Brain Death at the Washington Post

We had several people over for dinner last Sunday at my brothers where my brother's wife had been experimenting with ways to cook up a recent archery victim, and one fellow in attendence along with his wife was several tads more into high end music than most of my acquaintences; he told us a story which has had me sort of chuckling since then.

He said he and his wife had gone to Wolftrap to hear Itzhak Perlman play a particular Mendelsohn piece which is seriously difficult to play and that, rather than play that piece, Perlman commenced playing a much simpler piece which any violinist in the orchestra could have played, and was not doing the best job in the world of playing that. No sort of a notice of a change in the program had been sent or was in evidence anywhere.

After ten minutes, my friend and his wife got up and walked out in disgust and one of the managers stopped them outside the hall and asked what the problem was, and they told him they hadn't come there to hear Perlman butchering a piece which anybody should be able to play. The manager explained that Perlman had damaged his shoulder skiing or something like that the previous weekend and could barely lift his arm.

Kind of reminds me of Roberto Duran with his leg in a cast from a motorcycle accident a week prior, eking out a decision over a fighter he'd normally flatten in two rounds and apologizing to the audience for it a few years back.

At any rate, my friend noted that the Washington Post wrote this sorry performance up the next day as if one of God's angels had descended from the sky and graced the audience with the most fabulous violin performance which had ever been heard since Adam and Eve.