Jonathan Biss: The sadness and euphoria of playing to an empty room

My November was bookended by two characteristic displays of grace. I ushered it in by falling on all fours while out for a run, skinning both knees and demolishing my pride; masked and bleeding is not a good look, even (especially?) on Halloween. I bid the month farewell by leaving my house in a torrential rainstorm — having consulted the weather report — wearing socks and shoes with holes in them, and carrying no umbrella. It seems I’ve been distracted. In my… well, not defence, but perhaps something adjacent to it, it was a hell of a month. After a seeming eternity of nothing, everything happened in November. I played three live recitals (three more than I’d played in the previous eight months); finished writing an essay on the anxiety that I’d endeavoured to keep hidden for a decade or four; watched, over five agonising days, as my country finally decided to slow its creep into fascism or oblivion or both.