Completing a book in the Suzuki Method is a great achievement, and Aggie has done it (and along with that earning 10 trees at our tafatefe grove)! The tradition is that we celebrate this with a 'graduation' recital - and with Covid-19 lockdown in place, we went digital - and I am glad that it worked rather well. Helen and Aggie's piano teacher Larinda gave a lovely introduction, Aggie introduced her own pieces during her performance, and we unmuted everybody for Aggie to hear the audience's applause at the end too. Thank you to our audience for joining us, and for those who missed it, you can see the video here.
Sure, a Zoom concert isn't quite the real thing. But for all the benefits for hosting a in person concert, the reality is that we couldn't have entertained ~20 families (and perhaps 50+ people) at our living room! It is quite wonderful that we are able to share Aggie's music with family & friends near and far: from our next door neighbour (who admittedly would have heard the music anyway through the wall), to school friends and teacher in lockdown, to family in Coventry 300+ miles away, and grandparents on the other side of the planet! The pandemic has undoubtedly prompted us to do things differently, and now that we have done it once, we'll likely live-stream other concerts in the future even when we can host an audience.
'Live' audience or not, we are just very proud of Aggie's performance! The prospect of an upcoming concert is always a helpful prompt to practise with more energy than usual, and Aggie has certainly made a huge amount of progress in the past 2-3 weeks. As some of you may appreciate, Aggie has learnt the 13 pieces in the program over the past year, so just keeping them in one's head all at the same time is a serious challenge regardless of age. We find ourselves repairing new (and seemingly random) memory lapses each day, on top of developing that all important musicality that for 'older' pieces can often erode with time. One particularly useful practice tip that Larinda introduced to us is to make a box of cards - each of which represents a piece. The simple physical act of removing a card from the box after a piece has been played/practised, and ultimately 'clearing the box' at the end of a long one is a tremedous motivator for Aggie (we find the same technique also works wonders for Thea's practice!).
This early recording from January 2018 (the first 'out of the box' recording with our new mic) of Aggie served as a nice reminder of Aggie's progress over the past two years - it's easy to forget for us:
Of course, a big thank you to Larinda for her guidance and patience - she really went above and beyond to make sure Aggie is ready for the concert, by giving us daily tips through our practise videos as we tried to knock Sonatina (Aggie's last and most challenging piece from the book - maybe subject of a different post) into shape this last week!
On to book 3, other new music, violin, school of mummy & daddy! Keep safe & healthy all, B
Comments