meant no concerts for two weeks, and very welcome that time was too: I had to recover from that …“Handshake from Hell” - see November’s entry! Luckily that rest was long enough and happily I could breathe more freely, realizing that I had not ended my career… in Porto Alegre!

Then I re-prepared Shostakovich’s Concerto # 2 (its gorgeous slow movement is the opening-theme on my website…just in case some of you didn’t know) which I duly played at the launch of the Hacettepe University Symphony Orchestra, in Ankara, under the baton of Erol … Erdinç, not Flynn!

Oh yes, I must tell you this: after the rehearsal I went out for a meal with some new friends: Lilian, a charming young Brazilian pianist newly married to Burak, a very handsome young Turk conductor, and his sister. The catch is that the couple had met, dated and married in Moscow… so it went like this, clockwise: anything I said in Portuguese to Lilian, was told in Russian to her husband, who then had to re-translate it into Turkish to Burdju, his sister, seated across from me. Then she would say something to him, he would tell Lilian in Russian and…enough of that! By the end of the evening, after a few glasses of the local full-bodied red wine, we understood each other perfectly! That evening was a real delight … Turkish, of course!

Can you imagine the scene? Hilarious.