From Vancouver

I'm in Vancouver and my String Quartet No. 2, which should probably be nicknamed "Landscapes," will be premiered tonight in a concert in North Vancouver. Getting here was a bit of a mess, though. Flying to either Canada or Europe I always fly out of Mexico City because there are direct flights avoiding having to travel via the US. It is just a five hour flight to Vancouver so I anticipated an easy travel day. Alas! or as they say in some Italian madrigals "Ohimè!" Normally it is about a three and a half hour drive from where I live to Mexico City. My flight was at 9am so I arranged for my driver to pick me up at 3am which should have put us at the airport two and a half hours before the flight--plenty of time. This has always worked before, but this time we were very unlucky! Just minutes into the drive we ran into the first obstacle. Our lane was blocked by some transit officials to allow passage of an oversize semitrailer with a huge machine on it. No big deal, it just put us ten minutes behind schedule. But this was just a harbinger. We were taking the main north/south highway and about an hour into our journey we ran into a serious traffic jam. Surrounded by trucks and semis we ground to a halt and did no more than inch along for the next two hours. The end of the tale is that I missed my flight by about 20 minutes. This was the only time in my life I have ever missed a flight except for thirty years ago when I actually got the day wrong!

So I had to go to the Aeromexico office where the worst offenders are handled. The bad news was the next flight was at 1 am Saturday morning, getting into Vancouver about 6am. Ok, I was still going to make the dress rehearsal at the cost of a night's sleep. The worse news was that I had to buy a whole new ticket, not just for this leg, but for the return flight as well. The policy was that if you miss one leg of a return ticket, you lose the whole thing. Airlines are a lot less forgiving than they used to be.

Stuck with having to spend the whole day with nothing to do I got a hotel room and had a nap. The flight was fine and the weather in Vancouver was lovely and sunny when I landed. I got to my AirBnb and had another nap! Speaking of, I have now used AirBnb apartments in four different countries (Spain, Austria, Germany and Canada) and in every case the experience was excellent. Here is the living room and garden of the apartment I am currently staying at:

The apartment has everything you need and the host even stocked the kitchen with essentials. While hotels have many advantages, booking an apartment through Airbnb is definitely the solution for economical longer stays.

In the afternoon I attended the last rehearsal of the quartet for the concert tonight. The ensemble is the Pro Nova Ensemble and here is their website: http://www.pronova.ca. The members are Shin-Jung Nam (cello), Ju Dee Ang (violin), Barbara Irschick (viola), Hyunsil Lucia Roh (violin). In this photo they are, from left to right, Lucia, Barbara, Shin-Jung and Ju Dee.

We will be recording the last concert so I will post that later on. It was immensely enjoyable finally hearing the piece. I think I was able to make some good suggestions. I wrote this using my music software with its playback capabilities and while that is enormously useful, I am convinced that pencil, eraser and paper is the best way to work until the piece is pretty much in its final form. I wrote most of this music three years ago before Covid hit and caused concerts to be cancelled. I completely re-wrote the first movement this year and it is much better as a result. The quartet players seem to be having fun with the piece, especially the last movement, and I will talk more about it when I post the recording.