Chen String Quartet – Rush Hour Concert – June 8, 2021

This week, at the St. James Cathedral, for the first time since March 10, 2020, when a scientist walked into the bar I was at and started talking about thermodynamics, I attended an indoor event at a site that wasn’t a vaccinated friend’s residence.

Clearly, the Chen family had kept practicing during The Great Lull. Even world-class musicians might lose their edge spending 16 months just sitting around eating bonbons and catching up on old episodes of My Mother the Car.

Attendance was limited to 100, in a space that can accommodate, I am told, over 400. And masks were required, though a very few people decided that the rules didn’t apply to them, and pulled theirs down when no one, except me, was looking. Apparently these attendees were special, though they looked much like anyone you might encounter on the street, just as do the aliens among us who are posing as humans and small puppies.

I must admit that wearing a mask throughout the concert did cause me to grow somewhat sleepy as I breathed in my own fumes. Perhaps I should have brought a mask from home, rather than use one I found in the garbage receptacle on the corner.

Chen Family Quartet, Fourth Presbyterian Church, January 11, 2019; Civic Orchestra of Chicago, Symphony Hall, January 15, 2019; Phillppe Quint, Violin and Marta Aznavoorian, Piano, Dame Myra Hess Memorial Concert, Chicago Cultural Center, January 16, 2019

While others listening to classical music may try to appreciate its finer points or focus on getting inside the composer’s head, I just like the way it sounds, which leaves my brain free to wander during concerts.

Some day I might pick up a copy of Classical Music for Dummies, cowritten by David Pogue, whom I usually only think about as Techno Claus on CBS Sunday Morning, when I think about him at all, but who also is a monthly columnist for Scientific American.

But, until then, I think about things like the different shades of varnish on the cellos used in the Chicago Civic Orchestra’s terrific concert, which led me to an applied physics article on ‘the importance of the vibro-mechanical properties of varnish, its chemical composition, thickness and penetration into wood.”

It wasn’t so much during Chicago Symphony Orchestra Concertmaster Robert Chen’s brilliant violin solo at Fourth Presbyterian Church, but rather after, that I began thinking about the space itself, when Rush Hour Concerts Artistic Director Anthony Devroye, who filled in on viola with the Chen Family Quartet that day told a couple of us who had trouble seeing from the back that the quartet didn’t use the stage because the asymmetrically curved wall behind it caused acoustic problems – more science.

No science entered my head during the Dame Myra Hess concert, which featured the music of Charlie Chaplin. Quint and Aznavoorian closed with Chaplin’s Smile, from Modern Times, which reminded me of Jimmy Durante singing Make Someone Happy at the end of Sleepless in Seattle, which reminded me of its screenwriter and director Nora Ephron, who was an answer on Jeopardy this week.

In the immortal words of The Statler Brothers’ classic (not classical) Flowers on the Wall (I counted 12 on my guest bathroom wall), “Now don’t tell me I’ve nothin’ to do.”