After a day of almost complete R&R, I am finally recovering from a very tiring week. An exhausting Masterworks weekend, a challenging Stuart & Friends program last night, and for most of last week, my wife Marty was sick with the flu. Thankfully, Marty is feeling a lot better. And the concerts went very well.

Stuart & Friends is a chamber music concert I do each year with members of the orchestra. It gives me a chance to work in a different way with the players and to give our audience members a more intimate and personable concert experience. I strive, as host, to keep the atmosphere relaxed, upbeat, and fun, while playing some beautiful music for them.

One lovely aspect of this concert is that it is sponsored by my friend Marilynn Kanenson in memory of her husband, Bill, who was president of the HSO's Board of Directors for my third and fourth year here. He was my first friend in Harrisburg, and a dear man who I miss very much. Marilynn's support has allowed Stuart & Friends to grow and develop an audience.

We had a very nice crowd at the Whitaker Center last night, and, as usual for me, I programmed a really hard concert for myself. I like to challenge myself in these concerts. This year I played Stravinsky's Suite Italienne with Fiona Thompson, the HSO's Principal Cello, Mozart's fiendish sonata in A Major with HSO concertmaster Odin Rathnam, and the the three of us joined with HSO Principal Viola Julius Wirth for Brahms' 2nd Piano Quartet (also in A). And we basically have a day and a half to put it all together.

I don't know what I was thinking.

It all went very well, but boy are my hands tired today...

Chamber music performances are a bit strange for me. Conducting is essentially a macrocosmic experience. You're concerned with grand gestures, leaving the detail work to the musicians. If your palms get sweaty, or your mind wanders for an instant, generally (not always, but generally) it doesn't affect the performance all that much. When you're playing the piano, on the other hand, it can mean a musical train wreck. Every little detail is evident. This is both terrifying and exhilarating. There was one moment toward the end of the third movement of the Brahms - we'd already navigated (and rather successfully) about 30 minutes of intense wonderful music - when someone started coughing in the audience. Had I been conducting, it would have had absolutely no impact. In this moment of the Brahms, though, I was jumping back and forth from one end of the piano to the other, and that little distraction threw me for an instant. Not disastrous, but I was a bit miffed at myself for that instant of thinking, "Oh... someone's coughing."

The other side of that coin is that actually playing the music is pretty cool. Don't get me wrong. I love conducting, and it's an amazing thrill. But I would not want to ever give up playing. The chamber music repertoire is so rich, and the experience of crafting the music, moment to moment, with colleagues and friends is so indescribably gratifying, that it would feel like an incomplete musical existence without it.