Day 1052: Dan Flanagan
Feb. 5th, 2023 08:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eve_primeEvery quarter, I check the calendar for the university's music school and add anything interesting to my own calendar, so I was delighted a few weeks ago to see that Dan Flanagan would be doing a recital today. Twenty years ago, Dan Flanagan was my neighbor, two houses to the south of mine! When he finished grad school and went off to be the concertmaster (chief violinist) for the Sacramento Symphony, he had a big garage sale of all his excess stuff, and I bought several things, including the green floral carpet that featured in the Christmas story not long ago (my Jan 28 post). So I figured it would be fun to see this concert, and it was!
The first fun thing was that I arrived at the same time as Andrea and Tom, who are professional oboists; she's also on the youth orchestra board and we had been becoming friends just before the pandemic hit. It turns out they're friends of Dan's, too, and he was staying with them during his visit! They agreed that he'd be interested to hear that I still had his green carpet.
The recital was based on how he spent his time during the lockdown part of the pandemic. Dan collects art, and he started composing a piece about one of the artworks in his collection. Then he realized that was a great idea, and a great way to spend the time, so he commissioned a whole bunch of composers to write short pieces about many of the works of art in his collection, which he supplemented by writing a few himself. Then in the recital, for each piece, he showed the art on screen and told us about it and how it related to the music we were about to hear. He performed 12 pieces for us, and at each of the other recitals he's doing he shows some other subset of the 23 total pieces. He premiered them in New York in the fall, and on Tuesday he's taking the show to Paris and other European cities, then in April he'll play them in Texas.
During the intermission I chatted more with Andrea and Tom, and after the performance they went into the prep room with Dan, and when I came to the (glass) door they waved me in. I explained who I was (and about the carpet), and he looked just stunned. So fun! Then he needed to chat with other folks so Andrea and I talked about books, and then when everyone else had gone I updated Dan about his house. He'd actually been to look for it this weekend, but the area looked so different that he thought the house was gone. No, but new houses had been added to either side of it, and a bunch of landscaping in front. The person living there now is a mostly blind attorney and I think her mother.
The other thing I remembered about Dan besides his pet gila monster and the Thai girlfriend he had when he was here was a conversation we'd had, where I'd asked what he recommended for music education for D, who was two at the time. The fact that D. is 22 now really showed how much time had gone by.
The first fun thing was that I arrived at the same time as Andrea and Tom, who are professional oboists; she's also on the youth orchestra board and we had been becoming friends just before the pandemic hit. It turns out they're friends of Dan's, too, and he was staying with them during his visit! They agreed that he'd be interested to hear that I still had his green carpet.
The recital was based on how he spent his time during the lockdown part of the pandemic. Dan collects art, and he started composing a piece about one of the artworks in his collection. Then he realized that was a great idea, and a great way to spend the time, so he commissioned a whole bunch of composers to write short pieces about many of the works of art in his collection, which he supplemented by writing a few himself. Then in the recital, for each piece, he showed the art on screen and told us about it and how it related to the music we were about to hear. He performed 12 pieces for us, and at each of the other recitals he's doing he shows some other subset of the 23 total pieces. He premiered them in New York in the fall, and on Tuesday he's taking the show to Paris and other European cities, then in April he'll play them in Texas.
During the intermission I chatted more with Andrea and Tom, and after the performance they went into the prep room with Dan, and when I came to the (glass) door they waved me in. I explained who I was (and about the carpet), and he looked just stunned. So fun! Then he needed to chat with other folks so Andrea and I talked about books, and then when everyone else had gone I updated Dan about his house. He'd actually been to look for it this weekend, but the area looked so different that he thought the house was gone. No, but new houses had been added to either side of it, and a bunch of landscaping in front. The person living there now is a mostly blind attorney and I think her mother.
The other thing I remembered about Dan besides his pet gila monster and the Thai girlfriend he had when he was here was a conversation we'd had, where I'd asked what he recommended for music education for D, who was two at the time. The fact that D. is 22 now really showed how much time had gone by.
no subject
Date: 2023-02-07 12:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-02-07 07:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-02-09 01:47 pm (UTC)I like the merging of art and music, sounds cool.
no subject
Date: 2023-02-09 08:29 pm (UTC)