Spring Piano Recital...This Time, With TWO Barrett Girls

Spring has come...and with it, another piano recital for my students. Generally, I do two recitals a year: one at Christmastime and one in the spring, towards the end of the school year. While I usually hold my Christmas recitals at the home of Dan Bezzant, my LDS bishop, I have started holding my spring recitals in the activity room of the nearby Green Valley library. I love the Bezzants, but it is a lot to ask to flood their house with piano students twice a year!

The library's activity room has plenty of space for everyone, and they even allow food and drink to be brought in from the outside. And the piano there is a beautiful old instrument. The only problem is that it's obviously not kept up all that well; at our spring recital last year, it was obvious the poor thing hadn't been tuned in several years! I mentioned this in passing to a library employee this year as I was scheduling the room. A few weeks later, that same employee called me up to let me know that they'd found a piano tuner to work on their piano for free! Now that's service! It ensured I'd be scheduling recitals with them for a long time to come.

As usual, I was very proud of all my students and their hard work. Sadly, one of my students had to bow out at the last minute (it was Paloma, who is also my longest-tenured student at this point!). So, like the Christmas recital before it, I wasn't able to have all my students perform.But the students who showed up gave it their all; I was very proud of all of them!

This recital featured two students who were "first-timers" (that is, they'd never performed for anyone outside of their families). Ava was the first...and Celeste was the second! That's right, my beautiful middle child, who just started learning piano this winter, participated in her very first recital this spring! And she did pretty well, if I do say so myself:

Celeste claimed to be very nervous, but I wouldn't have guessed it from watching her perform. She kept her focus on her music, played carefully, and made no big mistakes. She also made sure to wear a dress, so she could "curtsey" at the end of her songs.

This was not Lorelai's first recital, and she came ready. She had been practicing both her songs for a long time, and she was happy to finally be performing them.

Even though our girls are not big Star Wars fans, Lorelai insisted on learning the piano version of the Star Wars main theme for the recital. She started a little shaky at first, but recovered nicely! It was a lot of fun for her to learn.

In a neat coincidence, Aidan, one of my older students, also chose a Star Wars song to play. He ended up performing the Imperial March, which was a nice contrast with Lorelai's song. A week later, Aidan performed the March again for his school talent show; on that occasion, he was dressed in full Darth Vader costume! I almost wished he would have done that for our recital, but everyone else might have been a little weirded out.

In the end, I was very proud of everyone, and very thankful for the opportunity to teach them all. A few of the kids are taking the summer off, and it is weird to have so much "free time" upcoming. However, it just means I will have more time to spend with my kids, so that's not entirely a bad thing. This fall, I will be adding a few more kids, all of whom are siblings of current students. It has been interesting teaching both Lorelai and Celeste at the same time, and seeing their different learning and performing styles. I look forward to teaching all these new siblings, and seeing how all of them differ from one another as well.