OUT, AND ABOUT

posted by James Reel

    Of the five days I was recently off the air, four of them were due to illness. At first I thought I had a cold, then it seemed like the flu, and my doctor ultimately diagnosed it as a bacterial infection in my lungs, for which he prescribed antibiotics that gradually got me back in action. (By the way, last Wednesday, when I finally admitted that the nastiness wasn’t going away on its own, I called my doctor’s office, got an appointment for that afternoon, saw the doctor without waiting once I arrived, and was out again 30 minutes after I pulled up in front of the door, even though the doc took time for a little friendly chit-chat. It’s worth the extra money to take the PPO option! Who needs HMOs?)
    Yesterday, although I wasn’t quite 100 percent better as my doctor had promised, I drove up to the far north of Scottsdale to interview Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg and Anne-Marie McDermott (and the little dog she carries in a bag) for a magazine article. The dog didn’t have much to say, but the musicians, both of whom I’ve interviewed by phone in years past, were open and refreshingly unjaded and not given to tiresome, oft-repeated soundbites.
    McDermott, by the way, is shopping for a label to release her Prokofiev sonata cycle, which she recorded for Arabesque but then bought from the company when it entered a financially troubled period of dormancy. McDermott recorded the sonatas well east of here, but she first performed them as a cycle in Tucson, via a weeklong series of UApresents concerts. I’m sure many people here have fond memories of those performances, and would gladly buy McDermott’s CDs of the works.