Pianist Heng-Jin Park: “I’m grateful for the opportunity; I wouldn’t have given it to myself.”
Write a novel. Get into shape. Spruce up that vintage machine in the garage. Make the glorious garden you always wanted. Organize the closets.
Everyone created pandemic goals. Faced with societal shutdown, it was a way to cope. Realistic or not, projects helped ease the uncertainty.
Pianist Heng-Jin Park created her own goals—decidedly more ambitious than others. Goals she eventually achieved.
“I’ve was kinda depressed for a couple of weeks, down in the dumps,” the Cambridge resident says about the initial concert cancellations, back in March. “Then I watched a documentary about Leonard Bernstein, made long ago. He was talking about his own first piano lesson, at Curtis. He brought Beethoven’s Pastorale sonata, opus 28. I had played it, but not for a long time.
“So I started practicing it. But with no concerts, and no deadlines, I thought, ‘Why not go back and relearn all 32 Beethoven sonatas?’ I figured by the fall I’d have to stop, because we’d have a normal concert schedule. That was unrealistic.”
So eventually Park prepared all the sonatas for performance, committing them to memory. Normally such dedication ends in a concert tour, or a massive recording project. But this summer, it became a personal accomplishment, not a public one.
“I’m grateful for the opportunity,” she says, “I wouldn’t have given it to myself. I didn’t really have any listeners—just my dog, who lies under the piano and keeps me company.”
Perhaps some day Park will perform them. But for now, the performance part of her life remains on hold.
She’s more accustomed to a hectic schedule, touring with her Boston Trio, which includes her son, cellist Jonah Ellsworth, and violinist Irina Muresanu. And spending her summers directing the popular Halcyon Music Festival in Portsmouth, NH, which she founded seven years ago. All of those activities will have to wait until audiences can gather together safely.
“I’m in good company,” she says about her fellow musicians. “All of my concerts have been canceled too.
“It was supposed to be one of the busiest times for our trio,” she says, “going all over the country—California, Virginia, Minnesota, Kansas. We’re hoping that some concerts can be resurrected, but everyone is so uncertain about their own future.”
Those performance dates depend on other presenters. Park’s summer festival—normally seven concerts, over two weeks in July, held in Portsmouth’s St. John’s Episcopal Church—is her own creation, and canceling that was a hard reality to accept.
“For Halcyon, I held out hope as long as I possibly could,” she says. “But by the beginning of May it was obvious that it would be impossible. It broke my heart.
“All the musicians live together for two weeks,” she says, “and we create our own community. We become incredibly close, and it’s reflected in our music. That’s why it’s been successful.”
The disappointment has developed into a determination to hold the festival next summer—vaccine or not.
“It’s a beautiful church, a huge, absolutely gorgeous space, and we really could do social distancing there,” Park says. “I’m quite certain that as long as we can do it safely, we can do it next year. Maybe the world will be in a different place by then.
“I’m hopeful. The winter will be tough. It might take a year-and-a-half, or so, to get back to normal. But I believe the performing arts will come back, albeit slower than we all want.
“There have been moments when I’ve turned to my husband and said, ‘It’s gone, it’s going to die. It was already a dying art. Why would anyone risk their health when they can sit in the comfort of their own home?’
“But live performance, and dance, live theater, it’s so exciting. It cannot be replaced,” she insists. “I don’t think it will ever go back to the way things were, but I’m optimistic.”
Keith Powers covers music and the arts for Gannett New England, Opera News and Leonore Overture. Follow @PowersKeith; email to keithmichaelpowers@gmail.com.