October 14 - Fairfield, Connecticut - Quick Center for the Arts

What a surprise!! Last weekend my piano duo partner and I traveled to Fairfield, Connecticut to watch our friends, The 5 Browns (www.the5browns.com), give a concert. (I personally thought it would be useful to listen to five pianos perform together live - the medium for which I have spent the last five months composing.) However, a couple hours before the concert, the Browns asked Elizabeth and myself to perform *on* the concert as guest artists. The dilemma we faced:

*We had no music
*We were severely unprepared to perform anything
*We had no dress clothes

Our solution:

*We spent two hours attempting to relearn (from memory) music we last played 11 months ago.
*As we couldn't remember all the notes, I found new notes for us to play.
*Liz wore a dress Melody had along. Ryan Brown and myself executed a quick change and I wore his outfit from the concert!

The result was an evening of joy and spontaneity. The audience loved the surprise diversion, Liz and I had a ball, and the Browns got a moment to recoup mid-performance. I have no idea how we played - it was all a blur, but I know I had fun!

October 10 & 11 - Recitals with violinist Karen Gomyo

The Faure Sonata No. 1 for Violin & Piano is no walk in the park ... although the goal is for much of it to sound like such. If the pianist were to play all the notes at a mere mezzo-forte dynamic (medium loudness), the piece would sound like a steamroller was parading across the stage. As that was not the desired effect, I practiced my part endlessly until I could tame the beast into the delicate Parisian it should be. Did I succeed? I sure hope so!

Performing with Karen Gomyo is always a wonderful experience. Her gift for long yet nuanced lines is truly inspiring.

October 8 - St. Paul Conservatory of Music Gala

Eating a full gala dinner, and then walking over to the piano to perform a set of ball-busters isn't always a recipe for success. Considering such circumstances, tonight's concert went surprisingly well!

The soft pedal on the 9-foot Steinway was one of the most dramatic I have ever encountered.

I would have liked to play the Ravel again.

As I often do, I talked before I played. I had been thinking a lot lately about how lucky I am to dwell in beauty for a living. Fortune could have destined me to a life of journalism, or even scarier, a soldier in combat; I could have spent my life dwelling in darkness. Instead I spend my day immersed in humanity, reminding myself that no matter how much CNN would like me to believe, the good and beautiful grossly outweigh the ugly in this world. So I said all of that. And after I said that, I wasn't nervous anymore.