After almost 3 and a half years of working downtown, I finally did something I've been meaning to do, which was take a long lunch break and go hear a concert. The First and Second Church on Marlborough street has a Wednesday afternoon series in their chapel, and Sergey Schepkin was playing the last 8 preludes and fugues from book 2 of the Welltempered Clavier. Schepkin's name has come up in some of the BPAA events, but this was the first time I'd ever heard him. Apparently he specializes in Bach, and while he's no Rosalyn Tureck, he presented a compelling program of these varied pieces, including some of the tough keys (G-sharp minor, B major). His interpretation isn't really comparable to Tureck anyway, as he looked for more of the substance of Bach's counterpoint and actually got quite emphatic about some of the subjects, not pretending that he wasn't playing on a modern piano. The piano itself wasn't very forgiving either, as it was kind of blurred, even with all the carpeting in the room, but it didn't seem to be a problem for him. With the exception of the A minor, these pieces are completely unfamiliar to me. The first couple, although they took several minutes each, turn out to only be a couple of pages long, and were well thought out and seemed to have a destination in mind. Sometimes the tempo went a little haywire, but the tone always seemed to be under control. It was a brisk 20-minute or so walk over to the back bay during a sunny break in the day, and shortly after I got back to the office, a black cloud came up and it poured for a while. Timing is everything, and this couldn't have been better timed. Next season they're moving the concerts to Fridays at 6:30 so that people don't have to rush off at the end, but the lunchtime concert isn't a bad thing either. There's plenty of this sort of thing going on, but most of the time if I see something that looks interesting I promptly forget about it until it's too late. So it was good to get out of the office for a couple of hours and do something productive.