This concert was entitled Treasures of Haitian Piano Music. Marianne has been part of the effort to preserve Haitian music that was lost for many years. As she has said: “Sometimes notes are faded, instructions are faded, things are erased, and it’s not clear what the composer’s final intent was.” But fear not, the music was wonderful and Marianne was terrific. (Full disclosure, I took piano lessons from Marianne for a year.)

The program, sponsored by the African American Network of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, went a few minutes long to allow a woman from the Haitian American Museum of Chicago to give a five minute history of Haiti between pieces. She unfortunately spent half her limited time telling us how little time she had. In college I wrote a history of the world in two pages and got a B+. The instructor thought I should have written three pages to do the topic justice. (It took Mel Brooks one hour and 32 minutes just to tell Part I of the History of the World – he never has told Part 2.)

A friend of Marianne’s, whom I met prior to the start of the concert, is a bass player with the CSO. He stayed for the entire performance, dressed in blue jeans, even though it went a little long because of the Haitian speaker. He seemed totally calm, despite having to get to his dressing room, change clothes, do whatever else one does before a concert (yes, that), and get to the main stage on time, which I thought was less than 25 minutes later. I didn’t know if that was supreme confidence or supreme indifference.

So I looked up that night’s CSO performance and found that the opening piece, the Bruch Concerto for Two Pianos, which is 25 minutes long, does not have a bass listed as one of the orchestral instruments accompanying the pianos. I guess he knew that.