Sorry for lack of updates recently - have been feeling ill for two days. No idea whether it's a virus or a result of overenthusiasm on exercise bike (or, possibly, allergy to practising?). Not much to say at the moment other than that I have been distracting myself from general malaise with total immersion in Dickens's The Pickwick Papers - something I've intended to read for years. What spurred me on was playing the Debussy prelude entitled 'Homage a S Pickwick Esq' - extraordinary that Debussy evokes in five pages an atmosphere that Dickens extends to around 800. Reading the book does make a difference to how I'm playing the piece. Especially since I found a paragraph describing Pickwick gradually falling asleep at the table during/after a very merry dinner that fits the prelude to sheer perfection...
Meanwhile, it's come to my notice that several artists' websites have quoted my reports on the relevant people's performances - a Sokolov site is the latest (though I can't read it on my Mac). If blogging is now so quotably quotable, what does this mean for the future of music critics in newspapers?
