Mom & Me—Finding joy and connection in music, even as her Alzheimer’s progresses

Christine Keller has taught at the Sound Minds music education program and other California Symphony education initiatives for more than two decades. In addition to being a teacher, Christine is a professional pianist and one half of the “Keller Duo” with her concert pianist mom, Alice Mae Keller, who has been struggling with dementia since 2001. She shares her story with us for World Alzheimer’s Day, September 21, 2018.

California Symphony: You and your mother are both classically trained pianists. Together you formed “The Keller Duo”, and you performed professionally around the Bay Area. How did you come to create the act, and what was it like working with your mother?

Christine Keller: In 1996, I won the Berkeley Piano Club competition and spent the spring practicing and preparing for the winner’s concert. Unfortunately, after that I was out of money, and had to find a job. I began teaching at Music Time, a music school for small children, through which I eventually got a job with the California Symphony. Too busy to follow a concert career at the time, I accepted my mother’s proposal to become her duo piano partner, and we became a team, the Keller Duo.

Of course, at the beginning, there were a lot of mother-daughter issues that came up, and eventually we found an elegant solution. Using humor to dissolve the occasional tension between us, we developed a deep respect for one another, not only as musicians, but as friends. Somehow, being at the piano(s) became a safe place to tell each other the truth, no matter how difficult that might be, and sometimes it was quite revealing. We performed around the Bay Area, mostly at Berkeley Piano Club and Performing Arts Society. Dad coached us as we were preparing for concerts, and turned pages for us at performances.

The Keller Duo: Alice Mae and Christine Keller on the cover of their 1992 recording.

How many years did you perform together? When was your most recent performance?

We have performed every year since 1996, except when I injured my shoulder and couldn’t play with her from 2005 until 2009. That makes 28 years playing together!

Our last performance was June 6, 2018 at Berkeley Piano Club.

Mom turned 88 this year, exactly the same number of keys there are on a piano. Together we bring 136 years of playing the piano to our performances!

Your mother has been suffering from dementia for a long time but you say that playing the piano together is something that has helped keep her brain active and has kept her engaged with you. How do you think music helps?

Mom has been struggling with dementia since 2001, when she had two operations within a week of each other. The anesthetic was toxic to her brain, as it is for many people. Playing music is something that gives her a sense of value. Preparing for the concerts allows her to feel important and have a goal to accomplish. She still sight reads, and though she can no longer tell you how many sharps are in the key of A major, she can still process that information and play it.

We even have a piece that shifts from A major (with three sharps) to A flat major (with four flats.) The notes look exactly the same on the page, but you have to play all of the notes differently because of the key change. With a little coaching, she can still do it. She is losing the connection between words and things, but she can still play piano!

About five or six years ago, we were invited to perform on the concert series for Rossmoor. Before the concert, when Dad left the house for any length of time she became very anxious because she didn’t know where he was. After a couple of weeks of four hours practicing a day, right before the concert, she could remember that he was out shopping and that he would come home safely to her. It extended my father’s ability to be independent for several years afterwards, a profound improvement for them both.

How is your mom doing now? Are you still playing together?

Mom is slipping deeper and deeper into Alzheimer’s now. The other day I asked her to help me clear the table and bring the cups into the kitchen. She just stood there, so I asked her a couple more times, getting more exasperated each time. When she didn’t bring them, I looked at her face, and saw she was very confused. She looked at me and said, “What’s a cup?”

It’s an extraordinary opportunity to be with a woman whose brain no longer allows her to engage the world easily, nor even make a full sentence most of the time—other than “You’re wonderful!” or “We’re having a good time, aren’t we?” But she can sit down at the piano and play music with me. Sometimes she even corrects my sight reading, telling me I am not observing a dynamic marking! After so many years playing with each other, it is such a delight to drop into this familiar and rare opportunity to play piano with my mother, still making really beautiful music together!

You currently teach students in the Sound Minds program at Downer Elementary School. Does your experience of working with your mom impact how you teach the kids?

My musicality, attention to detail, and the sheer pleasure of polishing a piece so it shimmers, I learned from her. I bring all of that to my work with the students. All of the patience and teaching strategies I use with the Sound Minds students have come full circle, as I draw on them when I sit at the piano with my mother, because her mind is functioning as a toddler now. But beyond that, at the piano, playing music together, she is still the extraordinary musician who was on the radio playing piano at age 11.

