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My First Tour
Read through, there´s a nice gift at the end ;)
My first professional tour was very exciting and special. I was 20 years old and living in Finland. I was still studying for my piano degree, but I had already been performing publicly for a few years.
The tour consisted in playing together with an ensemble through a few different cities in Denmark and Sweden.
They were neighboring countries but I had never been there before. I actually had only been in three countries before in my life: Perú (where I was born and raised), the United States (where I won a piano competition when I was 17), and Finland where I’d been living since I was 18.
Life in Finland was tough, I worked a lot and was always behind in my studies because of this, and I didn´t have much money. So this tour, even though it wasn’t well paid, meant a good bit of extra cash which I desperately needed.
The tour went great, and I loved getting to know these new places. I particularly loved Stockholm, Sweden’s beautiful capital, and Copenhagen where I stayed for a few days.
I was very impressed riding over the 8-kilometer long Öresund bridge which unites the southern Swedish city of Malmö with Copenhagen on the Danish front.
I marveled at the raw beauty of Denmark’s capital and the care they took with all the details in the shops and houses. Hygge.
Even though it was spring, the weather was dreadfully cold. The sun shone regularly but it didn’t really help much. Why is it that in extremely cold weather, a sunny day is actually colder than a cloudy one? I never understood that…
Anyways, one of those days while strolling by myself through the streets, for some reason I suddenly remembered how far I was from my home country and from everything that was familiar to me. Scandinavia and Latin-America are extremely different in practically every aspect.
I started to get a bit sad, and aided by the cold weather and the harshness of the winter that had just gone by, I started feeling a sense of loneliness, of being lost. Of not knowing what the heck I was doing there, so far away removed from my roots and whatever bit of security I could hold on to.
Of course, security is a strange way to put it… when I left Perú, it still was a country broken down by the recently overcome civil war between the army and terrorists, the constant political storms and scandals, and an extremely high level of crime.
But I guess you know what I mean when I say “security”. The security of the things you´re familiar with.
In the middle of this sorrowful stroll, a melody suddenly popped into my head. I found it beautiful and I couldn’t figure out if I had heard it before or if I had just made it up.
I quickly grabbed a small blank sheet music notebook (I always carry one with me wherever I go) and wrote it down. I forgot about it and didn´t hear it again, so I guess I had made it up.
Fast forward to 20 years later.
I was looking for some papers and I found this notebook. I opened it and among all the scribbles I’d done during that time, I found this piece. I remembered exactly where I had been and what I was feeling at the moment of writing it down while in Copenhagen.
I was touched, and decided to record it.
As a gift to you for being part of my mailing list, I’m giving you a link where you can listen to this piece, which I find particularly beautiful, and a free download of the sheet music so that you can play it, or simply to observe it if you don’t play any instrument :)
Here is the link: Faret Vild, for piano.
I hope you enjoy it.
Have a great day.
Claudio.