Disappointing Recital followed by Delicious Tapas

Today my husband and I went to a piano recital in Chicago. We mostly go to the Chicago Symphony concerts, and this year we have begun going to a few operas, and only occasionally do we go to piano recitals. I had wanted to see a particular pianist, Jeremy Denk, who is a MacArthur "Genius" grant winner, but we had a conflict with that date, so we ended up at a different piano recital.

I'm not going to name the pianist we saw today. He has won many competitions and has a busy career. We were both disappointed in his performance. I found myself thinking about all kinds of things other than the music -- the pianist's posture (excellent!), how many people were there, if Robert Schumann had lived today and been able to take Prozac would he have been happier but less productive? This is a bad sign. The performer should draw you into the music, sharing his/her interpretation, making a musical world. My husband, who is a pianist, had more technical complaints, but all leading to the same conclusion -- we were bored.

At intermission he said, "If I were here alone I'd probably leave now." I said, "Well, why not ask me if I want to leave, too?" So we did, but we had only 10 minutes to make it across the Loop to the train station. Our heroic cabbie got us there with ONE MINUTE to spare. We raced up the escalator and ran to our train. My Fitbit shows 28 minutes of exercise from walking to and from the train!

n the train, I mentioned that since I thought we were eating out that we might still have to do that because I didn't have anything to cook for dinner. "We could go for tapas," my husband said. Yes! There's a tapas restaurant across the street from our train station. So we had tapas and even dessert and it was very good!

Just two of the tapas dishes we had!