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Music is famously the international language, yet for reasons I have never fathomed I prefer to play it where Spanish is spoken. During the mid-Sixties I enjoyed a three-year piano career in nightclubs and restaurants in Spain, and since 1973 I have given classical recitals in Mexico's Baja peninsula. A bogus theory might hold that as, professionally, an English-speaking writer, I might prefer to surround my avocation with my second language, but I think the pairing has more to do with the nature of my playing and the kind of hispanophone communities I gravitate to. My musical attributes, which on the plus side include perfect pitch, near-perfect memory, and the ability to fake nearly anything, is undercut by faltering technique that hours of daily practice do little to improve, and which remind me of the endless driving ranges that never lowered my mother's golf score. In Spain I played the provincial towns that surround the Bay of Cádiz, and in Mexico I concertized in the glorified cowtown that is La Paz, state capital of Mexico's least populous state, Baja California Sur. I liked the idea of bringing classical music to people who hadn't heard it and therefore wouldn't criticize what they heard. In La Paz I became a collector of venues: the state music school, a marine biology institute, the municipal gallery, the French Alliance, a Fifties-era resort that had been bought by the pop star Engelbert Humperdinck. I did my serious listening in my hometown of Aspen, Colorado, locus of one of the world's preeminent summer festivals. When it came to performance, I was in it for the adventure.
I longed to extend my playing to the small Baja California towns beyond La Paz, and the first bombarded me with more adventure than I was braced for. Todos Santos, an hour away on the Pacific coast, boasts the state's oldest and most eccentric theater, built for movies and stage plays in the hoary year of 1944. It was so long and thin that its balcony, over the projection booth, floated from the proscenium like a visionary unwalled lobby. Still more notorious were its seats, made of the same concrete as the floor, as if it had erupted in a garden of sadistic backs, arm...