The Paternal Optimist would be the first to agree that overweening pride is amongst the ugliest of faults, but there are moments when a father's heart can but swell...
During one of our regular telephone conversations this evening, the Boy Wonder :
- spoke French - he is preparing for his aural/oral exam later this week (Good luck, BW !);
- explained with earnest disaproval how other boys in a recent net practice constantly hit the ball out of the net - "which is all right at our age, when most fielders can't catch - but they'll have to learn to hit it along the ground sooner or later" - before going on to describe his own efforts to add a little judicious attacking flair to his predominantly defensive repertoire of strokes;
- put the phone down for a couple of minutes so that I could listen to him playing Debussy's Dr Gradus ad Parnassum - a piece I love, but do not have the technique to play myself - with a few faults, admittedly (he's still working on it), but at a fair old lick - faster, certainly than this comparatively gentle rendition.
With a bit of luck, this weekend nous aurons l'occasion de papoter encore un peu ensemble, I will get to admire his forward defensive first hand, and I may even get the opportunity to add to the archive of historical BW recordings, and thereby give you the chance to judge for yourselves whose performance is the more engaging...
Incidentally, I wonder whether the choice of the BW's piano-teacher of that particular piece by Debussy was mere coincidence or a subtle private joke : Dr Gradus ad Parnassum - of which, by the way, there apparently exists a recording based on a piano roll of the composer himself playing (he rattles through it in 1 minute 51 seconds) - was intended by Debussy as a parody of a child attempting to play a piece by Clementi...
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