Pianist Earl Wild died last week. His obituaries carry all the usual stuff about him being a "super virtuoso in the Horowitz class" with "one of the great piano techniques of the 20th century." Well, that may be true but was not borne out by the one occasion on which I saw him live in concert. It was in Hong Kong, sometime in the 1980's and he was to play Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto Number 2. When Mr Wild walked - well, more stumbled - onto the stage one wondered whether he had walked into a piece of lumber off-stagesomewhere and was dazed. It soon became apparent that he had actually walked into an adult beverage and was somewhat the worse for wear. His hair was disheveled and he looked like Tip O'Neill after a particularly joyful St Patrick's Day celebration. He sat at the piano and signaled the conductor that he was ready to begin. It was a mess. It wasn't that there was the occasional fluffed note. It was that it sounded as though he was playing while wearing boxing gloves. I had guests with me who had never heard of Wild but loved the piece and initially I was much embarrassed. Then angry. Finally the whole experience saddened me in that a man of such obvious talent had lost respect for his own musical worth and that of the composer to such an extent that he clearly just didn't care that he was making a travesty of the work. That occasion may have been completely out of character. I do hope so.

I report this not out of a wish to be mean-spirited but to give an example of why I adore her.

The picture at the head of this post is of Jean Simmons as she appeared in How to Make an American Quilt (1995). Oh, no...wait....

The weekly opera on AllClassical on Saturday was a re-broadcast of a 1958 performance from the Met of Samuel Barber's opera Vanessa, starring Eleanor Steber and Nicolai Gedda. The libretto was written by Barber's life-partner Gian-Carlo Menotti. I am listening to it one chunk at a time, about 20 minutes of it per day. It's dark stuff, but interesting and there is some wonderful vocal work - particularly by Steber. I'll perhaps write more about it when I have had a chance to hear it all and form an overall view.