UNUSUAL INSTRUMENT
For many of us, our first response when you mention an accordion is an oompah band or the Lawrence Welk show and Myron Floren. This week we had the distinct and unexpected pleasure of hearing a young Chinese woman demonstrate her virtuosity playing classical accordion. Her accordion is both heavy and elaborate. It weighs 45 pounds and has a keyboard on the left side and a whole series of buttons on the right. Hanzhi Wang played a selection of classical pieces by Bach and Grieg among others that had been arranged for accordion; if you didn’t see her, you would not have guessed you were hearing an accordion.
Wang earned music degrees in Beijing and Copenhagen. Based in Copenhagen, she tours the world performing and has given master classes at the Manhattan School of Music. Hearing her was truly special!
RECENT READING
NEWPORT THROUGH THE CENTURIES
The Maze at Windermere by Gregory Blake Smith
I’ll start by stating that I loved this novel! What Mr. Smith has done using Newport, Rhode Island, as the venue and presenting five different stories from five different perspectives in five different time periods is simply amazing. Sandy Allison is a tennis pro in 2011 involved with three women, none of whom he initially sees as a partner for the long term. Franklin Drexel, a gay blade in all senses of the term, aspires to marry a wealthy widow in 1896 Newport, although he has no desire for women.
At just 20, Henry James is spending time in Newport (1863) and observing the scene and the people. He develops a friendship with a young woman named Alice (same name as his sister) and keeps a journal recording his experiences. A British officer, Major Ballard, is stationed in Newport during the American Revolution and is obsessed with his attraction to a young Jewess.
Lastly, there is Prudence Selwyn, a young Quaker of 15 whose mother is dead and her father likely lost at sea. It is 1692, she has one slave, and she must figure out how to live her life and support the two of them. Three of the stories are presented as diaries while the other two, Sandy’s and Franklin’s, are in the third person.
Themes of love, lust, betrayal, and duplicity, along with how we present ourselves to the world and each other, echo in each individual’s life. Windermere is modeled on an old mansion, but the physical aspects of Newport such as Doubling Point and the Jewish cemetery which recur down the years are historically true. I found all the characters fascinating with the British officer being the least likable and least sympathetic.
The novel is summed up, I think, in the last letter Henry James writes to Alice Taylor:
“…this sense I have that the hundreds of millions of us who breathe upon the earth are each a unique flame, that we are each uniquely composed within the caskets of our bodies and our minds, that each has an experience of the world as different as that of a fishwife’s from a foundryman’s, and yet we all live the same life (millionaire, artist, soldier, slave), we each of us strive to understand who we are why we are here, to love and be loved, and that, for all that striving, we are each of us lost in the mystery of our own heart.”
Gregory Blake Smith was not an author I was familiar with, but this novel came to my attention from a publisher’s e-mail. Subsequently, I learned it was one of the Washington Post’sten best books of 2018. For more on the creation of this work, here is a link to an interview with Smith from the Literary Hub. (~JWFarrington)
Note: Header photo is Chateau-sur-mer in Newport from visitrhodeisland.com. Hanzhi Wang photo from opening nights.fsu.edu and book cover image from the publisher.
