Author: John Chacona

There’s a wonderful joke about a Jewish guy in a confessional that can’t be repeated on a family blog like lct. In violation of every tenet of the Comics’ Code of Honor, I will give away the payoff here: “I’m telling everybody!”

Right now, I’m telling everybody about a marvelous new book I’m reading. It’s called Eat, Pray, Love : One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia, a picaresque memoir of the writer Elizabeth Gilbert’s post-divorce search for pleasure, the divine and her attempt to strike a balance between the two.

This book has particular resonance for me at the moment, but it’s so charmingly written, so self-deprecatingly honest . . . just so damn human, really, that I can recommend it to anyone in any life situation.

Liz, you are my guru. And I’m telling everybody.

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Journalistic evenhandedness usually precludes me from hyping events before I publish my previews in the Erie Times, but I can’t hide my delight at the program next Sunday afternoon at Mercyhurst College’s Walker Recital Hall. Trio Solisti (Maria Bachmann, violin; Alexis Pia Gerlach, cello and Jon Klibonoff, piano) will be joined by the extraordinary clarinetist David Krakauer for a program that will include Paul Moravec’s Pulitzer Prize-winning, Tempest Fantasy. I’ve long been a fan of Krakauer’s wildly imaginative klezmer mash-ups (I’m listening to the latest, Bubbemeises – Lies My Grandma Told Me, as I type this), but he’s also a serious and accomplished concert music player. In the Moravec, he and his mates have a terrific piece to tackle. It’s music by a living composer that can stand with the dead masters for juicy melodies and compelling emotion and match them phrase for phrase. Anyone interested in how concert music can remain a vivid and engaging art form in the 21st century can hear the answer next Sunday. And right here in Erie!

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Those of you who hang around the Erie, PA music scene may know Louis Nicolia. He’s the violinist with the luxuriant, Brahmsian beard who has been a longtime member of both the Erie Philharmonic Orchestra and of Bruce Morton Wright’s Erie Chamber Orchestra. As a younger man, he bore an almost alarming resemblance to the young Robert DeNiro, the DeNiro of Taxi Driver. As a joke, I used to call Lou “Travis Bickel,” the antihero of that film. He didn’t much care for the nickname, and it wasn’t hard to see why. Unlike the conflicted and violent Travis, Lou is one of the gentlest, sweetest men I have ever met. And he has what jazz musicians call “big ears.” He’ll listen to anything – obscure Rumanian Roma violinists, Harry Partch, Sun Ra (the last, an enthusiasm that brought us together). He has devoted his life to music, and while he might disagree, music is finally paying him back. Later this month, Lou and his fellow Phil violinist Keita Fukushima will embark on a one-week tour of Japan. The two will play music that is as wide-ranging as the musical interests of the players: music by Leclair, and Gyorgy Ligeti, perhaps our greatest living composer. When I spoke with him tonight, Lou didn’t have much to say about the tour. “It hasn’t happened yet. I’ll tell you about it when I get back.” Modest he may be, but talkative he’s not. Check back in this space to see if things change after his and Keita’s return.

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