The boy can play

The boy can play

Tom White returns to Telluride for a night of classical piano
By Katie Klingsporn
Associate Editor
Published: Thursday, July 30, 2009 11:45 PM CDT

Tom White opens up a heavy book of music. Its yellowed pages are covered with dense patterns of notes and symbols that stretch and cluster, rise and dip in the most complicated ways. For someone who can only read basic notes, this is about as legible as hieroglyphics.

It’s the Waldstein Piano Sonata by Ludwig Van Beethoven. It’s about 30 pages long, an epic piece that travels the emotional landscape like a cross-country train, that unfolds like a day. Its parts are bright and ebullient, quiet and gorgeous, as new and cathartic as daybreak.

It’s one of White’s favorites.

“It’s an amazing piece. It’s epic. It’s one of those pieces that just haunts you forever, I guess,” he said.
He flipped to a page and began to play, filling the empty pews and spacious sanctuary of Christ Church (where he was practicing) with music so lovely and lush it could only belong to another plane.

White, who has been playing the piano since he was 12, has had this sonata on his wish list for a long time. Last fall, he finally cracked it open and started picking his way through it, figuring out the intricate parts, stringing the movements together, and slowly, over days, weeks and months, memorizing it.

On Saturday, White will play the Waldstein Sonata as part of a classical piano performance he is putting on at the Michael D. Palm Theatre. The performance is at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $10 at the door, kids get in free.

White, who gets to perform on the Palm’s gorgeous 9-foot Steinway concert grand, will also be performing Suite Bergamasque by Claude Debussy, which he describes as a loose collection of early dance songs inspired by the famous poem Clair De Lune. Rounding out the performance, White will perform Sebastian Bach’s English Suite #2, a difficult piece that was written for dances from the late Renaissance and early Baroque periods, dances whose steps are mostly forgotten, White says.

“It’s one of those cultural things that’s been lost over the centuries,” he said.

By playing them side by side, White hopes to juxtapose a more modern dance suite with its roots.

This performance comes a little more than a year after White performed a similar concert at the Palm with friends. Only, last year’s was a bit of a farewell show, as White, then 31, was on the verge of moving to Greeley to attend grad school for piano performance.

Before he left, White lived here for six years, and his voice may be familiar to many as the co-host of KOTO’s Sunday Evening Classical, which injects some Brahams and Schubert into the usual stream of rock and roll, bluegrass and reggae that KOTO pumps into our speakers. He also performed a couple of concerts at the Sheridan Opera House, and led the occasional music lecture and taught lessons.

When he landed in Greeley from Telluride last fall to start school, he admitted that it was an aesthetic shock. But gradually, he found himself very much at home in the world of academia and musicology, he said. At school, he gets to practice four to six hours a day, live in a world of music and soak in the knowledge of incredible instructors. He plays on his instuctor’s awesome Steinway, learns about the history of music and plays in the symphonic band.

“It’s been so much fun and I’ve learned so much,” White said. “I found that being in an academic environment really suits me … it’s the one place where I really fit in in life.”

Plus, he had vast quantities of time to practice pieces like the ones he will perform this weekend — hours spent memorizing thousands of notes and hundreds of sequences, the allegros and staccatos and fortissimos, the complicated rise of sound and melody of piano pieces.

It appears that all of the saturation has paid off, too. White said it’s hard to tell if he’s improved much, but he seems to be more natural and graceful behind the piano, his hands dancing like spiders over the black and white keys, crossing over one another, simultaneously playing different parts that each appear horribly difficult.

He still has one year of study, and then White — who has loved classical music since he was an adolescent — hopes to get his doctorate, and go on to teach in a college setting.

It seems to suit him.

For this performance, White received support the Telluride Council of Arts and Humanities — which gave him a grant, the Chamber Music Festival — which helped him with insurance, and the Palm Theatre.

~ Faith