Happy 2011...and don't eat your luck

The first Monday of 2011. Not a lot of people on the streets, and many stores along my 20-minute route to the heart of downtown Sofia won’t reopen til tomorrow. It’s a slightly snowy kind of day, and there’s plenty of settled-in snow on everything, giving the city that look of pure wintry white and hiding the blemishes of age and use. I didn’t have to wait long for a tram to the opera house, where I turned left at Rakovska street and make it up the steepest uphill patch of central Sofia sidewalk – two blocks up to the Ivan Vazov statue – without catching my breath. I did relax the pace on the following downhill stretch, reaching the Military club just as the light at the intersection with Tsar Osoboditel Blvd turned red for my direction. I was only a few minutes late (I’m rarely early, I shamefully admit) for our traditional new year’s quartet meeting at the apartment of our first violinist, Angel Stankov.

Angel looked fresh and cheerful as he greeted me, pulling me by the hand into the small entryway, where a pair of slippers was waiting to replace my wet boots. I was the last to arrive, and as I entered the living room, my other quartet colleagues Nikolai Gagov (second violinist) and Valentin Gerov (violist) got up for the traditional “za mnogo godini” wishes before Angel served us maple tea, which turned out to be an old gift from me that he had only now opened! Angel then told a story (he always has a story to tell, and has a gift for ‘razkazvane’) about how the Japanese Embassy had sent all of us calendars, except that the one that would have been for me had been addressed to the Sofia Philharmonic’s director instead. Which was fine with me because Angel then offered me a choice of fine calendars from his own extensive 2011 collection! I picked one with various Bulgarian flags and coats-of-arms, making a mental note to show it to my son Christopher-Joseph, who is one of the younger members of the national vexillology society here.

Aside from firming up our performance engagements through the first half of the year, we also talked about the qualities of televised new year’s concert conductors Dudamel (great charisma, obviously going places) and Welser-Most (Vienna native, not so exciting, but still likable), the fact that the name Santa Claus is a variation on Saint Nic’laus and that there are enough Saint Nikolai-s and Nikola-s to cause you to become righteously confused as to who is who, and also how to avoid ‘eating your luck’ when enjoying the holiday banitsa. This last may sound trivial, but going over the details of how the Christmas ‘banitsa s kusmeti’ (salty cheese pastry with good luck sayings) was served is just as traditional as the actual making and serving itself! Many important questions need to be answered: was it homemade or storebought? Who wrote the good luck sayings? Did the oldest family rotate the banitsa three times? Did they put actual coins and ‘fortune tickets’ in the banitsa or just have numbers referring to the sayings? Nikolai revealed that at his family’s Christmas eve gathering, the reference numbers were not placed IN the banitsa, but rather on TOP of it, on sticks of 'dryan' (cornel-tree, says the nearest on-line dictionary), thus relieving family members from another tradition, that of actually having to stuff yourself with several slices of banitsa while looking for the luck symbols stuffed into the banitsa. And relieving the risk of ‘eating your luck’ along with the banitsa!

Another new year’s tradition in these parts – for me at least – is to stop by the Union of composers bookstore to pay my yearly subscription to Muzika vchera, dnes, a local music magazine that composer and musical renaissance man Dimiter Hristov started oh, almost 20 years ago now. On my way through the adjacent parking lot a car honked gently behind me as it pulled out. I was most pleasantly surprised to see that the driver who was trying to get my attention was none other than Dimov Dimov, my previous first violinist, who is still playing and moving and shaking with the Apollonia Foundation! We exchanged greetings and the encounter left me with a warm and fuzzy feeling, not just nostalgia for the kind of chamber music experiences – including an intense Beethoven quartet cycle in the year 2000 – that he had made possible for me and my colleagues, but also a sense of getting the year 2011 off to an early and positive start after the holidays. Holidays that for me have been very hard to recover from in the past – having a birthday just before Christmas can make things even worse, especially with the dreaded Saturnova dupka (pre-birthday astrological crisis named after Saturn, not to be confused with the pre-Christmas Saturnalia of Roman origin) leading up to it.  This year I’m ready to go, to move things forward, to at least partially achieve some unreasonably ambitious goals - musical and otherwise - and to have a good time doing it.

Now about this blog...