An experience

Not a positive one, but a useful one.

Tonight, Katie was guest of honour at our local rotary club’s Christmas party. They have offered Katie a small grant and suggested she play for them. Which was fine. We came up with some lovely unaccompanied Bach for her to play. They wanted accompanied Christmas music. So we arranged that.

Katie and I arrived to have a little run through with their “accompanist”. It very quickly became clear she was totally incompetent. She’d not looked at the music. She wasn’t able to follow a musician and play a piano part. She wasn’t actually able to see the music. She made up notes and rhythms.. She’d brought a keyboard that wasn’t big enough to accommodate the required notes of the piano part even. But this was just the warm up act for the real performance..... where she made an utter mess of Katies first beautiful piece. The notes that she played bore no semblance to the key Katie was playing in. The tempo was about 4 different versions. Then we moved on to the second piece where she actually stopped Katie in the middle of her second as she’d got herself lost. “So can we go back to bar 27 please” only to then screw it up again. People were actually sniggering it was that much of a mess. Katie was a complete pro and ploughed on anyway, as well as she possibly could when a blithering idiot was massacring her performance. She held it together admirably in public. Completely reasonably, she totally lost it when we got in the car and was absolutely raging. I agreed with her that it felt humiliating for her. But I was very, very proud at how she handled it. It was not the end to an incredible run of concerts for her that we had hoped for, but she was amazing in the face of it.