The Honens International Piano Competition is held in Calgary every three years and provides career development and a very substantial prize for the winner. For Calgarians it's a chance to hear some of the best young pianists in the world, playing alone, as accompanists, and with an orchestra. The format includes some free noon-hour recitals and this year I decided to go to one, in the foyer of the Jack Singer Concert Hall in downtown Calgary. I was excited.
Things didn't start off all too well because being October, a nasty wind had blown up during the night, the temperature was now just below zero and there was a good amount of snow blowing around me and a small, ginger-headed guy with a single front tooth, as we waited, stomping our feet, for the bus. We had to wait a long time because the snowfall in the early hours had made the roads difficult, so the bus, which supposedly comes every half an hour, was half an hour late. Every fall, Calgarians and their beloved City crews take months to get used to the idea that it's going to be cold, snow will come, and roads will be icy or impassible, especially in the morning.
Anyway, we finally boarded the bus and the one-toothed guy, amazingly, got off at the next stop. He could have walked there in five minutes. But of course you never know when a bus is going to come, so you stomp and wait in hope. The bus was cool inside for some reason, so I shivered a little, and when I took my seat in front of the beautiful shiny black piano in the foyer of the Jack Singer Concert Hall, my body was still warming up. There was an older lady in front of me who kept looking around for someone, and finally recognized an even older lady sitting next to me, heavily wrinkled, who must have been in her eighties. As I waited the twenty minutes or so for the recital to begin, they chatted happily across me as if I wasn't there at all, so I discovered where they'd parked, what groups they belonged to, what they were planning to do in Banff on the weekend and how the first lady's spouse's seventy-seventh birthday had gone, without having to ask anything, though being so closely involved, so to speak, I occasionally had to suppress the urge to request clarification about some detail. Funny little old ladies, I was thinking, filling their retirement up pleasantly and yet emptily somehow, with groups and clever parking tips and trips to Banff. I tried to tune them out, but they were so close and articulated so clearly that I had to listen to everything.
Anyway, we finally boarded the bus and the one-toothed guy, amazingly, got off at the next stop. He could have walked there in five minutes. But of course you never know when a bus is going to come, so you stomp and wait in hope. The bus was cool inside for some reason, so I shivered a little, and when I took my seat in front of the beautiful shiny black piano in the foyer of the Jack Singer Concert Hall, my body was still warming up. There was an older lady in front of me who kept looking around for someone, and finally recognized an even older lady sitting next to me, heavily wrinkled, who must have been in her eighties. As I waited the twenty minutes or so for the recital to begin, they chatted happily across me as if I wasn't there at all, so I discovered where they'd parked, what groups they belonged to, what they were planning to do in Banff on the weekend and how the first lady's spouse's seventy-seventh birthday had gone, without having to ask anything, though being so closely involved, so to speak, I occasionally had to suppress the urge to request clarification about some detail. Funny little old ladies, I was thinking, filling their retirement up pleasantly and yet emptily somehow, with groups and clever parking tips and trips to Banff. I tried to tune them out, but they were so close and articulated so clearly that I had to listen to everything.
Then there was a change. The one in front started relating a dream, which of course is always more interesting than talking about real life. Then, in the dream, suddenly she was improvising and incredibly, she said, moving from one key to another with no reason. "I'd be in C sharp minor and then it'd be D major, can you imagine?" "No! You can't do that." "Well, that's how it was, and you know, I was thinking, when you try to analyze what Philip Glass is doing, well, in some ways it's the same thing, like..." And off she went into a complicated technical analysis of the music of Philip Glass, an avant-garde minimalist I had never imagined little old ladies could have heard of.
The other lady by my side appeared to follow the analysis easily, agreeing and commenting liberally, as I was finally able to tune out, since I didn't understand any of it. I looked around at the other people in the audience, many of them older women, dressed similarly and chatting happily. It occurred to me that my two were probably music teachers, and I now imagined that I was surrounded by dozens, perhaps scores, of present and former piano teachers, all much more familiar with music than I, all more capable of appreciating the pieces and assessing the qualities of the pianist. Because I'm old now, I didn't feel the deep humiliation I used to suffer in my younger days when I realized my sad inferiority in situations such as this, but I did feel humbled and a little ashamed. But then the two women segued smoothly into quilt-making and once again I was able to follow the conversation.
The recital, by the amazing Ukrainian pianist, Sasha Grynyuk, ended with Gulda's brilliant, jazzy Play Piano Play. As the last note sounded and Grynyuk slumped back, the lady at my side jumped up like a five-year-old, clapping and shouting something that sounded like "Yow, yow". I struggled to get to my feet - arthritis - since everyone else was up now, and turned to look at her again. "Yow," she was screaming, laughing, applauding furiously, "Yow, yow".
