One Year From Today—Carnegie Hall! (May 3, 2025)
With my Carnegie Hall solo debut recital one year away from today, I am very excited. I know there will be a lot of work for me between now and then, but I am so grateful to have teachers like Mr. Buono and Mr. Alexander who are helping me to make this debut part of an ever-expanding career.
The weather here in New York has gone quickly from spring to summer, and as a result my mother and I are moving around New York even more than usual. When we saw Mr. Cosmo he gave us some mafaldine pasta, which is a flat pasta similar to the noodles used to make lasagna, and one that holds sauces very well because of the wavy ridges. Tradition says it was named mafaldine because of an Italian princess named Mafalda, known for her flowing, wavy hair, which inspired the pasta's shape, and why is it also sometimes called “reginette” or “little queens.” He also gave us some very fresh oranges, and suddenly my heart was in southern Italy!
The pasta gift made my mother and I start thinking about the type of sauce we wanted to make for dinner, and we discussed any number of them: tomato, ragu, olive oil-based, pesto, tomato cream, and carbonara, just to name a few. We also discussed lemon, avocado, and Italian, parsley, but in the end I asked her to just go with tomato sauce, which is what we did, but we used sun-dried tomatoes and thyme, which was summer-like and quite wonderful.
I discovered that there are so many types of pasta because each of them is designed to hold sauces differently, and the different textures can add a slightly different taste as one is eating them. I found this very interesting, and makes me like trying the many different pastas even more.
With my New York recital scheduled for May 9, 2025, I am finding that I will be spending even more of my time practicing. I have a personality that makes me obsessively focus on things when I want to accomplish something. With my mother and the cats around me however, it is always possible to keep a good balance.
Today I thought a lot about the relationship between Wagner and Beethoven after hearing Nina Stemme sing Wagner at her Carnegie Hall recital yesterday. Wagner’s music is full of grand themes, truths, and universal laws, so when I play Beethoven's music, and even when I play Liszt's music, which follows in that vein, I couldn't help but feel Beethoven's cosmic-scale thought process as well.
As for practicing, I was able to do so quite enjoyably from the first warm-up. I always play scales to start, and I usually focus on the technical aspects of playing smoothly and sharpening the sense of my fingers and body. Today however I played from an expressional perspective in addition to those ideas, specifically imagining the mood I felt with each key signature. Whisper, nostalgia, furious, leggiero, or grazioso? What kind of scenery? What kind of smell? What kind of emotion? Changing the color of the scale like this sharpened my sensibilities even more, and Mr. Cosmo's wonderful Steinway responded very well, so it was a lot of fun.
