Busking
Joshua Bell's bout of busking in the Washington Metro is old news by now, but a friend sent me the link to the WaPo story by Gene Weingarten, and I thought back to Mr Bell's Mostly Mozart concert last summer, and how thrilling it was to hear him and his friends play Mendelssohn's Octet.
Somewhat more to the point, however, I remembered the cellist who was playing one of Bach's cello suites - every bit as demanding, I should think, as the Chaconne that Joshua Bell played in the Metro - in a passageway in the West Fourth Street IND station. I was on my way to lunch with Édouard, the week before last. I heard the cellist long before I saw him, and by the time I saw him I recognized that he was playing very, very well. I walked past him but stopped at about ten paces. I doubled back. I grabbed all of the singles that were in my pocket and dumped them in his instrument case. I walked away hurriedly; I'd be just on time if I didn't dawdle. So far as I could tell (what with my immovable neck), the cellist never looked up. I didn't look at him, either. I have no way of knowing whether he regretted having to play in the subway as much as I did.
I'm not a fan of music in the subway. The acoustics are all wrong; in tiled expanses, music reverberates painfully. And then there is the (sad) fact that most of the musicians, all of whom have auditioned before some sort of MTA panel, are usually okay at best. All right: they're good. But good isn't good enough, not in this town. I always feel like the Penelope Wilton character in Woody Allen's Match Point. How long do you keep trying at something before you accept that you're not cut out for it?
The cellist at West Fourth was definitely good enough. I'd have paid to hear him perform. So I did pay to hear him perform. Maybe someday I'll get to enjoy his music-making in a more congenial setting.
