Month: March 2023

Child Prodigies of Hungary

March 21, 2023

The Hungarian piano prodigy gave a sensational concert at the Carleton Dominion-Chalmers Center in Ottawa, on March 15, celebrating the anniversary of the Hungarian revolution of 1848. The Hungarian Embassy sponsored the event with the Ambassador from Hungary introducing Misi Boros, a twenty-year-old virtuoso pianist, his first time in Canada. A reception preceded the concert with Hungarian wines served. The red was the popular Szekszardi Voros, and the white the equally popular Jaszberenyi Riesling. I had never heard of Misi Boros, but the Center was full. I heard Hungarian spoken frequently walking in.

Besides pieces by Bach and Beethoven, Misi played Debussy’s Clare-de-Lune, in a fashion that brought tears to my eyes with its melody and lyrical expression. And he showed his technical virtuosity by playing Liszt/Paganini’s La Campanale. It was a tour de force.

Misi was a child prodigy, defined as someone under ten years of age showing talent in a field way beyond his or her age. Since age four, Misi spent most of his time at the piano. Since age eight, he won all national piano competitions in his age group and won competitions in Rome, Milan, and Paris.

As of today, Misi has performed over 300 concerts around the world; I wonder how much time he spends at home in Hungary.

During the introduction, the Hungarian Ambassador talked about the significance of music in Hungary and the number of internationally recognized musicians Hungary has produced. Among composers, she mentioned Bartok and Liszt. Among known conductors, she mentioned Solti.

George Solti showed his musical talent early, attending the Franz Liszt Academy, a well-known musical educational institution in Budapest, by the age of 12, and subsidizing his education by teaching piano. He worked in Frankfurt and Munich in Germany and ended with an illustrious career with the Chicago Symphony, and the London Philharmonic Orchestra. I found it interesting to learn that he has the second-highest number of Grammy awards, at 31, after Beyonce, who has 32. Queen Elizabeth knighted Solti in 1972.

The ambassador did not mention other well-known Hungarian conductors, such as Eugene Ormandy, who had a forty-year career with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Ornandy’s musical talent showed early; his father taught him to play the violin at age three and a half and he entered the Royal National Hungarian Academy of Music at age five, the youngest ever student the Academy had.

Another well-known Hungarian conductor was George Szell, who spent over twenty years as musical director of the Cleveland Orchestra. At age eleven, he began touring Europe as a pianist and composer and made his debut in London. He was, clearly, a child prodigy.

But there were also pianist prodigies, similar to Misi. One was the incredible George Cziffra, a gypsy or Romani, to use an accepted term today. Cziffra came from a very poor family, and he listened to his sister’s piano practices, and learned to play the piano by mimicking her without sheet music. He played in a circus when he was five years old, for money. The Franz Liszt Academy invited the young talented boy to attend the Academy to gain his classical musical education. Later, he played in bars playing jazz to make some money; some jazz aficionados compared him to Art Tatum for his improvisational skills and technical virtuosity. I listened with amazement to his interpretation of the Duke Ellington song “Sophisticated Lady” on YouTube; his technique and free-flowing melody lines reminded me of Art Tatum.

Unfortunately, the Hungarian army drafted him during WW2 to fight on the Russian border. Cziffra hated the racist Nazis, deserted, and successfully convinced the Russians who captured him that he wanted to fight with the Allies against the Nazis.

After the war, he tried to escape from Hungary but was captured and sent to a labor camp, where he did not play the piano for three years. Once freed, he returned home, regained his piano skills, and gave concerts until his successful escape from Hungary after the 1956 revolution. He settled in France, where he became a citizen and established himself as a concert pianist.

I thought child prodigies were born with talent; it is in their DNA. Not so, according to Laszlo Polgar, who, during his university studies in Hungary, reviewed the bios of 400 famous people in many fields and concluded that anyone can become a genius provided they educate a child in one field from age three. He decided on an experiment to raise his children at home and teach them a specialty. He found someone agreeable to marry him and share in his experiment. They had three daughters whom the parents home-schooled, and Polgar started teaching his first daughter to play chess when she was three years old. The little girl bested his father in chess by the time she was five. And Polgar brought up all three girls to become grandmasters in chess; the middle girl has been the world champion for women for years and defeated ten world champion men during her career to date.

According to some studies, there may be one child prodigy among five to ten million people; and they are characterized by knowing one field at the adult level before they are ten years old. They also have photographic memories, are extremely curious, and have a passion for a field they are interested in.

Child prodigies are similar in characteristics to autistic children. And in most cases, child prodigies have parents who strongly encourage and push their children in improving their skills in a subject.  

