piano player
Annie started taking piano lessons this summer. There’s a teenaged boy, Baxter, in our church who gives lessons to several other kids in the ward, so I thought we’d let Annie work with him until we move to SD. He seems to do a decent job of teaching Annie the basics, and she’s able to play a simple song now if given the music. Baxter must be doing something right. Annie does enjoy playing and practicing and remembers to practice everyday without being reminded.
Baxter had originally scheduled a piano recital for all his students on the same night as our ward Christmas dinner, but he ended up getting really sick that day. The recital was rescheduled for this past Friday night. Since the kids worked so hard on practicing their Christmas songs, most of the kids just stuck with they had planned on playing the first time around. Annie did still play her Christmas song but chose a new song to play for her other song (the younger kids played 2 songs since their songs were shorter). I didn’t think she’d be nervous, but she stumbled and hesitated a few times which means she must have been pretty tense.
Here she is playing “Grandfather’s Clock”.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-EG4cmmMn0
And “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen”.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctHPR16XhQA
The seating went by order of who played, so Annie was relieved when she saw she got to sit by her BFF Alyssa.
Surprisingly, Annie wasn’t very thrilled to have to pose with Baxter, her piano instructor.
Of course, she was all smiles with Alyssa.
The girls spent some time teaching each other their songs. Vi wanted to learn, too.
All the kids did such a good job. It was a lot of fun seeing the range in skill levels. One of the final piano players, a 12-year-old boy, got up and played “The Toccata and Fugue in D minor”, and I literally gasped when I saw the music the boy was set to play. And he pulled it off, too, after only been playing for 2 years. It was a great evening, and I can’t wait to see how much Annie progresses in the next year. Both Julie, Alyssa’s mom, and I decided that we really need to have “real” pianos because the girls sounded so soft on the “real” piano as opposed to the keyboard which sounds the same no matter how hard you hit the keys.