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When I booked it, I booked looking for one that had a piano.

What I didn't know was that their piano was a 9' well-regulated Steinway D.

I hope your weekend plans also allowed for plenty of time to enjoy it!

Subject to the grumblings of a cranky spouse...

Is it an achievement? I dunno, but it was fun.

As folks following the Joplin thread may know, I've been out of town with limited computer access.

Where? Well, a B & B.

When I booked it, I booked looking for one that had a piano.

What I didn't know was that their piano was a 9' well-regulated Steinway D.

ZOMG.

Wow!!! That is pretty amazing... must be some crazy high class B&B! Video?

My 1st AOTW is playing for strangers in public (these poor folks didn't have a choice, mind you ), twice.

Boston Street Pianos started officially yesterday, but the logistics of putting out 75 pianos on one day are daunting, I'm sure, so they actually started putting them out earlier in the week. I stumbled across one and then found another as well. About all I have memorized at this point is the portion of Clair de Lune that I've mentioned many times, so that's all I've got to offer.

I played at Boston City Hall, which has one of what I believe is only two grands out of the 75 pianos. It's an enormous open plaza, so very hard for anyone to hear anyway (including even me sitting right at it, with the lid closed). I did get lost near the end and had to back up a couple bars to get myself reset, but it was OK overall.

Only a few people walked past while I was playing, but one woman did stop and offered to take my picture. It's funny, these days I guess one assumes that everyone has a smartphone camera on them? I did, but it is funny how this shift has occurred in the last 5 years or so.

The 2nd piano was a lovely little console right behind the Old North Church. It's tucked into a corner of the exterior of the building in a small courtyard, so the sound is nicely contained and it's a lovely intimate setting with a large fountain nearby. For this one, I got to measure# 15 and realized that... Ugh!, Bb6 was sticking when the pedal was down.

For those not intimately familiar with the piece, measures 15-18 completely revolve around Bb (in both left and right hand), so it's played 24 times in a row. One can't very well skip the pedal here and finesse legato, or at least I wouldn't know how to go about doing so.

That completely threw me for a loop, and also made me realize the degree to which I rely on feeling the keys before hitting them -- which one can't do so well when the key is down in the keybed.

Anyway, I recovered after four awful measures, and was quite happy with the balance of it -- didn't get lost where I did at City Hall just a few minutes earlier. By the time I was done a few people had stopped to listen, some even sitting down, and some of them clapped, which was very gratifying.

My 2nd AOTW was that I'm starting to get less nervous about this. It dawned on me that having pianos dotted all over the place with a cavalcade of strangers wandering by is a truly unique opportunity to expose oneself to public performance over and over again in a very short period of time. I mean really, aside from jotur & others with some sort of regular gig, how many opportunities do we have to perform publicly?

So, I found on the 2nd take that I was much less nervous. By the end I was not thinking about making errors at all, and was able to be completely focused on the music from an interpretation & performance standpoint. And that, felt really good.

I don't have performance anxiety ("oh no, what if I mess up?!") as much as I just get soooo much adrenaline because I'm worked up at the prospect of only having one shot to get it right. I feel that if I do this frequently enough while I have the chance, it will help me tremendously to be more relaxed.

My daughter was too shy to play in school so we visited to make her feel comfortable with performing, it worked!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7maRPg_TgYc

She did a very nice job! Where is that one? It looks and sounds really nice.

I played another one yesterday. Nobody around though except one guy on a bench 15' away who was not at all interested. I got applause once and now I'm expecting traffic to stop. :-)

I was sure the teacher would found brand new bad habits in my playing, instead she praised me because of the new expressiveness I put into pieces.

I've been working steadily (since prior to the August recial) on my next recital piece and made a significant breakthrough just this week.

My efforts to date have been in learning the score and I'm not quite 100% there yet (slow reader,) but getting close. At any rate, I felt it was time to bring out the metronome and see how I was doing with tempo for at least some of it (the 3/4 or so I feel comfortable with so far) and seeing if I can get close to desired recital tempo.

What an eye opener. I had been having trouble getting the proper chorus sections to sing out above the harmony. But, no more. Timing was part of it and key to fixing the issue, but I am really hearing what I need to now and the melodies are beginning to rise above the chorus loud and clear. I feel a lot more confident in my preparedness for this next recital now.