitas, one by my former (and brilliant) colleague at Michigan, harpsichordist Ed Parmentier, and a great audio clip analysis by Richard Goode, the following words recur: sunny, radiant, warm, courtly, majestic, grand, huge, all-embracing. Adjectives like these naturally abound when talking about the 4th Partita. Even its more introverted movements, like the Sarabande or Menuet, manage to retain a fundamentally optimistic atmosphere, as fragile single voices wandering in a seemingly aimless fashion eventually find their way home.

The space at Trinity fits this music perfectly; this work of Bach's is a prayer of hope and optimism. In these troubled times, I hope you can join me Wednesday and share the joy this music brings me.

Today is World AIDS Day, and the challenge is issued to all of us to recommit ourselves to fight and one day end this plague. The advances made in recent years must not blind us to the continued ravages of this illness, especially remembering that millions worldwide are not obtaining adequate access to those same technological/pharmocological advances.

AIDS is never absent from my mind, entirely...though no family members of mine were stricken, I lost several good friends in the 1980's, as did virtually everyone who (like me) was deeply involved in the arts scene in New York City in that decade. Rarely a week goes by when a memory of one or more of those friends fails to drift through my consciousness.

Since this blog is about music, my tribute today is to a pianist who should be better known among listeners of the current generation. I speak of Paul Jacobs, who died of AIDS in 1983, before the acronym had even become familiar. You can read more about Jacobs on his Wikipedia entry, and on this Boston Phoenix review of a live concert recording, and on this Amazon link to some of his recordings.

Through his recordings on the legendary Nonesuch Records LP's of the 1970's, Jacobs became a musical hero and role model to the teenage me, along with others in that era like Gilbert Kalish and Peter Serkin. What all of them had in common was their commitment in equal measure to music of the past and of the (then) current century, including music of the present moment. They weren't "specialists."  They played Beethoven and Boulez,  Haydn and Henze, Chopin and Carter. Moreover, their eclectic interests also extended to genre, in that they played solo works but also made chamber music a vital part of their careers. Heck, Jacobs even held the orchestral piano position in the New York Philharmonic for the last 22 years of his life, and he played harpsichord as well.

Those records on Nonesuch, by Jacobs and others, inspired me to want to learn diverse repertoire and to pursue a diverse career path. Growing up in North Carolina, I might not have known of such options without an example like Jacobs' to emulate.

Apologies for the week-long hiatus...between traveling back from Europe, fighting jet lag, celebrating Thanksgiving with relatives in Pennsylvania, and driving back south to Carolina, the blog had to take a mini-vacation. Happy now to be back in South Carolina and hardly traveling for the remainder of 2006.

It's encouraging to see some classical music bloggers connecting the dots where the mainstream music media has not. Here are other past examples we've noted of bloggers doing their job well.

Last week's post from Lithuania remarked on the Frank Zappa memorial in the city of Vilnius. While on that same tour the violinist Todd Reynolds tipped me off to an amazing YouTube video (in two parts, here, and here) of Zappa appearing on the Steve Allen show in 1963. It's a clean-cut Zappa, pre-Mothers of Invention, playing a bicycle---that's right, a bicycle---and seeming every bit the devotee of Edgard Varese. Allen plays it for laughs at first, but in his closing comments, it's clear that he recognizes Zappa as the real deal. In any case, can you imagine network television giving that much air time---or any time whatsoever---to experimental music today?

You've gotta love a town that has a memorial to Frank Zappa. Granted, it's not situated in the most dignified setting: in the middle of a parking lot, surrounded by elaborate graffiti on the walls around it, including images of Jimi Hendrix and Cartman, among others. Erected in 1995, the bust looks like Zappa in his mid to late 1980's period, when he was befriending Vaclav Havel and busting the chops of Tipper Gore and Ernest Hollings in those ridiculous Senate hearings on obscene lyrics in pop music. I knew Vilnius had a Zappa memorial somewhere, but had not found it on any maps and was thrilled when I stumbled on it yesterday completely by random wandering.

Vilnius has a lot going for it other than its Zappaphilia, of course. A brief 36-hour stay in a place can only tell you so much, but it seems that the city is booming economically. Much of the Old Town is in beautiful condition, looking recently restored in many spots. Construction and other restoration is continuing in many locations in the center city, and a sense of optimism pervades the air. Already signs everywhere herald Vilnius' selection as the European Capital of Culture for 2009.

The Steve Reich band played the final concert of its 2-week European tour last night here at the Palace of Congress, and the Lithuanian audience could not have been more warm and welcoming. The program was slightly changed from what we had done elsewhere...instead of the new Daniel Variations, the program here included Drumming Part I and my personal favorite among all of Steve's music, the 1973 Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ. That piece is perched right on the edge between the lushness of Music for 18 Musicians and the more hardcore minimalism of the earlier works. There's also a faint whiff of Flower Power lingering in that music, some evocation of the best aspects of a long-gone era.

Reminders of Vilnius' troubled past are still around, but you have to look for them. The bridge over the Neris River between our hotel and the concert hall retains its Soviet-era statues, soldiers standing guard looking out of the city, the Ideal Working Men and Women looking in towards the town, with bricks and trowels in hand. But the propagandistic plaques under the sculptures are gone, the gaping holes where they were mounted a simple but eloquent reminder of how much has changed here in a mere 15 years.

15 years is not long, but neither is 65 years, and it's only been that long since Vilnius was the scene of unimaginable horror. My wanderings of yesterday not only took me to the Zappa statue, but also to the Choral Synagogue, dating from 1905. A sign in both Lithuanian and English tersely informs the visitor that this is the only remaining synagogue out of some 300 that once existed here. You have to look elsewhere to find the rest of the story: Vilna, as it was known to the Jewish people, was once called the Jerusalem of the Baltics. Before the Nazi occupation in the Second World War, those 300 synagogues served several hundred thousand Jews. It is estimated that at least 90% of those Jewish citizens of Vilna were exterminated, in a span of about three years.