I spent my May Day on a flight from London to Philadelphia this year, which isn\u2019t much fun, but is certainly better than spending a flight from London to Philadelphia calling out \u201cMay Day!\u201d I left home with a knot in my stomach and an ache in my heart- since our kids were born, I\u2019ve tried very hard to keep business trips to about a week at the most. There have been exceptions, but this was to be one of the longer trips away from my family in many years.<\/p>\n
Looking at my schedule for the month, one might wonder why I was flying to Philadelphia at all, as I didn\u2019t have a single concert or rehearsal in the \u201cCity of Brotherly Love.\u201d My mission there was simple, and took only about an hour. From the airport, I made my way to the home of my colleague David Yang, where my second-string cello has been living for the last few years. David was already in New York, where our trio would be working for the next week, so I picked up a key from a neighbour, let myself in and found my cello laying on the floor of his living room, grabbed it, and went back to the waiting cab and on to 30th<\/sup> St Station.<\/p>\n The \u201csecond-string cello\u201d is a sad sign of the times. My first-string cello is pretty wonderful, and after twenty-five years together, it feels like its sound and my identity are pretty well fused. It\u2019s also ancient and fragile. Yes, I do often buy a seat for it and travel with it, but the costs of doing so are obscene in an age when presenters are under ever more budgetary pressure. A huge chunk of what Ensemble Epomeo<\/a> does is on the East Coast, and we tend to rehearse in Philly, so leaving my spare cello there has significantly lowered the threshold of financial viability for trio projects, and it does save me a lot of stress.<\/p>\n