Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Recital pics

Still haven't uploaded any videos yet. We used our "real" camera this time, rather than our handy Flip, which seems to have captured its last magic moment.

(Moment of silence for the Flip.)

(Thank you.)

With the Flip, uploading a vid was no more difficult than offloading stills from a digital camera. It's a much more sophisticated process to get clips off the Camcorder, a process which includes fancy things like Firewire and perplexing software like Adobe Premiere. In short, I'll have the clips of our recital pieces for you some time in the next, oh, week or so. I'm figuring somewhere in there, we'll have a block of 2 unscheduled hours.

So instead, some stills. Let's start with the sound check.*

* - It wasn't really a sound check... Jillian and I just got there about 45 minutes early to squeeze in some last-second practice before anybody got there. But it seems like all the cool musicians do sound checks, so let's pretend.

Jillian went first, and I wandered around the church while she played.








Wow. She doesn't look 7 here.


Then it was my turn, and Jillian took some pictures of me. Didn't ask her to, but I don't mind now, because, frankly, she takes better pictures than I do.


Apparently, from what I can tell, I have this look on my face a lot while I play.



We got the program, observed that Jillian was playing sixth, and I was playing 25th. Out of 25. More on that later. But the way it went was this: everybody went up and introduced themselves, "Hi, my name is..., and I am playing...", then they played, bowed, and the next person went. This is cute in theory, but in practice, children tend not to speak clearly into microphones. Jillian has no formal training in this, but she wanted to be sure that she was heard and understood.



Then she played, and... apparently I don't have any pictures of that. Must have been too busy enjoying the performance. But trust me, she played. We'll have film at 11:00.*

* - Figuratively speaking.

About an hour later, it was my turn. I felt like simply stating my name, rank and serial number wasn't going to cut it... partly because I was too nervous to immediately sit myself down on the piano bench, and partly because I wanted the people to be somewhat prepared for music that was out of step with the Sonatinas, method book pieces, and Coldplay songs that had preceded me. So I added a sentence or two. Something along the lines of "What you are about to hear is a musical description of two African rivers..." You'll hear later, in the meantime, this is what I look like when I am in front of a bunch of people, talking.



And because someone on Pianoworld suggested I do this, I took a moment when I sat down to gather myself, and take a deep breath. (It seemed like 20 seconds, although it was probably less than 5.)



Again, no pics of the actual performance. I suspect those in the audience were simply too spellbound by my mastery. But afterwards, here are the happy musicians.



- Aw2pp, currently listening to Reptile by The Church, and wondering why this wasn't my favorite song in high school. Seems like it would have been my sort of thing back in the day.

2 comments:

pdxknitterati/MicheleLB said...

Congratulations to you and to Jillian! Aren't you glad you did it?

You made me laugh with the "this is what I look like when I play" comment. All the pictures of me playing look so *grim* but really I'm not unhappy!

Always Wanted to Play Piano said...

Seriously, facial expressions and piano... never occurred to me before. There's enough to worry about in terms of hands and feet and music...

BTW, I listened to your Granados piece in the May recital (yes, just got around to listening to those this week). Really well done!