There is also little separation between audience and performer. “Nobody expects to see a piano outside of a living room, so when you put it under a tree in a beautiful setting, it creates a disconnect in your brain that allows wonder to grow.” “This works because of context,” Mermell said. Updated to include drought zones while tracking water shortage status of your area, plus reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Area’s largest water districts. “Felt absorbs moisture like nobody’s business,” said Soper, who came armed with a blow dryer and a tin of ointment to do battle.Īll 12 pianos, including two Steinways, two Baldwins and a Yamaha, belong to Dean Mermell and Mauro Fortissimo, partners in Sunset Piano located in Half Moon Bay. “With the changes in humidity, the tuning gets shot very fast.” The rain causes a problem for the felt components. “It’s a pain, but it’s a lovely pain,” he said after lifting his ear from the wire strings. Saturday night brought a smattering of rain, so piano tuner Robert Soper was there by 8:30 a.m. The pianos stay in place all weekend and are covered at night against the fog and mist. Hogarth had just gotten up from belting out “La Cage” when another player sat down on the still-warm bench to play a moving version of Pachelbel’s “Canon in D.”Īll of those different hands are hell on a piano, and so is the weather. He’d play straight through, but there is a loosely enforced 15-minute time limit for any set, other than the booked professionals who each play a one-hour concert. “It’s fantastic to be back,” Hogarth, 43, said after singing a heartfelt version of “La Cage Aux Folles” at a concert-quality Kawai under the trellis at Zellerbach Garden stage. So when Flower Piano opened Friday, he was there in his piano-keys-bedecked shoes and his iPad set list of 26 show tunes, one for each letter in the alphabet - from “Anything Goes” to “Zombie Prom.” He tried Facebook Live at “Paultuni’s,” as he calls the studio, but he missed the audience feedback. It got canceled and since then he’s been cooped up with his 1928 Baldwin grand piano in a Nob Hill studio apartment so small that the piano is also the couch. Paul Hogarth’s last scheduled performance was at Martuni’s piano bar on March 27, 2020, which was also his birthday. Some are amateurs, but most are either professional performers or aspirants. The format entails a few professionals playing sets of about an hour each day, the rest of the time filled by anyone with the nerve to sit down and capture the audience. “When the pianos were set up on Wednesday,” she said. Delle Maxwell, the garden’s board chair, summed up the emotion in a speech to members and sponsors Sunday morning. It runs through Tuesday, and after its return on Friday, crowds grew each day until the line Sunday ran from the garden kiosk out to Martin Luther King Drive and toward the Lincoln Way boundary of Golden Gate Park.įlower Piano is the first public program held at the Botanical Garden since the pandemic started. Normally held in July, the event was last staged in 2019.
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