Hungary has had its fair share of child prodigies, not only in music and chess but also in science, and mathematics as well. For example, John von Neumann was a child prodigy; he could divide five-digit numbers by five-digit numbers at age six and could converse in ancient Greek by age seven.

As a mathematician and physicist, he moved to the US to further his career, where he led the Manhattan project developing the atomic bomb. They often describe him as the father of the atomic bomb. He ended his career as a Professor at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study..

So, are child prodigies born with their talent, or are they educated to become so?

I came across an interview with Misi Boros’ father, a professor of philosophy at the University of Pecs, the birthplace of Misi. When asked how he brought up Misi to become a child prodigy, he said that children need a lot of love and time spent with their parents, which he gave to Misi growing up.

The interviewer further probed whether Misi was told to play the piano several hours a day. The father said no, Misi was happy to practice up to five and six hours a day when he was young. That was not my experience. I took piano lessons when I was young, but when practice time built up to three hours a day after school and doing homework; I rebelled. I preferred to play with my friends. The time came when my parents just gave in; I was not to be a concert pianist. So, can you predict who will be child prodigies?

I believe that child prodigies have it in their DNA to excel in some field, but they also have supporting parents and a burning desire to work hard to achieve perfection in their chosen field. Just my opinion.

Exploring the Camino de Santiago: A Journey of Culture and Reflection

March 11, 2023

It felt like, rightly or wrongly, we should take a trip. Everyone we know was going somewhere. It is winter vacation time for many of our friends as they “get away” from winter.

The winter travelers made me think: what type of past trips have we enjoyed the most, anytime? And the one that stood out was walking the Camino de Santiago in the Fall of 2012. We walked from Leon to Santiago, Spain, a distance of 320 kilometers, in 16 days, following the centuries-old pilgrimage route to the shrine of the apostle St. James in Santiago de Compostela. Thousands of people from all over the world walk it every year.

Although the Camino is often described as a religious experience, we thought more of doing the Camino for exercise, for its physical challenge, and as a cultural experience. Most people we talked with had similar goals, except for a few doing the Camino for reflection, or a pause in life, figuring out their next career move.

To me, the best feature of the walk, which made it so relaxing, was that we lived day to day with no thought of the future, with no thought of doing daily chores such as taking the garbage out, paying bills, and washing the car. We just got up in the morning, packed our stuff, and hit the road, with or without breakfast. Then we walked and walked, and stopped whenever we wanted to rest, eat, see the surroundings, or engage in a chat with locals or other pilgrims, called “peregrinos” locally. There was no past, no future, just the present.

Living in the present is wonderful. After a long day of walking, our challenge was to find a nice albergue, or hostel in English, where we took a hot shower, relaxed our tired bodies for a while, and then enjoyed the “peregrino’s” dinner. After dinner, we sat by the fireplace and socialized with other pilgrims, solving world problems. It was a glorious life!

The walk is well-marked by the scallop symbol because the pilgrimage routes lead to the Galician coast, where scallops are abundant, and pilgrims would often collect these shells as souvenirs

I am not saying it was all fun. When we started in Leon, it was raining hard and we thought of delaying our start, but, who knows, the next day may be the same, so we started with our rain gear on. The first challenge was to find the scallop sign to start the walk, and talking with a local on the street, he suggested we take a bus to get to the outskirts of Leon, where the trail is marked clearly and we could start walking in the country avoiding the industrial parts of the town. We followed his advice and got on a bus with our backpacks; we did not know where to purchase a bus ticket, so we just got on and asked the driver for advice who waved us on to sit down, recognizing foreign pilgrims.

The driver beckoned us where to get off, and we followed the other pilgrims on the road. The road was wet and full of puddles and we got thoroughly soaked that day, but we found a friendly “hospedalier”, or hostel host, in an albergue in the afternoon, where we rented a private room at a slightly more expensive rate than staying in the dormitory. After changing into dry clothes, we put our wet clothes in front of a roaring fire in the living room. Once we took a shower and changed into our dry clothes, we joined other pilgrims for a “fixed dinner” at the albergue. After dinner, we sat with the other pilgrims and exchanged views on the Camino experience and whatever was happening elsewhere.  

Talking with other pilgrims was entertaining, interesting, and comforting. We learned that no matter what part of the world you come from, we all have similar wishes, ambitions, frustrations, and experiences. We met someone from the UK who just went thru a divorce and came to walk the Camino to rethink his life. Another pilgrim from the US was between jobs, assessing his options; he did not want to work in his father’s company. A young woman from Brazil came to see the culture of Spain.

