Floating in a cloud, playing music.

Yesterday I played a lunch time concert at the Richard Bradshaw Ampitheatre at the Four Seasons Centre in Toronto. It actually only sounds slightly less cool than it is. It's the staircase of the new opera house, but they've designed it very well, and have a fantastic piano. Twice a week there are free concerts at noon, and they're so popular they have to turn people away.

The stage is on the third balcony level, and most of the audience sits on a wide staircase leading up to the fourth balcony level. The rest of the audience sits on the fourth balcony level looking over the back and sides of the stage area. I felt a little intimidated, being surrounded on all sides like that, but more like a rock star than anything.

Even though we weren't paid, I've never been treated better by management for any concert. Someone met us at the stage door and walked us to the green room. While the piano tuner finished his work (someone in our quartet recognized him as "the slow blind guy"), she took us on a tour of the opera house. After our hour and a half sound check there were good sandwiches, fruit, and bottled water waiting for us in the green room. And the audience was packed, attentive, and appreciative. On my way out four old ladies stopped me to shake my hand and say how much they enjoyed the concert.

The whole experience with this quartet was very intense. I was asked to play with them about two weeks ago when their violist decided to take an audition in New York on the same day as the concert. So I was given the music, and we started rehearsing. On Thursday (5 days before the concert) we had a coaching on the middle two movements of the piece- they had worked on this last semester, but only had lessons on the first movement. On Friday we played the last movement for the Tokyo String Quartet & tried to learn everything they had to teach us. A little hard when four guys are telling you slightly different things all at once, but fantastic nevertheless. (A side note: one of the few things the Conservatory does very, very well is all of the masterclasses they arrange with international artists. Not many schools can say they get this many people to come give classes.)

So anyway, that's just about everything I've been doing since I got married. That, and Nathan and I brewed batch #2 of beer today. Our first batch we christened Fail Ale, aka What Ales You. This one's supposed to be an IPA, but needs a good name.

As for the title- the walls of the front half of the opera house are thick plate glass. The main stairs leading up to the ampitheatre are also glass, giving the feeling of being suspended over the street.