My own little slice of heaven

Steve Kramer plays Bach

Last month, the Times Herald building in Norristown was closed, to save money, and the staff was scattered to the winds. Now, one day a week, I work from home, two days a week I work in the Reporter building in Lansdale, and two days a week I work in the lobby of Norristown’s Centre Theater, where the cellist Steve Kramer teaches on the third floor.

Friday, when Steve was finished with teaching, he brought his cello down to the lobby to practice. I was the only one of the newspaper staff who had not yet gone home, and so I was treated to a private performance, though much of it consisted of warmup scales and arpeggios. 

Last year at a benefit concert, also held at the Centre Theater, Steve played one movement of Bach’s Suite No. 1 in G. Afterward, it seems, I teased him about it, asking him why he didn’t play the whole thing. I have no recollection of the incident, but Steve remembered, and he said he I was right. He felt guilty, he said, and to pay me back, he would play the entire suite right there in the lobby.

Well, you know, I said, my favorite of the Suites is No. 3, and which point he sat down and played it. He did it in fits and starts, since he was breaking in a new bow, but he did, eventually, get through the whole thing, and the extended portions were soul-searing. There is a physicality to the cello heard in close quarters, a quality not conveyed in recordings, or even live in a concert hall. One can almost see the instrument vibrate. One can certainly feel it.  

When he was through, he asked me, with a smile, “Have I paid you back?”

I said we were square.

Fun, if squicky, fact: Bows are made from the hair of horse tails, but, Steve informed me, only the hair of males is used. Why? Because females, given the arrangement of their anatomy, stale on their own tails. The hair is impregnated with urine.