Any final thoughts you’d like to share?

My mom has been my musical mentor, inspiration, and wonderful companion at the piano for my entire life. Playing music together allows me to continue a meaningful relationship with her now, even as her mental capacity dwindles.

I believe making music together with my mom is one of the most important things I’ve done in my life, and I encourage every parent who has a musical child to share music-making with them!

Finally, I’d also like to acknowledge my dad, Richard Keller, for his support, keen musical insight and encouragement, especially these last few years. Without his loving attention, Mom wouldn’t be where she is today.

Beethoven & Bernstein Program Notes

An American icon’s best loved works and a returning virtuoso feature in the California Symphony’s 2018–19 season opener—Sunday, September 23, at 4pm, at the Lesher Center in Walnut Creek. Read Scott Foglesong’s program notes here.

PROGRAM: BEETHOVEN & BERNSTEIN

Sunday, September 23, at 4pm, at the Lesher Center in Walnut Creek

Overture to Candide (1956) — by Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990)

Piano Concerto №3 in C Minor, Op. 37 (1803) — by Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827)

Three Latin-American Dances for Orchestra (2003) — by Gabriela Lena Frank (b. 1972)

Symphonic Dances from West Side Story (1961) — by Leonard Bernstein

**Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990): Overture to Candide (1956)**

Chic celebrity he may have been, bellwether of contemporary American life, his patrician features and cultivated New England voice familiar to millions from his many appearances on radio and television. And yet Leonard Bernstein was something of a throwback to an earlier age when to be a musician meant to encompass the whole of the art rather than to segregate oneself into a well-defined specialty. Like those multitudinous kapellmeisters who peppered Europe from the 17th through 19th centuries, Bernstein could do everything. And he could do it all well: composer, conductor, pianist, teacher, writer.

But he didn’t always succeed. Consider his 1956 Broadway “comic operetta” Candide: It bombed, despite having a libretto by no less than Lillian Hellman, despite being directed by no less than Tyrone Guthrie, and despite starring no less than Robert Rounseville and Barbara Cook. Rather than allow his Voltaire-based brainchild to slink away to the Bardo of failed shows, Bernstein kept on revising and rewriting, starting with the 1959 London production and continuing on for decades with an assortment of collaborators. Nor did it all end with Bernstein’s death in 1990. As of 2018 Candide sports as many upgrades as Microsoft Windows.

The Overture has persisted through it all as a popular concert staple. Vivacious, witty, and ever so manic, it whizzes by in a whirlwind of orchestral pyrotechnics. Along the way it serves up a number of tunes from the show, including Glitter and Be Gay — that canary-on-steroids throat-scorcher that some listeners might remember as the theme music for Dick Cavett’s various TV shows.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827): Piano Concerto №3 in C Minor, Op. 37

“String Snapper, Hands on High” was critic Harold C. Schonberg’s title for the Beethoven chapter in The Great Pianists. The description is apt. Easily the most electrifying pianist of his generation, spellbinder of audiences and scourge of piano tuners, Beethoven brought something altogether new to the yet-green art of piano playing: pure animal magnetism. As he aged and his hearing deteriorated along with his overall health, wrong notes began to crowd out the right ones, but his laser-like intensity never faltered.

Piano Concerto №3 in C Minor dates from the beginning of Beethoven’s “Middle Period,” a.k.a. his full artistic maturity, when his output began to resemble a fusillade of musical thunderbolts emanating from the right hand of an over-stimulated Zeus. Music would never be the same after that decade-long bombardment; in fact, one could characterize the ensuing 19th century as a collective attempt to come to grips with, and mop up after, Beethoven’s volcanic Middle Period.

Even if the Third Concerto is putatively in the darkly dramatic key of C Minor, its first movement is quite the journey through a mélange of keys, moods, and affects. Almost right up to the end Beethoven manages to sidestep an easy resolution until absolute necessity dictates a proper wrap-up.

The second-place Adagio, one of the noblest movements in Beethoven’s concertos, could stand alone as an independent work of the Rhapsody variety. Just how far the piano had evolved in the mere ten years since Mozart’s last piano concerto is demonstrated by the middle section, in which a silvery haze from the piano accompanies and supports statements from the winds. Soon enough (too soon, it often seems) the final measures are reached, and in a sudden lurch the masterful third-place Rondo is propelled into action by the solo piano.