We walked with a Danish woman for a few days on the Canino; we walked at the same speed and spent many hours talking about the social network in Denmark. She was a teacher but got bored with teaching and just took a few months off to travel. She was not concerned at all with getting another job when she returned home and explained that she would always have a job, no matter how often she quit. During one of her breaks in her career, she learned to become a yoga instructor, and she gave us a morning yoga class, a good warm-up, before our walks.

With all fellow pilgrims, we had direct, honest, and meaningful discussions; we all realized the chances of ever meeting again were close to nil and therefore we could open up and talk from the heart. I seldom, if ever, had this type of deep-felt interaction before. Being older than most pilgrims, we felt a bit like the confessional priest as they poured out their stories.

Some people were introverted and did not stop socializing, preferring to be alone with their thoughts. That was all right as well; there was no shortage of people on the road to say hello to. We saw people behind or ahead of us all the time. A few came to experience and find religion. But most people we met and talked with came for the exercise and to soak up the local culture and enjoyed engaging with other pilgrims on the day’s journey.

Of course, we needed preparations for our trip. One was by walking longer and longer distances at home, which helped me to get used to the daily walks on the Camino, which averaged six hours. We stopped walking in the early afternoon to make sure we had a nice auberge to stay overnight.

In the light backpacks that we purchased, we carried a change of quick-dry clothing, toiletries, rain gear, and digital equipment. We minimized the amount of clothing we took with us to reduce the weight of our backpacks. One of the best recommendations received was to have hiking boots that are well-worn and comfortable, and we had those. 

We put the winter clothing that we needed to travel from Ottawa to Leon, Spain, in a suitcase, and sent it on the train from Leon to Santiago, where they held them fro us at the station storage area.

We also carried silk liners that we purchased in Vietnam; we used them at the albergueswhere they provided beds and covers. By using silk liners, we tried to protect ourselves from bedbugs. One in our walking group acquired such an acute case of bedbugs that she visited a doctor and delayed her trip by a week to get over the itching.

For information on the Camino, I found the slim book by John Brierley the best. Using his book, we identified rest stops where we would look for albergues for overnight stays.

When we were tired of bunk beds provided in the albergues and wanted some comfort, we went upscale to a hotel with a private bathroom. Another reason for taking a hotel room was that although the albergues gave some sort of breakfast, it was minimal and we had to leave by 7 a.m., a not-always-pleasant early departure. In one albergue, they shut the lights off at nine p.m., and locked the entrance door, which I found strange and scary; I looked for an exit in case of fire that I could not find. Locking the door for safety made sense to me, but we should have been able to open the door from the inside. That was not the case in this situation.

But most of the time, we found the albergues clean and hospitable, offering excellent dinners at a reasonable price, and providing the opportunity to meet and socialize with pilgrims from all over the world.

Our lunches included cheese, bread, and fruit, which we purchased the evening before. We learned early to buy our food supplies at the first available store; many of the small villages we crossed had no stores. Many of these villages looked abandoned or occupied by few people, perhaps because of urbanization that drew people to the cities for jobs, like what has been happening in North America.

We bought the fixed menu “peregrino’s” dinner offered in most towns, or at the albergue, frequently accompanied by other peregrinos we had met that day. These dinners were terrific, often freshly caught fish, always served with a bottle of wine on the table that was refilled when emptied, and dessert.

In Galicia, we enjoyed the locally famous “pulpo” meal of octopus, freshly boiled in front of us and served on a wooden platter cut into small disks, with a jug of wine and bread. It tasted a bit like chicken. We went back twice; the octopus was so good!

But the Camino is more than great food, genuine hospitality at the albergues, and meeting people on the Camino: it was a walk across various and attractive landscapes, from flat to hilly terrain, that was occasionally challenging.

Along the way, we visited unique architectural works that I found interesting being an architect. For example, the Santiago de Compostela Cathedral is a Romanesque-style cathedral, which was our destination. It is one of the most important pilgrimage sites in the world and is believed to be the burial place of Saint James the Great. The cathedral’s crypt is beneath the high altar and is believed to be the burial place of Saint James. A striking memory of the Cathedral is the way it is lit up at night when we can see all the rich sculptural details of the building.

The Cathedral in Santiago made an impression on me in another way as well. I am Catholic and my memories of Catholic churches in Hungary as a child did not compare with what I experienced in Santiago. We attended a service that was in Latin and performed by three priests. Right after, they burned incense in a large basket hanging from the ceiling, forty meters above the transept, halfway down from the ceiling. The basket swung back and forth, and the burning incense generated a cloud that enveloped the upper part of the church. I found that the sun coming through the windows from the sides of the transept created a mysterious effect, burning through the incense. Some people in the audience cried. I was so taken by the experience that we came back a couple of more times to relive this supernatural feeling.

