Maxim Lando is a 22 year-old pianist who started playing when he was three years old and went on to win his first major competition when he was 13. I’m guessing that he didn’t have a normal childhood.

Nevertheless, it gives me hope that I may yet turn the corner in my playing, when I reach ten years of practicing, though I suspect that he put it more hours and didn’t spend time writing blogs.

He has a unique style, sitting very close to his instrument (against everything I have been taught) and hunching over the piano, almost never looking up. I guess he has the music memorized (another difference).

While delighting the audience with Manuel De Falla’s Nights in the Gardens of Spain and Franz Liz Liszt’s Rhapsodie espagnole (arranged for full orchestra), Lando spent much of the time jerking his head all about, while playing, in a manner that suggested a likely future need for chiropractic services. At the end of passages, he would then practically jump up off the bench in dramatic fashion. Definitely a show within a show.

The evening opened joyfully with Rossini’s overture to The Barber of Seville, which the conductor, Lee Mills, acknowledged first drew his attention in Looney Tunes (as with all of us).

The finale was the ever-popular Bolero by Maurice Ravel, bringing a resounding climax to the evening, even for those of us who did not sit there counting the 18 repetitions of the melodic theme (as mentioned by Mills) or the 169 rhythmic repetitions by the snare drum (repeat after me – carpal tunnel syndrome).