Tweet19-03-2010 om 08:54 by Sueli Brodin

My children Tim, 10, and Naomi, 8, have been taking piano lessons for the past 18 months and participated last Saturday in their second recital. Their piano teacher, Willy Riemens, wanted to give her students the opportunity to perform in front of an audience. “It is a very rewarding and stimulating experience for everyone,” she said.

Tim and Naomi have developed their own relationship with the piano, in keeping with their character. Tim practises all the time, at any moment of the day, impulsively, not always bothering to sit down, often too loud, too fast, untroubled by mistakes. He clearly enjoys the contact with the instrument and knows most of the pieces by heart.



Naomi, on the contrary, plays the piano just as she does everything else. She only sits at it when she’s told to practise her exercises, restricts herself exclusively to her homework, conscientiously follows the technical instructions and tries her best not to make any mistake. She considers it a serious affair and always looks very focused and concentrated while playing.

Willy says that they’re fast learners, both of them, and that she’s pleased with their progress. “They fly through the books!”

My children and Willy’s 16 other young students couldn’t have wished for a more supportive audience of family members and friends in the small room on Mount St Pieter where the recital was taking place.



My mother in law especially travelled from Dordrecht for the occasion and our sporty friend René biked all the way from his hometown of Sittard, 30 km to the north of Maastricht.

If my children felt any stage fright, they didn’t show it. They looked calm, confident and ready. When their turn came, they each walked up to the piano and played the pieces they had rehearsed. They didn’t panic when they mistakenly hit the wrong keys and carried on just as their teacher had advised them to. The friendly woman sitting next to me complimented me on their performances: “They look so sweet! They’re not even reading the notes.”





A group of six children of different ages from three related Chinese families also took part in the recital. I was looking forward to seeing them again, because I had greatly enjoyed their choice of music last year. They made me discover popular Asian musicians unknown to me until then, such as the Taiwanese Jay Chow and the Korean Yiruma, whose compositions sounded like typical theme songs of Asian drama series I regularly watch on the Internet.



Many questions raced through my mind as I listened to the melodies from the Far East being played and shared on a hill above Maastricht. “What made these young Chinese girls choose these songs? How did they find them? Do they like watching Asian films and listening to Asian music as much as I do? What emotions do these songs unleash in them?”

One of the girls in particular enchanted me. When she played, not only her fingers but her entire body seemed to feel and follow the music. Her movements were refined, graceful, almost like a dance. The notes came alive as she let her fingers run over the keys of the piano.



The recital ended with a piano six hands by my two children and their father. When they stopped playing, an enthusiastic man in the audience made my heart swell with pride when he cheered: “We want more!”

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