The Honens International Piano Competition is held in Calgary once a year and 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.
Things didn't start off all too well that morning because it was below zero and there was a good amount of blowing snow, and the bus, which supposedly comes every half an hour, was half an hour late, so by the time I took my seat in front of the beautiful black piano in the foyer, I was a little cold. There was an older lady in front of me who kept looking around for someone, and finally connected with 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 one of their spouses' seventy-seventh birthday had gone, without having to ask anything, though being in the group, so to speak, I occasionally felt 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 parties and trips to Banff. I tried to tune them out, but they were so close and articulated everything 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 who I see as about as far away from hiking groups and parking at Safeway as you can get.
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 a thing. I looked around at the other people in the audience, many of them older women. It occurred to me that my two were probably music teachers, and I now imagined that I was probably surrounded by dozens of present and former music teachers, all much more familiar with piano music than I, all more capable of assessing the qualities of the pianist. Because I'm old, I wasn't worried about being seen as an incompetent nincompoop, but I did feel humbled. And then the two women started talking about baking and I was back following the conversation as if nothing had happened.
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, since everyone else was up now, and turned to look at her again. "Yow, yow," she was screaming, laughing, applauding furiously, "Yow, yow".
