Candlelight Concert (Klaudia Kudełko, piano) – Newberry Library – February 5, 2020

It’s not a smudge on your screen. Klaudia Kudełko’s last name is spelled with a voiceless alveolar lateral fricative that adds a stroke to the L that makes it look like a T (and now I know how to make it magically appear).

The Candlelight Concert series produced by Fever (don’t worry, it’s not related to the coronavirus) presents its artists, as advertised, by candlelight, which meant that Kudełko had to know the music and where the keys were, just as if she were Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, or George Shearing.

Though Kudełko was great, I was disappointed by the fact that the candles spread throughout the room all burned (well shone, not burned, as they were battery-powered, because, after all, it was best that Kudełko’s flying fingers were the only thing on fire) yellow. In particular, I would have liked to have seen different colors of candles on top of the piano, changing in sync with the music as if part of some hallucinogenic dream (which led me to an article on “5 reasons to buy color-changing light bulbs”).

Though the colors were uniform, the candles on the piano were of different sizes, which made me hope that Kudełko also might entertain us with some variation of playing glasses of water with different levels, as in the video of the street musician playing Mozart I found. Maybe it doesn’t work with Chopin.

What does work with Chopin is the Tido Music app (which Kudełko promotes in an online video of her playing part of one of the selections she played at the concert), which hears what you’re playing and automatically turns to the next page of music on your tablet at the appropriate time! Most apps can’t hold a candle to that.