Yesterday was a first for me—playing two recitals in one day and prepping for one only an hour before!

The morning started out leisurely, and I was able to indulge in my usual concert prep practice of studying the score away from the keyboard. I was especially paying attention to stop and manual changes in my score because the Trinity Lutheran organ was four manuals and had many more stops than our Beckerath organ in Honolulu.

Joan Ishibashi and I arrived at the church at 11:00 am, and I quickly reviewed the stop pulls with Florence Mustric whom we had met and had lunch with on Monday. She really made all the difference in how smoothly everything went on the Dupré “Cortège et litanie.”

Here is the program:

In addition to David Lawrence in the audience (I had first met him in Greece last June), guess who drove two hours to come to the concert?

It’s April Smith formerly of the Lutheran Church of Honolulu! April had apparently read in this blog that I was coming to Cleveland to give this concert and drove all the way from the Cincinnati area! It was so great to find out that she is doing well here and has “found her place.” She had told Angela Freeman-Riley about the concert but unfortunately Angela went to the Trinity Episcopal (instead of Lutheran) where there was also a noon-time organ concert!

Another person whom I met at the concert was Marlene Goldheimer, with whom Sae Shiragami (Joan’s violinist friend from the Cleveland Orchestra) had shared my Doc Martin video. Marlene is a Clunatic (Martin Clunes fan, like me!) and we chatted a few minutes about our favorite Doc Martin stories.

Joan’s friends Dave and Mary Ellen Szamborski and Michael Ruffing (whom I had meet on Monday) also came to the concert. The music went well, and I was pleased with about 99% of it—the small boo-boos (like not pulling the 2′ flute stop in the Dale Wood “Pisgah”) were somewhat insignificant.

I just HAD to take a picture of this sign outside the Trinity Lutheran office—I didn’t know that dogs could read, did you?

No sooner than we said goodbye to the last guests we had to be on the road to Akron where the second concert took place at Trinity United Church of Christ. This was the congregation Joan served as interim pastor a couple of years ago, and the people there were very glad to see her.

Amazingly I was able to register all my pieces in about half an hour (it was the same program, but on a completely different organ). Somewhat unnerving, though, was the fact that some of the general pistons, after being set, cancelled all the Swell stops! I found out the same thing happened with some of the Swell division pistons, so I quickly had to come up with a Plan B—to push the pistons that were more reliable.

Afterwards there was a reception and I met a lot of nice people.

We then drove to Hinckley, OH where we met Joan’s friends, Dan Gebhardt and Ray Usiak, and had a delicious Italian dinner at a nearby restaurant.

Fun evening!

Now, one more concert today, then I’ll be going home tomorrow.