I shouldn't have been surprised at the power of In the Memory Palace—but I was. The quattro staggioni effect of four song cycles, each of them intense and utterly different from one another, worked even more magic than I had expected. The beauty of not being...
written by
Steven Blier
Blier’s Blog: October 24, 2011
Moving to Merkin from our Washington venue was a bit like going from dating Twiggy to dating Gina Lollabrigida. Our Washington space was a Bombay martini; Merkin is graciously reverberant, and it sure LOVES the piano. We spent a pleasant afternoon adjusting to the new...
Blier’s Blog: October 23, 2011
It sounds simple: you leave town to make music in another locale, and then you come home. But touring is seldom a bed of roses, and this bed was unusually thorny. Dramas abounded. When we got to Union Station in Washington on Friday night, our specially pre-ordered...
Blier’s Blog: October 19, 2011
Today is my late father's 100th birthday. One of the cast members took his photograph down from my windowsill and put it on my coffeetable—the Danish Modern one I inherited from him. It gave my dad a ringside seat for the six-plus hours of rehearsal today, and I think...
Blier’s Blog: October 17, 2011
A recent NYFOS tradition: the roadside display of personalized mugs for rehearsals at my place. I spend too much time thinking about who gets assigned which color.
Blier’s Blog: October 16, 2011
As I get ready to rehearse Granados's Tonadillas, I've been tempted to listen compulsively to other performances of them—I have about six recordings on my iPod. But I realized that rather than torture myself hearing de los Angeles and Gerald Moore for the ninetieth...

