At six years of age, Tricia Dawn Williams was, as she puts it, “tinkling away on four toy pianos − three blue and one black”. Today, at 38, she is one of Malta’s most accomplished pianists, specialising in modern/contemporary music.
She told me that her constant “tinkling” at home got the message across and her dad found her a piano teacher. From the age of seven right up to Grade Eight, she always came first in her piano exams under the tutelage of Rita Micallef. She also got a bronze medal at 12 and a silver at 14 (competitors were from four different countries) from Trinity College of Music in London. She took her ‘O’ levels while working for her eight grade exam and her ‘A’ levels while studying for her piano diploma, Dawn tells me proudly.
“I suppose I was a bit of a nerd, at least that’s what my friends used to say I was, ” she adds. “As soon as I got home from school I would head straight to the piano and start practising, I never stopped to eat, or for anything else, until my mum would start shouting at me to get on with my homework, which I usually got done by 11pm. There were no weekend outings, except to play the organ in church,” she said.
The organ playing came about when the parish priest visited their home to bless it. “Whenever people came home, my father would ask me to play the piano for them. I remember hating it and trying to avoid it, or just being stubborn and refusing to do it. I just hated someone trying to show me off.”
However, she did play something for the priest and he asked her whether she would like to start playing the organ at the 6pm Mass during the week. “I honestly don’t remember agreeing to this, but the next day my father came home with a brand new copy of the hymn book Innijiet with all the music. It looked very easy to play and boring, I’m afraid to say.
“When the day came I arrived three quarters of an hour earlier, because I had to be shown the ropes. I had never seen an organ in my life. So many buttons, and the pedals. My first experience was that whatever music was put in front of me I had to forget the time signature, all I had to do was play the notes and let everyone sing.
“At first this was very frustrating, but then I decided to look at it from a different angle and thought it would be a good exercise for me to play in a different way. I also started improvising because I thought that if they can do what they want then so can I. Strangely enough, improvising always came naturally to me on the organ, but I shy away when I’m asked to do it on the piano, something that has always baffled me!”
Dawn’s organ playing got noticed and people started commenting positively. “It was then, at age 13, that I started going for organ lessons with Patri Bert Borg, who sadly passed away this year, and learnt how to play the organ properly, using the pedals too. I had an organ lesson once a week and piano lessons twice a week,” she said.
“So I suppose boyfriends were out of the question,” I remarked. “I was also 13 when I met my first boyfriend,” she told me. When I asked how on earth she had found the time, she said had met him in church of course. “I used to practise on the pipe organ in church every Saturday morning. In no time I was playing at all the major ceremonies at my parish church in Senglea. But after I did my Grade 8 exam, I had to take a decision.
Practising once or twice a week wasn’t enough and Patri Bert suggested I buy my own organ. But I was more interested in playing the piano, so my organ studies fell by the wayside,” she said. Dawn was 16 when she had her first serious relationship, which ended up in marriage at 19 followed by the birth of her first daughter, Sehrazat, now 19, and her second daughter Seda, now 18, a year later.
“That drastic change in my lifestyle put a stop to my piano playing. Looking after two small girls left me no time, let alone energy, for anything else. In retrospect I should have concentrated on my music and not got married so early. Except that of course I adore my girls. I was separated at 22 and I felt that I had crammed a lifetime in those three years, ” she said.
Having neglected the piano for four to five years, Dawn’s first break came in her mid twenties through a chance meeting with violinist James Grech. “I was in partnership with my ex husband in a chain of Turkish food outlets at the time, and one evening, James, wearing his tails, came in to one of them after a concert.
“We got chatting. He was telling me about his career and I told him, ‘I used to play the piano’. He got very interested and surprised me by saying, ‘why don’t we play a concert together’. I was really taken aback, I had almost forgotten I used to play the piano until we started chatting, so was rather nervous about such an undertaking,” she told me.
However, James persuaded her to start practising with him “just for fun”. That went so well that they were booked for their first recital of classical and romantic music for piano and violin at the Manoel’s Sala Isouard, six months later.
“On the morning of the concert I got so scared that I phoned James at 6am and told him I wanted to cry off. He was rightly furious and there was no way he would agree to cancel. So I had to perform. I was very tense and I certainly did not enjoy it, but I was back to some serious piano playing.”
Dawn played regularly with James for a couple of years. In 1999 she met the composer Rueben Zahra, who had just returned to Malta after four years in Rome. “Until I met him, my music knowledge was restricted to classical and romantic composers like Chopin and Rachmaninoff. He gave me a Bartok piano concerto CD as a birthday present to introduce me to modern music. I immediately fell in love with Bartok and Rueben suggested that I start taking lessons in modern music.
