I spent last weekend in Osaka with 'the boys' from my prefecture - 3 fellow guys who I regularly play Airsoft games with. We went to Osaka with the express purpose of playing at one of Japan's rare indoor Airsoft arenas. As promised, it was awesome, but this isn't a gun geek post. This post is about the break I took one afternoon to head to Kyoto.Kyoto is only 30 minutes from Osaka by train, so I had no excuse not to go to my friend Eri's piano contest happening on Saturday afternoon. The world of piano is a funny thing, it seems.As this was a contest, I saw a rapid succession of several players, mostly girls, dressed mostly in black with the occasional white, who each played for 6 minutes before a small bell rang, the players stopped mid-note, and quietly walked off stage. No applause was allowed.The players were obviously talented, but you could hear a wide disparity in skill. The less talented (or more nervous) players paused before notes that were big steps across the keyboard. Most aspired to what seemed to me to be the current fashion in piano playing: schizophrenia. I turn my TV onto the NHK Education channel pretty often at night (I only have 5 channels) and more often than not it's classical music, and there's usually a special place, front and center, for a fat pianist with an impossibly long Eastern European last name and a penchant for overacting as he plays: tender baby Jesus facial expressions for legato segments, Furious Anger for the forte. It strikes me as lame every time. Yes, I know that piano comes from pianoforte, which means 'soft' and 'strong' at once. But Mr. Nagaheekamapouliskov seems to have forgotten everything that comes in between. And yet this guy's on-off-switch style of playing is all the rage, telling by what I see on TV. And it's ugly.But then in stepped Eri. I knew she was playing Debussy, a composer known for his expressions of smoothness and grace, but that was all I knew. She arrived for her 6 minutes dressed in a gorgeous pink dress, a pearl necklace, and meticulously done-up hair. Honestly, she'll be hard-pressed to look that classy on her own wedding day.And it was everything I could have hoped for. With the weaker players, you could see the fear in their eyes, the fear that the piano might somehow betray them and PLONK out the wrong note. Eri didn't show a hint of it. She looked as she should: the piano was her tool, her instrument to control. And she played like it too. Weaker pianists play with their fingers. She played with her whole arms, her wrists smoothly but firmly commanding the piano to do her bidding. The resultant sound was beautiful: a full dynamic range, a smoothness that any player should aspire to play with, a sound that Debussy himself may have thought of when composing. She was the only one who didn't sound like Mr. Nagaheekamapouliskov, and that was a good thing.Except I was wrong. The performance was a train-wreck. She spent 15 minutes being let into by her piano teacher before she could even talk to me or her own mom and sister who had come to watch. That teeny flower bouquet I brought along in the interest of tradition could wait. She had blown it.As she finally stepped outside to talk to us, apparently she had known it all along. She had "given up right after [she] started." Wait, what? This performance that I had concluded was awesome was in fact her not cranking it to 11. It was her choking. She was too jittered to carry a regular conversation, so she sent the family and me off to have coffee together without her while she stuck around to await her 'miserable' result.The result, according to a text the next morning, was a 'miserable' 5th out of 14 players. The top 4 were set to advance on to some other competition. For Eri, the score was some minor solace - she still did well despite totally blowing it. For me, the score made perfect sense: beautiful performance, but not what The Piano-Playing Establishment is looking for.Eri, by the way, just accepted a job at Yamaha as an in-house piano instructor. I still don't understand why Yamaha employs them, but more importantly she's now technically a professional pianist. Take that, Establishment.
