Charlie Liu’s Blog

On this past Sunday, Charlie took part in the annual winter recital of his teacher’s (Ingrid Clarfield) Studio. He was to play the Mozart Sonata K280, the piece he won the Cecilian Music Club Competition with and also had a great Carnegie Hall performance with; and a beautiful and emotional piece by Tchaikovsky - October, “The Autumn Song”. At first, Mrs. Clarfield was not convinced that Charlie should be doing this piece, because it’s not easy to get a piece ready in such a short period of time, and because she loves his playing of another beautiful and emotional piece by Chopin - Nocture Op 9 No 2. Yet, when Charlie played October for her after learning it for only a week on his own, she was so amazed that she said: You might actually pull this off. You can play this piece in the recital. We were thrilled about it - after all, Charlie’s getting pretty tired of playing the old pieces, however beautiful they are.

Despite that the recital pieces are decided, Charlie was focusing on a couple other pieces more, mostly because they’re harder pieces and took longer to learn/refine. Yet under Mrs. Clarfield’s instructions, he did improve on his playing of October, and played it more accurately and maturely with more refinement and style. When he opened the solo portion of the recital with the Mozart and Tchaikovsky, people thoroughly enjoyed his performance! Several families came to us or Mrs. Clarfield commenting how maturely he played - he played like an adult pianist! Of course, one should always take compliments with a grain of salt, but I enjoyed his performance much too.

Maybe the kids enjoyed Charlie’s performance much and wanted to outdo it, everybody played at an extremely high level and gave one great performance after another. This recital was definitely one of the best I’ve seen anywhere, and probably the best I’ve seen of this great studio. We’re all delighted that we were treated to such a wonderful musical event. Mrs. Clarfield joked that she knew that Charlie opening the concert was a smart decision as he played so well, and everyone played so well!

Without further adieu, here’s a Youtube version so you can judge Charlie’s performance for yourself (BTW, I just found out that youtube compresses video to 22KHz, 64Kbps audio! Ouch! No wonder I ALWAYS felt after uploading to youtube, Charlie’s videos lost audio quality significantly! I might one day decide to sit thru a lengthy upload (for high quality video) just to rectify such a ridiculous problem):

BTW, Charlie had another very busy weekend! Last weekend we had to get up at 4:30 AM on Sunday to play a game in Atlantic City at 7:00 AM. This past Saturday we only had to get up at 6:00 AM to play an 8:00 AM game in Little Falls, NJ, then we went to two other cities for various events and only got back slightly before the recital. Charlie was simply amazing dealing with a hectic schedule and still perform quite well. As picky as I am, he still impresses me sometimes - such as this past Sunday’s hockey game where he played great defense! The Princeton Mites B team had a great, great game, beating a very good Hollydell Hurricanes team 3-2 (or 4-2, if the goal right at the buzzer counted). Kudos to Coby, Mac, Max, Charlie S, Charlie L (yeah, two Charlies on the team), Alec, Connor, Benja, Chris, David, Frankie for an incredibly exciting and entertaining game!