Oma's Concert

A few months ago, Oma asked me if Cat could perform at her Senior Living Apartment, since the activities coordinator regularly schedules musical acts to entertain the residents in the afternoons and evenings.  It was too late to get on the calendar for Christmas, so we looked ahead and saw that there was a time in February between the Junior and Senior Solo Festivals, which would be perfect.  Since Cat was learning two difficult pieces for her festival, I didn't have her try to put together an entire program by herself.  Oma said the typical program was between 30 and 60 minutes - that's a lot of music!  Thankfully, another family in our piano studio agreed to perform with our kids and the full program was about 35-40 minutes long.

It worked out perfectly that the younger kids' festival was the weekend before, so they'd learned their pieces already, and the older kids' festival is in a week, so those kids needed to practice performing anyway.  Unfortunately, though Jack and Eliza had both continued to play the pieces they competed with the previous weekend, Jack never did solidify his "Sonatina," so we decided to cut that.  And his "Wild Horseman" just wasn't sounding good the morning of the concert.  I told him he couldn't perform at Oma's if it wasn't really good, expecting that he might decide to bow out, but he didn't.  I decided that if he could play it three times almost entirely perfect, I'd let him perform.  He continued to work on this for about 20 minutes AFTER he'd done his 30 minutes of piano practice for the day, which really impressed me.  And he did a great job at Oma's, as all the kids did.

Oma wanted me to sing as well, so I asked Cat to learn the accompaniment to one of my tried-and-true performance favorites, "Caro Mio Ben," and then I put together a little jazz long-song medley of "Someone to Watch Over Me," "Fly Me To the Moon," and "Paper Moon," for which I also played the guitar.  The guitar playing wasn't great, but oh well.

Oma brought one of the three bouquets of roses she had in her room from Valentine's Day and the flowers adorned the piano beautifully.  She'd been asked to introduce the program, which she did, and the kids and I took over from there.

Ben had stayed home with Whit and Luke, thinking they would have more fun at the house than having to sit quietly and listen to Classical music.  But I was worried about Jack being able to behave during the 33 minutes he wasn't performing (he struggles during piano recitals).  Thankfully, bringing a book was the perfect answer and he didn't make a peep the entire time.

I didn't take any other pictures of the performance or try to make any videos, as I didn't feel I could without being very conspicuous.  But just trust me that it went well.  20 or so people were in attendance and we received lots of positive comments.  Most importantly, Oma was pleased and before we left she started talking about doing it again.  Gladly!