Piano Girl (a musical memoir)
Piano Girl is a piano recital-meets-cabaret show exploration of my relationship with music and artistic inspiration from ages 17-21. The album features works by Chopin, Rachmaninoff, and Beethoven, interspersed with original songs.
About
In highschool, I was the piano girl. That was how people knew me, and it was how I knew myself.
I was fortunate to have abundant musical opportunities as a pianist, singer, and composer through my school. And I had my piano teacher - Misha - who helped me and encouraged me.
My imagination was so full from my various musical projects (and my simultaneous musical theater obsession) that I was largely unphased by the typical dramas of highschool, both academic and social. I was in my own world, and I loved it.
Somewhere between high school and college, things changed. My sense of the world grew bigger and I was unsure that my way of fitting into it should be as a musician. It seemed to me that one had to be a truly rare talent to merit becoming a “real” musician.
In college, I intended to make practical choices about my future since I planned to become a lawyer. But instead, I unexpectedly declared my major in Russian literature, as I was drawn deeper into the history and culture of a place both foreign and somehow familiar. Why?
Maybe it was because of the perplexing Russian characters I’d known most of my life - my best friend, my piano teacher, my ballet teacher. The more I learned, the greater the enigma of this place and its people. Most of all, I was fascinated by the clash of history and art, often violent but with a truth ringing out from within. The contradictions never seemed to end, and I couldn’t get enough. My Russian literature studies shaped my future in ways I couldn’t have imagined, and put me back on a path to prioritizing my artistic work as an adult.
For many years, I maintained a half-hearted relationship with the piano. I couldn’t ever completely let it go, but I wasn’t convinced there was any point to engaging more.
Things changed in the fall of 2021 when I began taking lessons again for the first time in years, with the fantastic Robert Durso. Only then did I begin to realize how much I'd missed the piano, and appreciate how deep my relationship with the instrument already was, from my high school years.
I was able to look back on my life so far with new understanding. All of a sudden, it felt like things had been working out all along.
Piano Girl is my tribute to those early days of musical connection, through a long and confusing period of separation, to a reunion many years in the making.
This album is dedicated to all my piano teachers, especially Mikhail Morgovsky and Robert Durso.
Album credits:
Recording Engineer, Editing & Mastering: Louis Ng
Producer: Jennifer Rosenfeld
Photo credit: Monika Broz
Recorded in Los Angeles, September 2023
Special thanks to:
Robert Durso, Benjamin Boyle, Kate Conklin, Andrea Stolpe, Cara Chowning, Joel Chapman, Danny Ziemann, Susan Blackwell, Laura Camien and The Spark File Illume program