One thing leads to another

I recently read A Romance on Three Legs, about Glenn Gould's search for the Right piano.  

In passing, it mentioned that Gould's favorite of his own recordings was 1971's A Consort of Musicke Bye William Byrde & Orlando Gibbons.   

OK, I'm game: it's for sale, and for only $2.88! (plus $2.98 shipping, but still...).

And - sure enough -  it really IS terrific. (I think it's my favorite new-to-me album of 2012.)

OK, time to scour my shelves for more of this stuff:  hey, how about that - this spring I found a Hyperion disc of David Moroney playing keyboard music of Wm. Byrd.  ($1 at a library sale...)

Turns out, Moroney has done a seven-CD set of the complete Byrd keyboard music.

On the one hand, I mourn the loss of Tower Records at Lincoln Center; but, on the other hand, it's pretty nice to be able to find this stuff while sitting on the couch. 

Stuff like this was basically never available locally - I always needed to drive to NYC or Boston to find things.

Around the Lake Again in Twenty Ten

A couple of times when we were in college, M & I went camping around Lake Ontario. This year, it was finally time to take my daughters on a similar expedition.

Before we left, I looked into the Glenn Gould Tour of Toronto and found that his neighborhood diner up on St.Clair was now gone.

So Priceline gets us a pretty good hotel right in the middle of Toronto:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=bond+place+hotel+toronto&aq=0&aqi=g8g-m1&aql=&oq=Bond+Place+H&gs_rfai=CAcTvWxKDTN-PDae-zgSht9GLBQAAAKoEBU_QZ0kg

Monday afternoon we leave Niagara Falls, arrive in T about nightfall, find the hotel just steps from the Eaton Centre: but where is their parking?

Drive around the block: hey look, it's Massey Hall; oh look, that looks like a decent place to eat across the street. We go check in, get told where to park, stash the car, check out the neighborhood.

Time to eat: OK, let's try this "Fran's" we spotted just down the block.
We wound up eating there for dinner, breakfast the next day, and The Eldest and I wound up there a third time.

Come home and find that the place is actually a descendant of Gould's neighborhood diner: the original branch uptown is gone, but they opened on Victoria St. in 2004.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran's_Restaurant

http://www.fransrestaurant.com/

"Sometime between two and three every morning Gould would go to Fran's, a 24-hour diner a block away from his Toronto apartment, sit in the same booth and order the same meal of scrambled eggs."

Kinda funny how even though I didn't go up to GG's old neighborhood, I still *accidentally* managed to eat at his hangout anyway.

Small world.