Lorelai Gango/The Mossy Log
On April 12, just after 7:30 p.m., Lewis & Clark senior Josh Nguyen ’26 walked onto the Evans Auditorium stage in a maroon suit and floral necktie. Without a word, Nguyen sat down at the Steinway piano and launched into a fast, dramatic piece by the Baroque composer Domenico Scarlatti. With no sheet music, he navigated tension-building crescendos, thunderous low bass notes and viciously difficult hand-crossing maneuvers — where the pianist’s left hand reaches back and forth over the right hand to play the highest and lowest notes of a musical strain. After deftly executing two false endings, Nguyen finally brought the piece to its resolution, which was met by loud applause from the audience.
He then stood up and explained that the rest of the program for the night would consist of other classical piano pieces, in contrast to the implications of the recital’s title, “Silly Songs with Larry Josh.”
“Silly Songs with Larry” is a segment on the Christian television show “VeggieTales,” in which, according to Nguyen, “Larry the cucumber sings about missing his hairbrush, or being a lazy pirate or something like that.” The titling decision for the concert — which Nguyen made in order to take some of the seriousness out of the recital — may have netted him some unexpected audience members.
“There was a very young child and what I presume to be his father sitting in the very front row. I didn’t recognize them… the running hypothesis for that is that they thought it was going to be a ‘VeggieTales’ children’s music concert, and then it wasn’t,” Nguyen said in an interview with The Mossy Log. “They stayed for the whole thing.”
The front-row duo, with their apparent enthusiasm for classical piano, must have appreciated Nguyen’s next piece: a Franz Schubert sonata with an incredibly rapid and dense melody. This piece also featured dramatic low bass notes and was played mostly from memory, with light pedal work and stylistic brio.
Susan Smith, associate professor of music, department chair and director of piano at LC, has been teaching Nguyen for all four years of his college career. Smith described the progress Nguyen made under her instruction.
“He plays with great freedom, both interpretive freedom and physical freedom,” she said in an interview with The Mossy Log.
For Nguyen’s next piece, he brought Cappella Nova singers Zach Martin ’26 and Elise Barton ’26 to sing “Take Me As I Am” from the musical “Jekyll & Hyde,” which the trio had also performed at Martin’s senior recital earlier in the semester. Although the piece’s piano part was less technically complicated than the first two, providing backing music as a pianist presents its own set of challenges.
“Accompanying somebody who’s a vocalist versus playing piano by yourself is an entirely separate game of what you’re doing,” Nguyen said. “You have to be taking all of your cues from them: the pacing, the dynamics, everything is based off what they’re doing.”
Nguyen’s next piece, another solo work, was a nocturne by Frédéric Chopin, a composer of the Romantic period. Like the pieces by Scarlatti and Schubert, the piece was dramatic but balanced, its prominent crescendos with a peaceful, dreamlike feel created in part by Nguyen’s right-hand minor-key harmonies.
A source of frustration for any piano student, regardless of skill level, is page turns: lifting a hand off the keys long enough to flip a page of sheet music without interrupting the flow of the piece generally ranges from difficult to impossible. Nguyen often deals with this obstacle by memorizing all or most of his performance pieces, but for the Chopin piece, he was able to turn the page with his right hand while continuing to fill the melody with his left. He credits this to luck with the printing of the sheet music, which places the page turn at a point where his right hand can be lifted without interrupting the performance.
For the recital’s finale, Nguyen played a Maurice Ravel concerto, with Smith playing the orchestral reduction (accompaniment) on a second piano, and Martin providing page turns. The longest piece in the program, it was patient and elegant, showcasing Ravel’s complex style with melodies and harmonies spanning the full range of the keys.
Visually, what struck me from my seat in the audience was that everyone onstage was performing with impeccable posture. Piano performance is a very physical discipline, with technique that goes far beyond the performer’s hands. Smith explained that straight posture is important to allow the pianist’s shoulders to be down and relaxed.
“You have to think of the piano-playing mechanism as your whole body,” Smith said. “You always think about movement from your shoulders all the way through to your fingertips.”
Nguyen noted a stark contrast between his practicing posture and his performance posture, describing the former as “like a little vampire on his organ, and then it comes time to actually perform, and I feel like there’s a ruler going up.” He credited his mastery of physical piano performance technique to his theatre major, particularly body movement courses taught by Professor of Theatre Rebecca Lingafelter.
Smith also gave kudos to the LC theater program for Nguyen’s stellar technique, though she stipulated, “I tried to get him to be a music major.”
Nguyen certainly has a temperament for music study. He described the tempo, dynamics and phrasing of his repertoire as “individual pieces that all fit together into a beautiful puzzle canvas of a finished performance.”
After graduation, Nguyen plans to stay in Portland, building his theater portfolio with the goal of eventually getting accepted into a higher education program and becoming a theater director. He is also thinking about teaching piano lessons.
“Any way that I can get my foot in the door of any kind of art in the Portland scene, I would love to do,” Nguyen said.
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