Saturday, May 25, 2013

Spring Recital


Mitchell's end of the year recital was held on Wednesday night and how enjoyable it was!  What we love is that there are so many young men in our church who love to play the piano and they all encourage and challenge one another to excell still more!   


 
Future Piano Guys??? :-)
 
 
 
 
 
The first song Mitchell played was a duet with his friend Tommy. Tommy is an incredible violin player. He and his sister do a Vivaldi piano/violin duet that is outstanding ...I love to hear him play! He kindly agreed to accompany Mitchell on this first one, River Flows in You by Yiruma. River Flows in You is hands down one of my favorite songs Mitchell plays, it is beautiful! It is the song he played solo (no violin) for the Sunday @ 3 concert series at the Jansen Arts Center last Sunday. 
 



 



The second song is a different story! He changed his song from another piece to this one on Sunday... yes.... 3 days before the recital! He was originally slated to play his Rachmaninoff piece he has worked on for months...literally months! He has worked so hard on that song with much success but even after hundreds of hours working on it there was still this one part in the middle section of the song he has never been able to master. He realized that as much as he wanted to play that song it would not be without a difficult middle section so he decided to change. His teacher, Mrs. VandenBos is such a gem and wants the students to have fun and was all for him changing his song, even last minute! In fact she said if he changed his mind yet again and wanted to improv when he got up there then go for it! Straight away he began memorizing the second song, Racing Against the Sunset by Phillip Wesley. He altered the song a bit and only played 7 of the 10 pages but did pretty well in quick memorization. It is his pet peeve to bring music up to the piano during a recital as he holds himself to pretty high standards on memorization. This time around though since he had so little time for prep. he was open to the suggestion of bringing up one little part of his sheet music up there. He had just a little bit of the music prior to the key change that he had yet to fully memorize so he decided to take a small folded portion of music up with him. Well, poor guy, it would have been good had he not put the sheet music upside down AND backwards!! He still says he should have stopped, held out his finger as if to say "just a minute".... turned over and right side up his paper and started again with a smile! Needless to say you can catch the errors a bit in the playing but otherwise the second song was great and a memorable evening all together! Hope you enjoy!


 




 

2 comments:

  1. Did you see that I had a similar "Future Piano Guys" caption on my post about the recital? That's funny! I love the pictures...Mitchell did an outstanding job!!

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  2. Thanks Abbie! Yes... I saw that and I love it...hard not to label them!! I told Mitchell we should have had Tommy A. in there with them for that photo as he could be Steven Sharp Nelson...I know the violin is not a cello but Tommy would fit perfectly!

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