Beethoven’s finale has served as the inspiration and model for any number of later composers. Its square-jawed main theme turns out to be the inexhaustible source of the materials that follow, as Beethoven adroitly leaps over every pitfall of a form prone to stupefying tedium due to its periodic repeats. To conclude, Beethoven transforms that originally stern theme into the stuff for a dazzling celebratory frolic.

Gabriela Lena Frank (b. 1972): Three Latin-American Dances for Orchestra (2003)

“Perhaps there are other disciplines that I could have aimed my life at — I seriously considered political science and law — and who knows where those roads would have led? But my sense of self has developed inexorably along the simple principle of storytelling and creating objects of beauty through sound, leaving the earth hopefully a bit better.”

Thus wrote Gabriela Lena Frank, a notably successful practitioner of a profession not particularly noted for successes. Her influences and inspirations reach far beyond her native Berkeley, including Latin America (Peru in particular), Asia, and Eastern Europe. Frank tells us that the first of her Three Latin-American Dances for Orchestra of 2003 opens as an “unabashed tribute to the Symphonic Dances from West Side Story by Leonard Bernstein.” The second-place Highland Harawi evokes the mountainous mysteries of the Andean world, while the concluding Mestizo Waltz lightens the mood by celebrating the kaleidoscopic mestizo music of the South American Pacific coast.

**Leonard Bernstein: Symphonic Dances from West Side Story (1961)**

Bernstein’s theatrical masterpiece West Side Story, with lyrics by a then-unknown Stephen Sondheim and book by Arthur Laurents, opened to solid, if not overwhelming, success at New York’s Winter Garden Theater on September 26, 1957. A dramatic departure from Broadway norms in its threading of Jerome Robbins’s deeply integrated dance routines throughout an urban update of Shakespeare’s tragedy Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story constitutes a sophisticated hybrid of musical and ballet, the whole empowered by Bernstein’s magnificent, and now iconic, score.

In 1961, four years after the Broadway premiere, Bernstein assembled an orchestral suite that follows the show’s plot mostly via its dance routines, including songs such as “Somewhere,” later fused with “I Have a Love” in the tragic Finale. A point of particular interest: Bernstein’s skillful variants of the ecstatic love song “Maria” in both the “Cha-Cha” and the “Meeting Scene” as Tony and Maria discover each other, followed by an up-tempo variation of the same melodic figure as the nervous Jets dance the “Cool” fugue immediately before their climactic rumble with the Sharks.

Program Annotator Scott Foglesong is the Chair of Musicianship and Music Theory at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and a Contributing Writer and Lecturer for the San Francisco Symphony.

The California Symphony’s season opener BEETHOVEN & BERNSTEIN takes place on Sunday, September 23 at 4 PM at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek.

Visit www.californiasymphony.org for tickets and more information.

Something Old, Something New— Something Different

The 2017–18 season finale features two European masterpieces (“Something Old”), a world premiere (“Something New”), and a program with a difference

At first glance, the line up for the California Symphony’s May 6 season closer —SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW—may look like business as usual. However delve deeper, and there is more to the finale than might initially meet the eye.

Balch — like a broken clock (World Premiere)

Sibelius — Symphony №3

Brahms — Piano Concerto №2, with Haochen Zhang, piano

1. A World Premiere

First on the program is the debut performance of like a broken clock, written by Young American Composer in Residence Katherine Balch (2017–2020). By definition, a world premiere is new and therefore pretty special, so we won’t labor the point. (You can read more about Balch and her fascinating approach to composing here.)

2. A Symphony That’s Short

Next up is Finnish composer Jean Sibelius’ Symphony №3.

Pro-fans will notice that this is a break with the common pattern of classical music concert programming, which usually places the symphonic work at the end, after intermission. For this program, the running order is flipped, with the symphony before the break and the piano concerto at the end.

The reason for the flip is the relative length of the pieces: For a symphony, Sibelius’ Symphony №3 is a comparatively brief piece, clocking in at 31 minutes. It even comprises one fewer movement than the usual four you might expect from a symphonic work. This is the result of Sibelius choosing to move away from the Romantic style of his previous two symphonies — long, expansive works, influenced by the likes of Tchaikovsky — to explore a more focused, compressed style, characteristic of later composers.

