30 Days to Showtime!

I've secured a venue in Chico, at a place called Chico Women's Club, where I performed for the Baha'is several months ago. The decision to book this event was generally a result of me telling myself to stop making excuses for postponing it. I've been wanting to put on a concert like this for quite some time. More specifically, I chose this particular venue because the place is small enough for it not to be too intimidating, and the acoustics are fantastic.

A secret to success...

I carefully chose the article 'a' in the above heading, as opposed to 'the', because I don't intend to claim that I know "the secret" to being successful, as if there were only one. But I do know a method that can work wonders, and that's being able to network well with other people. If you're good at building professional relationships, acquiring colleagues, and just being a nice guy (or gal) your chances of success will be a lot higher -- guaranteed. .

The Chico Women's Club concert is only 30 days away and I've been delighted to see how many people stepped in to help. I have a sound guy, a tech guy, a host person ("MC"), a chair set-up person, two other musicians that will be performing at some point, a promo guy, a design guy, a ticket lady, a merchandise person and even a person who's going to sell food.  Some of these folks I'm paying, but even when you can't afford to pay people, building supportive networks goes a long way and it means that much more people will still step in to help you out when you happen to be strapped.


Everything I know I learned from George Winston (and others)

In one of my blog posts I talked about a time I went to see George Winston perform in Redding, California. Part of the reason I wanted to go (besides just that he's a great performer and a fantastic composer) is that I wanted to see how what a typical piano concert looked like. Questions kept coming up in my head, prior to watching him perform, like "Does the performer talk between songs?" "Does he introduce himself?" "Does he do anything else?"

George Winston played some of his most popular compositions on the piano, as expected, but during the show he also picked up his slack key guitar and played on that as well. He played the guitar for two of his pieces, and the rest were all on the piano. This was a nice change of pace and it added some variety, even though I loved everything he was doing on the piano.

Watching George put on a concert this way definitely helped inspire me to dig for ideas to add variety into my own piano concerts. As a result I've been able to find a professional cellist who will be playing "The Swan" by Camille Saint Saens, as well as a melodic version of "Snowfall on a Light Glissade". The person hosting the concert is also going to sing for one of the songs, and I'm extremely grateful that the host just happens to have an opera background. I've rehearsed twice with him and once with the cellist.

Yo-yo Ma performing Camille Saint-Saens' "The Swan"

Since it's my first self-organized concert, only time will tell how successful the attempt at variety will be. And at just a little over two weeks away I'll be squeezing in as much rehearsal time that I can.