Pounding The Keys
Why did Rice, elegantly attired in a red batik dress, choose a somber Brahms piece for the ASEAN show? After all, last year her deputy, Robert Zoellick, sang “My Darling Clementine” wearing jeans and a bandanna. Well, Rice told reporters, she was preoccupied with Lebanon and wanted something to match her “serious mood.” Perhaps it was also because, as Rice likes to quote her former accompanist, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, as saying, Brahms’s music has a “tension that is never resolved....