I like this blog venue, I can publish those funny pictures that are kinda cool, but you just don’t know where to put them. They’re not “official” enough for the website, and certainly don’t belong hanging on my wall.

My piano partner Lyosha just sent me the best of our session from 25 Dec. 2008. It turned out to be a really mellow session, almost minimalistic. I was in a strange frame of mind. In the western world, it was Christmas Day. In Russia, which goes by the old calendar, it was just a working day. Not that it makes much difference to me. There are basically no holidays for musicians anyway.

So it was a steeley gray and very cold day in St. Petersburg. We’d just arrived at Babushka and Dedushka’s two days ago, with our 4-month-old in tow, and I was still recovering from the trip. One of those “vacations” which is not a vacation. Family trip, plus had a difficult program to learn for a concert on Jan 9th in Cologne so no time to really slack off.
But I always find time to play with Lyosha. He’d just bought his new grand piano, and his new at-home studio was now set up and ready to go. So armed with extra woolen socks, my husband and I set out to the session.

Here’s a take from the session, Lyosha titled it “House on the Lake”. Quite minimal but it has something, I think:

House on the Lake

Here is a photo of our concert that we played at the GEZ a few days later. Don’t have the recording of that yet, am curious! That’s Vladimir Shostak on bass and Nikolai Rubanov on bass clarinet.