In Astorga, we encountered the unique neo-gothic “Palacio Episcopal”, or the Bishop’s Palace, designed by Antonio Gaudi. every bit as fascinating as the works by him we had seen in Barcelona, characterized by curvy, flowing lines.

It was an educational experience to stay overnight at a monastery, converted to an albergue, where we slept in a cell with bunk beds designed for monks previously.We had one enormous bathroom per floor, like some college dormitories at home, and a common kitchen where all the pilgrims fixed their dinners. It was an opportunity to socialize again.

In Rabanal, we visited the 12th-century chapel, where a choir of Benedictine monks performed Gregorian chants in Latin, a unique experience in an appropriate historical building. The Knights Templar built the 12th-century Romanesque chapel and protected the pilgrims as they traveled the Camino. The chapel could not seat more than a few dozen people and smelled musty. It was dark inside, but the sound of the choir created a mysterious atmosphere, making us feel as if we were back in the 12th century.

Walking through a part of Galicia, we came across Celtic Crosses – like what we see in Wales and Ireland and learned that the Galicians were also Celts; in fact, they have their language and to this day many in the country do not speak Spanish.

While going on a cruise or spending time in warm climate resorts has appeal,there is no comparison in my mind to the satisfaction that I get from a walking tour such as the Camino, which combines physical challenges with cultural experiences; truly, to me, a very satisfying way to spend a few weeks. We walked the second half of the Camino, although we met one couple who had walked from Germany. Others divided it up into several blocks to enable them to finish the whole trail.

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My Love of Music and Black History Month

March 2.2023

When Beau Dixon came to town, I had to go and see him at the Meridian Theater in Ottawa. The ninety-minute show promised Beau’s music, blues, rock, and soul, my favorites. I must have gotten one of the last tickets on the balcony in the last row. But I did not complain; the back row has good acoustics and Beau’s music is loud.

It is Black History Month and Beau had a scripted, fast-moving show displaying black music at its best, playing songs from Bob Marley, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and others. I came to listen to and enjoy my favorite type of music and ended up learning about the contribution of black music to North American culture.

Beau showed his multi-talented musical genius by playing the harmonica, and keyboard and singing. It was a tour de force and brought back fond memories.

My first job after finishing graduate school at the University of North Carolina was in Norfolk, VA, and I just had to build a stereo system to listen to my music. I still remember the high-quality Harman-Kardon component system, that I built. Testing the system, I played my favorite pianist, Oscar Peterson, at full blast when there was a banging on the door of our rented apartment. Scared that management might throw us out for being too loud, I cautiously opened the door to discover a black pastor. I turned the volume down and asked him to come in. Before explaining that he was looking for donations for his church, he congratulated me on playing “excellent religious” music. I had Oscar Peterson playing his composition “Hymn to Freedom”, an ode he wrote for the freedom marchers in the 1960s. With such an introduction, I had no choice in my mind but to offer a large contribution to his church.

Listen to Oscar Peterson playing his composition in Denmark, in 1964.

The other memory took me back to when we went to listen to Oscar Peterson playing at Norfolk State College in 1973. Oscar gave a rousing concert with mostly spirituals, and the audience was rocking along with his playing. We may have been the only white folks in the audience that I found a bit eery but in those days there was still much segregation by skin color and this was a black college.

Beau drew a mixed audience in Ottawa. A large percentage of the people were black and their enthusiasm showed in the tapping, stomping, and singing along with many of the songs. It was an appreciative audience and I also could not help myself but start stomping with my feet. My neighbor was swaying from left to right, nudging me constantly. Some in the audience jumped onto the floor and danced while others stood up and clapped to the sound of well-known songs like “Hound Dog”, popularized by Elvis Presley in 1956, but originally recorded by “Big Mama” Thornton in 1952. As Beau explained, many famous songs originated from black people but were popularized by white folks.

Listen to the first recording of the song by Big Mama Thornton in 1952.

Throughout the meticulously curated show, Beau engaged the audience with his charm and infectious energy. And his singers not only performed well-known songs but also talked about black Canadians’ contributions to our society, such as Viola Desmond, a civil rights activist from Nova Scotia; Lincoln Alexander, the first black member of Parliament and Lieutenant Governor of Ontario; Drake, the rapper, Michaelle Jean, previous Governor General of Canada.

One highlight of the program was when Beau’s singers performed “Lift Every Voice and Sing”, which is the hymn of black people; a song I have not heard before. The audience responded by standing up and singing along with the band; it was a highly emotional experience.

Listen to the hymn performed by the Amanah AME Zion Church choir, from Knightdale, NC, in 2022.

Although I went to hear my favorite music and I was not disappointed, I learned much about the contribution black culture made to Canadian society.