My First Love

During a recent trip to Beijing, I bought myself a violin.

This was a planned thing. I knew exactly where to go: to a shop located in the third floor of a building on the Wangfujing Street, seemingly only containing a sports equipment store. I had bought one violin there before, an instrument that I had sold away to somebody who seemed to need it more than myself.

This time, the master violin-builder was not himself there. When I bought the previous instrument, he helped me the make the choice. Although he had no English, and I have no Chinese, we understood each other very well. This time, however, I was helped with his assistant, who also contributes to building the instruments.

My prime interest was to find an instrument that feels (relatively) easy to play. I spent a couple of hours browsing through the various instruments, until I finally decided on one of the first that had been offered to me. I ended up spending a bit more on it than what I had planned, so I went back to my hotel with somewhat mixed feelings. Do I really need another violin?

Violin was my first instrument that I picked up at the age of 7. In my early teens, I was (relatively) serious about it, until I realised that several of my friends were more talented, more committed, or both. I switched to playing viola, and downscaled my music-related objectives to a more realistic level.

This worked out very well: I ended up playing a lot on amateur level, especially chamber music. I like the viola, and the instrument has served me very well. I also started the play the piano, and deloped another kind of a passion to it. But violin was my first love, a love that eventually failed to bloom. Thus it was with mixed feelings that I started to explore the new instrument, initially playing this and that, various pieces of music that I had learned at some time.

What led me to play Bach again, I don't know. For sure, I had played some parts of the Partita in D minor already in my teens, but I had never dared to attack seriously the monumental Chaconne that forms the final movement of the Partita. It felt too formidable, too wide in scope and expression, and technically too difficult to make it sound right.

Be it as it may, I am playing the Chaconne now. I am not making a good job on it yet, but I am making progress, and I think I have a found an angle of attack to it that might work. It's a steep climb, but I think I can make it, if not to the top, then surely higher from where I am now.

Frankly, I had forgotten just how intensive playing the violin seriously is both mentally and physically. That my fingers and my back are hurting is just a trivial part of it. It's the intensity of concentration, the strain of pointing one's mind totally to the music, the keen alertness demanded by the composition that I had forgotten. They are both painful and seducing.

So, in my advanced years, I have found a link to my first love, the sweetness and bitterness of it. But I am also making a proposition that I did not have the courage to make back then. Will this (hopefully) more mature and realistic passion be rewarded its price?

WFC

During the last years, I have become sort of a regular visitor at University of California at Berkeley.

I like the campus a lot. It is fairly small: all parts are easily reachable by foot. The campus itself is reachable by BART trains from the SFO airport, so renting a car is not necessary - an unusual luxury in the USA. The campus sits next to downtown Berkeley, with its good bookstores and cafés. I could easily spend a whole afternoon by browsing the shelves of Moe's, and actually have in many cases. The Berkeley branch of Rasputin CD + DVD store is just across the Telegraph Avenue from Moe's, and it's good for another afternoon visit.

I guess part of the charm of my Berkeley visits is that the place is 10 hours away from my time zone. That makes me practically unreachable by telephone during the normal hours. So all the sudden I'm the master of my time again and can enjoy the atmosphere of the campus at my leisure. Jet lag also reverses my schedule: I wake up early in the morning, and often take a jog around the campus before breakfast. It makes me feel a better person than what I am.

If possible, I stay in the Women's Faculty Club right in the middle of the campus. I have bribed shamelessly the secretaries of my UCB colleagues to the effect that they are typically willing to make me a reservation there when I prepare a visit; WFC visitors must have an invitation from campus. It is an old English country house style building, with lot of charm. The look and feel are not hotel-like at all, and I could imagine staying there even for a longer period of time.

What adds to the attractiveness of WFC is the grand piano they have in the downstairs parlour. It is a mid-size Steinway, roughly from 1905. Nobody has ever had the heart to stop me playing it.

The Steinway is different from my regular piano in many significant ways. The touch is fairly light, requiring carefulness and control. The dynamic range is immense. The pedals work - well, I still don't know just what is possible with this instrument. One could spend a lifetime exploring its possibilities of expression.

When I approach the instrument for the first time after the previous visit, I feel considerable awe. Playing it is a bit like driving a sports car: it goes fast, it reacts to the pedal in a split second, and it keeps whispering to the driver: "Faster! Faster". It is so easy to lose control - but what can one do? You cannot drive a Ferrari carefully.