3. A Concerto That’s Like a Symphony

After intermission and standing in contrast to the economy of the Sibelius symphony comes the mighty Brahms’ Piano Concerto №2. Delivered 22 years after his first, which was initially savaged by critics, Brahms’ second piano concerto is a grand and sweeping piece in the tradition of Romantic composers, with moments of drama and tenderness and culminating in thrilling finale. Brahms jokingly described it to a friend as a “tiny, tiny piano concerto,” but in fact, it’s a monumental piece that is often described as a “symphony with piano.”

Most concertos have a straightforward, “fast-slow-fast” three-movement structure, but Brahms added an extra fast second movement (the scherzo), so it’s a real workout for conductor, orchestra and soloist alike. For the soloist, it is also fiendishly difficult to play.

Taking on the challenge is acclaimed piano virtuoso Haochen Zhang, who won the 2009 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition at age 19. (Read more about this unique talent here.) Zhang first learned the piece at 15 and he performs it for only the second time in his career at the season finale.

“Brahms has always been one of my favorite composers, and this concerto certainly has given me an overwhelming joy everytime I listened or played it. It’s a perfect embodiment of this combination of grandness and intimacy and is perhaps why it’s so enduringly charming yet so challenging to interpret.” — Soloist Haochen Zhang on Brahms Piano Concerto №2.

4. A Special Reunion

Haochen Zhang and then Music Director candidate Donato Cabrera in 2013.

Guest artist Haochen Zhang last played with us five years ago when Donato Cabrera was a guest conductor, auditioning for the role of Music Director for the California Symphony. (Zhang played Beethoven’s Piano Concerto №4 — read more about that performance here.) The concert wowed critics, audiences, and the selection committee, and led to Cabrera’s appointment to the role he has held for the past five seasons.

Zhang says, “I recall lots of fond memories from the last time I was there. The Orchestra was really devoted and enthusiastic throughout the rehearsals, and Maestro Cabrera was not only a great conductor but such a supportive collaborator to a young musician like me.”

Cabrera chimes in: “I’ve been waiting for the right opportunity to bring back Haochen since we first worked together in 2013 on Beethoven’s Piano Concerto №4. I could tell through his approach to the Beethoven that he’d bring the same wonderful singing qualities to the Brahms Piano Concerto №2.”

The California Symphony’s 2017–18 season finale concert SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW takes place Sunday, May 6 at 4PM in Walnut Creek at the Lesher Center for the Arts.

For tickets and information, visit californiasymphony.org

Haochen Zhang: Veteran Pianist at Age 27

Season finale guest artist Zhang first wowed audiences at the age of 5

Then and now: At left, Zhang plays for family in preparation for his first professional gig, just shy of his 5th birthday. Right: Haochen Zhang now.

In demand internationally for nearly a decade now, Haochen Zhang first rose to prominence with his 2009 win at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition at just 19. However, his musical journey began much, much earlier: As a kindergartner, while friends were playing in the sandbox, Zhang was playing Mozart to great acclaim in his native China.

The Early Years

When Zhang was introduced to the piano a few months before his 4th birthday, he says it looked like a big toy to him, and when his mom asked if he’d like to learn to play, he embraced the opportunity. He says his mom “felt like I learned the piano faster than other children at the same age.”

At age 5, he dazzled a Shanghai Concert Hall audience with his interpretations of music by Bach, Mozart, and Haydn. By 6, he had debuted with the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra. When he was 11, Zhang toured major cities across China performing Beethoven, Mozart, and Chopin.

Success and accolades continued and in 2002, at 12 years of age, Zhang became the youngest winner in the history of the International Tchaikovsky Competition for Young Musicians.

Coming to America

2005 marked a turning point as Zhang came to the US to study at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia under Gary Graffman, who also taught major stars like Lang Lang and Yuja Wang. It was a challenging time for the young prodigy, especially after mom’s visa expired and she had to return home to China, leaving fifteen-year-old Zhang to make his way on his own in a foreign country and with limited English language skills.

Zhang with his mother around the time he relocated to the US to study music.

“I had learned to speak English before I came to the States, but only to the degree of simple conversation and very basic reading. Of course, I had to suffer quite a bit in my first school year in the States. But that was nothing compared to a much bigger challenge: the culture shock of an utterly different environment, and the loneliness of living by myself for the first time.”—Haochen Zhang remembering his move to the U.S. at 15.

