Alice in Wonderland

Phyllis? The new Alice? This was my first thought as I walked into Sears Recital Hall. It was this woman sitting down with a miniature, apple red toy piano with pots and pans surrounding her. She appeared like a giant to the small instrument sitting before her, like Alice in multiple scenes throughout the story. In addition, in her introduction, she uses this comparison to Alice in Wonderland. Soon enough, the chiming began. At first, it was sort of magical. Who would’ve ever thought you could accomplish this type of noise with such a small instrument or that of a piano for that matter. However, as the performance went on, my opinion changed. The high-pitched chiming turned to pounding giving me quite the ongoing headache. The next element of the performance was the real piano. She used paper to create a different noise. Unfortunately, this sound wasn’t satisfying what so ever. The piece of paper rattled like static you would hear on the radio or a blank TV channel. In my opinion, the rest of this part sounded like bad horror music in an old movie. The music she was performing wasn’t exactly what I imagine when I think of classical music. In contrast, I did admire her passion for such an unusual instrument. She talked about her discovery and developed love of toy pianos with excitement. While she played, as part of the audience, I noticed she devoted all her energy to the music from the movement of her body, especially her head to the quickness of her fingers. You could tell she truly enjoyed what she was doing. Overall, when I think of toy pianos I imagine them to be like the one in the movie “Big” with Tom Hanks. In this movie, he moves and hops across these large keys on a huge piano on the floor and draws quite a crowd. Hank plays this character that is truly a big kid at heart; maybe Phyllis Chen is a kid at heart playing toy pianos as not only a job, but out of pure enjoyment.