Going Solo

My musical world for the past year has consisted of playing music with other people – usually with Deborah or Bill. As much fun as this is, when someone comes over and asks me to play something, it sounds quite lacking without the other part.

Deborah and I have joined a group on Capitol Hill called “Works in Progress” that gets together monthly so that the members of varying experience and ability can play whatever they are currently working on for the others. Until we joined them, it was all piano. After we played our Bottesini Elegy, we were invited back to the next meeting. But they also suggested that I play something by myself. Yikes!

I started considering what to play and went down a long memory lane back to my childhood piano days. I took a weekly piano lesson during the school year at 8:30 AM every Saturday morning from Mr. Lightburn, a man who it turns out was a complete alcoholic and who made the rest of his living by playing in a nightclub. I often wondered why he seemed so perfumed; as it turned out, it was probably to hide the fact that he reeked of alcohol. Every week he would attempt to make ridiculous small talk in between hearing me play the various pieces I was working on. I never knew what credentials he actually had to teach piano. We paid him $5 a lesson and I took piano for 6 years. Once he played St. Louie Blues for me, but that was the only time I heard him play anything other than my music. I rarely played for anyone else because he didn’t do recitals.

A couple of years into my piano lessons I inherited a large box of very old music from a distant relative, Mary Lamb, in West Alexander, Pennsylvania. When I needed something new to play as a diversion from the John Thompson First - Fourth Grade books, Mr. Lightburn would simply dip into the box and come up with some old gem of a European book that was likely yellowed and somewhat crumbling.

That’s where I found Albumblatt (Op. 28, No. 3) by Edvard Grieg. Albumblatt means “page leaf” in German. These were little pieces that great teachers wrote for their students. I played this piece as a child for many months, committing it to memory.

This week I copied the pages of my ancient sheet music that are now ready to totally disintegrate. I willed my fingers to remember how to play it once again. I heard those hauntingly beautiful chords after 40 years of missing them. Invariably as I play this piece by the Norwegian Grieg, I can imagine being out on the Sognfjord, that beautiful body of water that cuts through the mountains north of Bergen and empties out into the North Sea. This Albumblatt is now my work in progress destined finally for an audience on April 16.