Just like most musicians, when the dreaded Covid, along with the accompanying lockdown, hit in 2020, that was it as far as work was concerned. Like some very dark cosmic joke, I not only had a bad case of Covid in March of 2020, but my beloved dog Honeypie had to be put to sleep in April of 2021. In June of that year I was diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma."
The sound was maddeningly familiar. A beautiful ballad melody spelled out by a pianist with perfect mastery of the legato line - the widely spaced notes leaning one into the next, the voice leading in the left hand, the little pools and eddies of ornamentation - was supported by brushes and bass. Surely this was a standard I just couldn't recall. Those rhythms seemed to imply the syllables of written words. But it was Chopin's Nocturne in F minor, played by the Ted Rosenthal Trio on their new CD Impromptu (Playscape).