Today we had our March piano recital. I started taking piano lessons about 5 years ago, just after I retired. It has been great fun and I love playing.

For our recital this year, our teacher, Karen, suggested doing Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, which is 33 pages long, in sections. So she picked 7 of us, plus herself to take some pages (I got 3 1/2, as I am the junior of the group), and we played it sequentially. I have put pictures up on my flickr site. We played at a piano store, which we had to ourselves, and played on grand pianos. The best one was a brand new $200,000 Bechstein. It was gorgeous. Such a treat for all of us to be able to play something like that.

It was a real challenge to play my part, which was the shortest and easiest; all the others have been playing for years.  I managed to hold up my end, and wasn’t too horribly nervous this time. It is getting better, but still get a bit shaky handed. Fortunately nothing like when I began. It helped that we had a couple of run-throughs ahead to get the sequencing smoothed out. It was such fun, and the end part was played by three of the group for a very grand finale.

I played a little of a Chopin nocturne I’ve been working on (I won’t say for how long) on the gorgeous grand, just to say that I had played Chopin on a concert grand. The bass on that thing makes you sound so good! Here is a photo George took, just to prove it.

We had such a good time with it, and it turned out very well. It is one of my all time favourite pieces of music too, so extra special.