Yesterday was kind of a dreary Sunday and Beth was threatening to ditch me with the kids for the afternoon, so I decided to go to a piano recital. As luck would have it, there was one to go to, out in Ashburnham, which is about 30 miles from here basically in the middle of nowhere, where a piano technician has about 20 restored antique pianos and sets up a concert series with visiting artists in the spring and fall, and the last one for the session was yesterday. Jack Reynolds had told me about this a long time ago, and I'd seen the listings in the calendar before, but I wasn't quite sure where Ashburnham was (I think I was confusing it with Amesbury, which is clear in the other direction and even further away), so once I figured it out it seemed doable.



The pianist for this concert was Benita Meshulam, who of course Ii'd never heard of, and she was playing a program mostly of music of Manuel de Falla, most of which I'd never heard of either. The venue was the local church (Unitarian, I guess, since there were no crosses anywhere), and she played an 1877 Erard piano, which had a tendancy to sound a little too reverberant in the hall, but that may have been the case with any piano in there. It was a pretty good crowd for a rainy Sunday afternoon in the sticks, I'd definitely want to check it out in the fall, since it really only took about 45 minutes to get there. The concert was good too, spanish classical music tends to sound kind of the same after a while, but she seemed to have the affinity for the music that her biography claimed she had, and came back for a rip-roaring Ritual Fire Dance as an encore. I don't think I'd heard an all-Spanish piano recital since Ms. Bosits did her doctoral recital on Villa-Lobos back at NU. I'm in no hurry to rush out and buy the music, but it was a nice change from the usual Chopin Scherzo or whatever.