Willa's Piano Recital

Willa worked her way through the entire "A Day at the Zoo" piano book, so it was time for her to give her first solo recital, or house concert, as her teacher likes to call it. It was exciting and reminded me of preparing for Suzuki book concerts whenever I finished a Suzuki book. She had to learn and have memorized every piece in the book. The biggest trial for me was that by the time we got into the last dog days of polishing, she was tired of these songs and wanted something new to practice. We probably could have pushed her to do the concert in December or January, but with the holidays and the Disney cruise we opted for the more cushiony time frame of February 20th.

I printed up some invitations through Costco and we were able to invite some of her friends and teachers. We held it at the church in the Relief Society room because I thought our house might be too cramped. We have about twenty people come and it was really sweet. 

All the little songs are about animals, so we had zoo-themed refreshments. Cupcakes in zoo wrappers with little zoo decorations on top, iced animal crackers, last minute cookies when we thought the other food wouldn't be enough, and water. Ryan took the girls to a different recital a few weeks ago and said there was a full dinner after. I just wanted to keep it all very simple.

Here is a wrinkled old program. I think this is the one Willa read off of to remember the song order. The other ones were spruced up with a little animal sticker at the top :). In my defense, I tried to find an online template to use and there were tons of cute ones, but they all required Word. Ryan did an update on the computer a few months ago and had to uninstall all of Office. When he went back to reinstall it after the update, he discovered that the disc reader wasn't working well. So now we have no Microsoft Office, which would probably be an issue if we were students, but for now Google docs seems to be handling things well except for this type of minor annoyance.

Willa did really well and I'm proud of how she could focus on her songs with some of her little friends present. She memorized about 20-25 minutes worth of music, no small feat for a five year old! She wanted to wear her Elsa Frozen Fever gown, which she earned as a special prize earlier for doing three days of eye drops. I love that she wanted to wear it, to her it's her most beautiful, fanciest gown. It encapsulates who she is right at this moment.

Here are two sideways, grainy videos from Rebecca's camera. We took a video of the entire concert with our camcorder that we got way back in 2007. Surprise, surprise, our Iphone videos are better quality and when Ryan downloaded it to the computer, it was in some weird format that took some finagling to read. If we figure it out, I will post it later.  But here are some clips for now.

After the concert with Bridgett and Hailey. I'm kicking myself for not getting a photo with her teacher.

After all the excitement with her flowers. She wasn't in the mood for posing.

It was a fun and exciting night and I'm really proud of her. She was very excited to do her own concert and is especially excited not to have to play from her Zoo book anymore, except when she wants to. The day after the recital we drove up to Utah for a few days and that night she played all her pieces for my dad. He told her he was sorry he missed the recital and asked her to play, so she sat down and played everything just like that.

I really love our teacher, she's just a master teacher, and I think this method that she uses is really excellent. Willa's hands are all over the piano and she's reading almost four octaves (give or take some cheat notes here and there). As we work through the method books, her teachers usually prints off a fun and easy song each week for her to learn from a different piano method. Some of the songs have been from the Alfred and Piano Adventures Levels 2 and 3 already, which is pretty cool. She's not totally polished, but she can sit down and play through them without too much trouble usually, which is something my piano students who are actually in those levels sometimes have trouble doing. Not saying that Willa is this genius, I just think she has been taught well from the start. So, hooray for Willa! I really like having something with long term goals and results, but also with short term enjoyment and work. She can really focus when it's time to practice and she enjoys it, for the most part. It's been a good thing for us while we await kindergarten next year.