Zhang’s Big Break

Zhang garnered international attention in 2009 when he won gold at the 13th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition—arguably the highest-profile piano competition in the world, which is held every four years in Fort Worth, TX. At 19, Zhang became the second youngest ever winner of the gold medal and the first from an Asian country.

Life After Gold

After winning the $20,000 cash prize, a recording contract, and a raft of international concert tour dates, Zhang embarked on a three-year tour across the United States, Americas, Asia and Europe, playing an astonishing 200 concerts at top venues across the globe. In 2017, he won the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant, awarded to only 5 outstanding musicians each year. He also released his first studio album CD the same year.

Now 27 years old, Haochen Zhang performs the immense and challenging Brahms Piano Concerto №2 in the California Symphony season finale concert SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW under Music Director Donato Cabrera at the Lesher Center in Walnut Creek on Sunday May 6 at 4PM.

“Brahms has always been one of my favorite composers, and this concerto certainly has given me an overwhelming joy everytime I listened or played it. It’s a perfect embodiment of this combination of grandness and intimacy and is perhaps why it’s so enduringly charming yet so challenging to interpret.” — Haochen Zhang on Brahms Piano Concerto №2.

For information and tickets, visit www.californiasymphony.org.

Piano Sensation Haochen Zhang Returns after a Pivotal Debut

Haochen Zhang reunites with Music Director Donato Cabrera five years after their first “glittering” collaboration

For internationally acclaimed, award-winning pianist Haochen Zhang, the California Symphony’s 2017–18 season finale concert SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW marks Zhang’s second time performing with the orchestra—five years after his 2013 debut and a concert which holds special significance in the 31-year history of the organization.

In the three seasons after founding Music Director Barry Jekowski’s departure from the California Symphony in 2010, audiences in Walnut Creek welcomed a total of 12 guest conductors to the podium as the organization searched for a successor. Towards the end of that search, for what would be his final chance to impress, then Music Director candidate Donato Cabrera led the orchestra in a program he devised which featured music by Adams, Prokofiev, and Beethoven’s Piano Concerto №4.

The guest artist he selected to feature on that program was 22-year-old piano sensation Haochen Zhang — one of the youngest ever winners of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, and already an established soloist who was in-demand internationally.

On his winning performance at the 2009 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, The Dallas Morning News observed that Haochen Zhang “demonstrated a musical maturity almost unimaginable in one so young… he impressed with depth of musical understanding and subtle expressive nuance.”

It proved a wise choice.

In a review of the March 2013 concert, the Mercury News declared: “The afternoon’s centerpiece was a glittering performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto №4, with pianist Haochen Zhang as soloist. Cabrera shaped this radiant score with elegance and precision, and Zhang… was a strong, stylish partner.”

The review continues: “Zhang, a 22-year-old native of China, resists the swooning excess that besets many of his contemporaries in performances of Beethoven’s music. In the concerto’s first movement, his playing was assured and briskly emphatic; the finale came across with arresting, clear-eyed vigor.”

And as for Cabrera?

The Mercury News’ review headline says it all: “Guest conductor Cabrera, California Symphony make a perfect match in concert.” The piece continued: “Cabrera, conducting with impressive energy and meticulous focus, drew vibrant, dynamic playing from the ensemble.” Clearly, it was enough to persuade the selection committee and soon after the concert, Cabrera was appointed California Symphony’s second ever Music Director, a position he has held for 5 years and counting.

“I recall lots of fond memories from the last time I was there. The orchestra was really devoted and enthusiastic throughout the rehearsals, and Maestro Cabrera was not only a great conductor but such a supportive collaborator to a young musician like me.”—Haochen Zhang on his 2013 California Symphony debut.

On Zhang’s return, Cabrera comments: “I’ve been waiting for the right opportunity to bring back Haochen since we first worked together in 2013 on Beethoven’s Piano Concerto №4. I could tell through his approach to the Beethoven that he’d bring the same wonderful singing qualities to the Brahms Piano Concerto №2.”

Zhang agrees: “One could argue that Beethoven 4 and Brahms 2 share a certain kind of likeness, in the sense that both are large-scale works full of Germanic spirit yet intimate reflections, which makes me look forward even more to our collaboration this time.”

The California Symphony’s season finale concert SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW takes place on Sunday, May 6 at 4 PM at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek.

Visit www.californiasymphony.org for tickets and more information.