“That was when I started studying Bartok with Pawlu Grech, who introduced me to other modern composers like Ligeti, Cage, Saygun and Adams.”
Later that year Dawn gave her first performance of contemporary music with the original Etnika, which had been set up by Ruben Zahra and Andrew Alamango, featuring works by Rueben. “Since then I have only played modern and contemporary music,” she told me.
In the early 2000s, Dawn played a lot with Etnika in several concerts around Malta. After a couple of years, Etnika started playing different music. Eventually, the initial instrumental formation changed to a more flexible one, which did not include a piano. However, she continued doing duo recitals with different people, “but nothing major,” she said.
“In 2007, Ruben wanted to record Mouse in the Machine for clarinet and piano. Lino Pirotta was to play the clarinet. Lino was also very interested in modern and contemporary music so we clicked immediately and after recording Ruben’s piece we started to plan a recital of our own. We played at St James Cavalier, private events and during Notte Bianca. That was when we decided on the name – Equinox.
In 2009, Karl Fiorini asked the duo to play his music at a recital, but it needed a violinist. They asked Tatiana Kirkop whether she was interested in joining them. She was and Equinox grew from a duo to a trio.
That year, the group played in Paris at Les Invalides, at a recital at the President’s Palace and took part in Evenings on Campus. Equinox has also often taken part in recitals organised by embassies and has been invited to festivals by composers, who wanted them to play their work.
In 2011, the Equinox Trio were invited to play at the Contemporary Sounds Festival organised by the Malta Association for Contemporary Music; Evenings on Campus; the International Festival of the Arts, and Karl Fiorini’s Spring Festival. Besides her work with the Equinox trio, Dawn is also part of Rueben Zahra’s ‘Crossbreed’, an open contemporary ensemble.
Its name derives from the fact that the instruments change according to the project in hand. Crossbreed, with Dawn on piano, Kevin Abela on trumpet and Daniel Cauchi on percussion, was in Torino last November to open a festival of contemporary music Musiche in Mostra, with Rueben Zahra’s Diversity, which they were all very excited about. Maltese audiences, me included, got the opportunity to hear this dynamic and eclectic piece, including both drama and fun, at Sala Isouard, during Karl Fiorini’s Spring Festival this year.
Then of course Dawn has ongoing projects with her solo work, one of which involves piano and storytelling of folktales, myths and legends. She is working with a Maltese narrator, Joseph Galea, and last November she was invited by the Associazione Culturale Etnea to perform in Sicily with Italian actress Biancamaria Stanzani Ghedini. She has performed this work locally several times as part of Notte Bianca, Evenings on Campus and at St James Cavalier for school projects.
“One of my favourites is Henry Cowell’s Three Irish Legends, which can be performed with a narrator, or just on the piano. Besides the fact that the pieces of contemporary music that I choose are dynamic and powerful, what I find so exciting is discovering new composers, discussing their music with them and bringing it all alive. On top of all that, the cherry on the cake is when one of those composers asks me whether I would like him or her to write a piece for me. This has happened with two composers, one Scot and the other American.”
Dawn’s hectic lifestyle has not really changed that much since her girls have grown up, she just plays more music and looks after two pet degus − Walter and Peter. But she does stick to a healthy regime. She is up at six and makes up a breakfast of fresh vegetable juices. She loves gadgets and waxed lyrical about her wonderful juicer, which she bought abroad. Then off to work at 7.30 until 5 pm. (She has a full time job with General Soft Drinks as PA to the general manager).
“Music is my life, but I have to put food on the table. Having said that, I have a wonderful boss and am lucky to have a great work environment,” she tells me. After work she practices on the piano from six to nine with a dinner break and is in bed by 10. Thursdays are the exception because she goes to a Pilates class. The weekends are for household chores and shopping and of course five hours of piano practice. I almost didn’t dare ask about socialising. “Well, I do go to concerts, especially when friends are performing,” she said.
So what are Dawn’s plans for the future? “On Tuesday I shall be playing with Nafra, a traditional folk ensemble with a contemporary edge (also a Ruben Zahra enterprise) at the Institute of Art & Design Annual Exhibition and on 4 August in Sicily, also with Nafra.
In 2013, a recital is planned with Macedonian musician Gyorgyi Ciencievski on double bass, featuring new work composed specifically for Dawn and Gyorgyi by Maltese, Chinese, Australian, American and Macedonian composers.
“I shall also be working with a French composer, Denis Levaillant, who has just finished writing 20 piano études. He is selecting pianists from all over the globe and organising a worldwide premier tour. I was lucky that he came across some of my live performances on YouTube and asked me whether I would be interested in being one of them, which of course I was delighted to accept.”
You can watch Dawn playing on this link – www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzBFzaT0me8
Article published in the Independent on Sunday on 01 July 2012
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