Kiwi experience kind to US concert pianist

ARTS “NOT suitable for work!” blares the sex-alert on the on-line footage from the film adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s 1889 novel The Kreutzer Sonata. But it’s not raunch The Guide is looking for. Rather, it is the dexterous digits of US concert pianist Melanie Hadley Lina who played the music — and the hands — for the film.
There they are, flying across the keyboard as they snatch out the notes for the piece of the film’s title.
But, Lina says from her new home in Cambridge, musicality is the only thing she shares with the film’s female lead.
For one, unlike Tolstoy’s ill-fated Abby, Lina’s Kiwi husband is not prone to fits of murderous jealousy. For another, Lina is not a pianist whose career has been thwarted
. . . instead, she is one that is thriving in New Zealand, with concerts including the one she presents in Gisborne next week.
Though acknowledged as an artist of note since she graduated from the University of Kansas around a decade ago, the Missouri native says that, back in the US, “there are so many more musicians who are all grasping at the same opportunities”.
She sees New Zealand, where she moved to last year, as “a kind of a land of opportunity”.
To keep her occupied there are a raft of teaching commitments, including those in-house at Hamilton’s St. Paul’s Collegiate School.
And then there’s her busy concert sched-ule: “If you know who to talk to it is much easier in New Zealand to make a phone call and arrange a concert, and there seem to be many communities here eager for what I have to offer,” she says.
Already on the calendar are solo performances to be staged for audiences in the Waikato and Auckland regions. Then, Lina has been contracted to join orchestras from Wellington to Northland for a series of 2012 concerts showcasing the work of composers including Rachmaninoff, Schumann and Tchaikovsky.
But she says that, before then, she wanted to perform in Gisborne because of its special place in her heart.
When she first came to New Zealand in 2009 to meet up with the New Zea-lander who is now her husband, she hopped off the international flight in Auckland and directly onto another plane that brought her to visit her future sister-in-law in rural Gisborne.
Then, when she returned at the end of the following year, it was to be married at that same Waerenga-o-Kuri homestead.
“Perhaps because of that I have always loved the area and was determined to come and play there,” says Lina.
And she’s not fussed that she may not get as big an audience as she might if she stuck to the larger centres.
“To be honest, that’s not even a consideration,” she says.
“I am the kind of musician to whom it doesn’t matter whether there are two people or 2000 in the audience. I am still going to play the same way. . . I am not going to let the quality of the performance suffer.”
For her Gisborne concert, Lina has planned a programme of works from a piano transcription of Bach’s famous choral work Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring and Beethoven’s “substantial” Waldstein (Piano Sonata No. 21) to the Three Preludes by George Gershwin.
And there is going to be a little something extra to remind her of the day she got married. She will play accompaniment for three songs performed by emerging young soprano Cheyney Biddlecombe, who sang at her wedding.
“I suppose my intention is to try to put classical piano music in the forefront of people’s minds,” Lina said.
“I want to show that, just because it involves one person sitting in front of a piano for an hour or so, that doesn’t mean it can’t be very exciting.” ■ Melanie Hadley Lina will be in concert at Gisborne’s St Andrew’s Church this Saturday, September 24 (7.30pm).