Well, the Recital Relay was completed with great success.
Joseph’s piano recital was at his school (it’s a wonderful thing – the school offers private piano lessons during the school day), which is less than a mile from our house in the south part of town. At 1:30.
Katie’s piano recital was at IPFW in the north part of town. At 2:00.
Hmm.  Fort Wayne isn’t Chicago, but even on Sunday…that’s a challenge.
The solution was to get her up to her place early – before 1. Which was fine. She had a book to read, plus she could practice in one of the practice rooms if she wanted to.  So I dropped her off, then rushed back down to our ‘hood, got there at 1:26, took a couple of breaths, then listened to Joseph (who was scheduled first) play his 30 second piece, sneak out, and then go back up to IPFW for the other recital.
We actually arrived only a few minutes after it began, so I got to hear not one, but two renditions of Rondo Alla Turca. I do wonder if music teachers just want to slink off into the sunset after a couple of decades, hoping to never hear certain pieces ever again. God love them.  Katie did fine with her Tcherepnin. Which, for me, has the advantage of being fairly novel and very listenable, even after three or four months of it. Her shot at the Rondo came last year, but between that and my own playing of it…a while back…it’s still ringing in my ears.
As patience-trying as they can be sometimes, I also find music recitals interesting. It’s just like anything else  – you can pretty quickly tell who are the naturals and who…aren’t.  It’s just like theater – watching a bunch of kids onstage you can instantly tell who’s comfortable there and who’s not. And being a natural has nothing to do with getting the notes right. There were a couple of players today who barely missed a note but played so robotically you felt sorry for them, knowing that their hearts just weren’t in it – or didn’t seem to be. Not being anywhere near accomplished – although I do play – it seems to me it isn’t about simple “emotion” either. It’s about that amorphous thing called “touch.” You know? A feel for it. I suppose it’s really nothing more than a connection to the music you are producing – the intuition that in this, you are finding something of yourself.
 
 
Bring back any memories?
I also started taking piano in school – at Patrick Henry grade school in Arlington, VA, I believe. It was group lessons, I was in second grade, and we played on silent keyboards in the class, long before individual electronic keyboards with headphones and such.  My parents rented a piano for that first year, and then when we moved to Kansas, one was eventually purchased – the little spinet that’s sitting a few feet from me right now.
While in Kansas I had a couple of different teachers as I recall – both music students at the university, I think.  I also think my lessons were sort of off and on, but that’s fuzzy. I also don’t remember too many recitals – perhaps because they were students, I was blessed with not having them.
Once we moved to Knoxville, I don’t think I took again until I was a junior in high school – maybe a sophomore – when we discovered that a woman who gave lessons lived across the road and down a couple of houses. So I was set up, and it was..interesting. It was always a rather strange situation in ways that my teen-aged self could not specify, but which became clear years and years later when I learned that both the woman and her husband were serious alcoholics.
But that wasn’t what eventually put me off lessons – it was (oh, and I should I admit this in this post?) it was the recitals. Well, more specifically it was the type of recitals I had to do – basically programs at their church down the road, the final straw being for me being forced to play a duet of Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer with my teacher’s daughter. Oh, she was my age, so that wasn’t the point. I just remember having this distinct feeling at the time of “This is not what I signed up for” – and so I quit.
I still play, though, although not as much as I should. I’ve even considered taking lessons again now and then. I guess I yearn to reach a level of facility that is about two or three notches above where I am now, but I wonder if I’m too old at this point.
And I’m thinking, also at this point…I won’t have to play in a recital.
Will I?