Bethanyology

Beethoven
Movement I (Allegro con brio)
from the Symphony No. 5
C minor, Op. 67
arr. Jeffrey Shumway
The 5 Browns

Gottschalk
Grand Tarantelle,
Op. Posth. 67 (1, 5)
Gregory & Ryan Brown

Brahms
Intermezzo in A major,
Op. 118, No. 2
Melody Brown

Rachmaninoff
Valse (Presto)
from the Suite No. 2,
Op. 17
Desirae & Deondra Brown

Liszt
Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2
in C-sharp minor
Gregory Brown

Holst
Selections from The Planets,
Op. 32
arr. Greg Anderson
Mars, the Bringer of War
Neptune, the Mystic
Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity
The 5 Browns

Intermission

A Conversation with The 5 Browns

Rachmaninoff
18th Variation from the Rhapsody
on a Theme of Paganini
arr. Greg Anderson
The 5 Browns

Debussy
Fetes from
Nocturnes for Orchestra
arr. Maurice Ravel
Gregory & Melody Brown

Chopin
Fantasy-Impromptu
in C-sharp minor, Op. 66
Ryan Brown

Milhaud
Brazileira: Mouvement de Samba
from Scaramouche
Desirae & Deondra Brown

Rachmaninoff
Valse and Romance
Desirae, Deondra & Melody Brown

Saint-Saens
Danse Macabre, Op. 40
arr. Greg Anderson
The 5 Browns

The “conversation with the Browns” part of the concert included a brief introduction of each performer, then a Q&A period with the siblings taking turns calling on raised hands in the audience.  I especially enjoyed the questions about how, where, and what they practice at home and on the road.  They said that on the road they only practice about an hour a day on the loaned Steinway concert grand pianos that follow them on their concert tours in a dedicated truck.  At their parents’ home, they have five more Steinways in separate rooms to practice on when they work on their own and they put the five loaners together in one room to practice simultaneously.  Apparently they practiced so much at the local Steinway dealership (where else do you find five pianos in one room?) that they loaned them pianos to get them out of their hair.  And they said that they had to use Steinways because when they tried other brands of pianos they’d “wear out” too fast because of the 5-8 hours of practicing every day.  I’m fascinated by the idea of “wearing out” a piano.  What does that mean?  Do you make it impossible to tune? Do the strings or the keys break?

I’d spent part of the afternoon at Macy’s with Heidi (Grandpa stayed with the older two while they napped) trying to find a cute springtime dress to buy with my Christmas gift from Sonja to wear to the concert.  No such luck, but I did find three cute shirts on sale, one of which I wore that evening.  Heidi cooperated everywhere but in the dressing room, where she cried until I fed her and rocked her to sleep (which took about a half an hour).  Shopping with a baby (or babies) is really challenging.  Finding things that fit correctly and that look good is tough work on its own, but doing it with a 10 lb crying baby in a carrier…that’s hard. Definitely worth it to look appropriate and feel cute on a date with my husband, though.

Back to the show.  The 5 Browns played impressively well.  The couple in the row behind me warmed my heart as they  murmured “mm-hmm” and “good” and “that’s right” as if they were paino teachers cheering their students on.  I don’t know if they knew the music or piano at all, but hearing the encouraging sounds made me smile and feel encouraged myself.  Colin and I both enjoyed the showmanship of the painists (who were all trained as soloists at Juliard) as they moved with the music and often measured out the beat together, not with their toes, but with their heads.   Watching five heads bounce at exactly the same moment was surprisingly entertaining–we couldn’t afford see-their-fingers-moving tickets and sat three rows from the back, in the center.  But we could hear everything perfectly from our seats in the Frank Lloyd Wright concert hall.  It surprised me that when they played the same notes together at the same time, it sounded like one piano playing even with the notes bouncing around the auditorium before they reached us.

Colin’s clear favorite was Holst’s “Neptune the Mystic.”  I don’t know which was my favorite, but Rachmaninnof’s “Valse and Romance” caught my special attention because it was written for three sisters at one piano(and played by three sisters) and made me want to learn to play just so I could play it with my own sisters.  During one of their pieces, middle brother Greg played by plucking the actual strings of the piano–that was unexpected, memorable, and worked well.  We heard a classical car race, a french rendition of Brazillian music, a musical story about dancing skeletons, a theme from Somewhere in Time (which I’ve never seen), and Beethoven’s 5th Symphony exclusively on pianos, all with entertaining commentary from the pianists. How can you go wrong when the Juliard-trained musician asserts that “musical snobs hate it when I say…”?

A relatively new audience “contribution” to the classical scene that I observed for the first time in the mostly-Senior audience occurred during a piece with lots of repeated high notes.  A high pitched note sounded intermittently from different points in the audience and at first I thought it was a distant alarm, then I thought it might be the lights.  But no, the sound we heard sounding in response to the music was the cheerful squealing of hearing aids throughout the room.  I don’t know if anyone else noticed, but the extra notes made me smile.