A pair of pianists compete in world’s top amateur piano competition

BRUSH PRAIRIE — All the feeling comes through the fingers — and the faith.

Two stellar Clark County pianists — Colleen Adent and Sandra Baumgarten — have been invited to travel to Fort Worth, Texas, and participate in the world’s most prestigious amateur piano contest, the Cliburn International Piano Competition, which begins June 19, and lasts for several days of live performance and professional judging. It winds up with six finalists performing a whole movement of a concerto for piano and orchestra, accompanied by the Fort Worth Symphony.

Adent and Baumgarten have never met, and they live on opposite sides of Clark County — Adent facing Fruit Valley and the Vancouver Lake Lowlands, Baumgarten perched in the foothills of the Cascades — but their musical and personal journeys have been similar. Each excelled in music early on, each developed doubts and took detours. In the end, religious faith helped each woman return to music and embrace it as a way of life.

Adent said that playing piano is her best way of worshipping God. And Baumgarten is sure that faith healed her ailing, overworked hands.

“It’s nothing I did own my own,” she said.

Healing hands

Raised in Fairbanks, Alaska, Baumgarten started banging on her grandmother’s miniature spinet piano at age 8 and quickly started running out of keys, she said. The upright piano that replaced the spinet when she was 9 is the one she has practiced on most of her life, she said, and it has proved a hardy traveler from Fairbanks to the hills east of Brush Prairie.

Baumgarten graduated from the University of Alaska at Fairbanks with a degree in music and piano performance, and she earned a full scholarship to keep studying music at the University of Oregon — but she seemed to hit a wall there, she said. Eight hours of practice per day, in a windowless basement room, became oppressive. All she had ever tried was music.

It was time for a change.

“I literally flew away from graduate school and took to the skies,” she said.

Being a flight attendant had at least one major reward, she noted — it’s how she met her husband, Robert, a Horizon Airlines pilot — but she also missed her beloved piano.

Lesson learned.

Now 37, Baumgarten and her husband have three young children who split their time between public and home schooling in Brush Prairie. She maintains a small group of piano students — four to six per week — and purchased a Steinway this year for the new front room of the house. And she has served as choir director at her family’s church for years. In fact, church was Baumgarten’s major musical outlet as she faced another major test along the way.

“For 16 years, I struggled with severe carpal tunnel and tendonitis, so I could not play any of this music,” she said. “It was really frustrating to not do what you want to do and spent your entire life doing.”

When she did push herself to play, she would pay the price: Her hands froze up and hurt so badly that she couldn’t sleep at night. She tried everything, she said — alternative therapies, acupuncture and oils, new techniques for posture and playing — but in the end, Baumgarten credits God with healing her.

“I can play fast now, and there’s no swelling, no clicking,” she said. “My hands are totally healed.”

Depth of feeling

Baumgarten’s favorite pieces are by the heavy-duty Romantics. Franz Liszt, Frederic Chopin, Johannes Brahms: the 19th century keyboard masters who strove to get past mere technical brilliance and achieve great depth of feeling, to reach far inside the human heart.

“Raw passion” is what she wants to deliver in Fort Worth, she said.

“I hope to bring a technically strong program, but what I want to offer as an artist is the passion. Why did somebody devote their life to this? Why have I devoted my life to this?”

Certain great performances seem to go someplace sublime, Baumgarten said.

“I still remember performances where I felt that. And you don’t really know what you’re feeling. Am I happy? Am I sad?”

It cannot be named, she said. She just knows she’s been moved.

Baumgarten said she isn’t worried about winning the Cliburn.

“It’s an honor to even be there,” she said. “Of course, I want to make it past the first round, and I would love, love, love to play with the Forth Worth Symphony.”

But she already considers herself a victor.

“Miracles can happen. Healing can happen. I can play again. That’s already the win,” she said.

Wired for music

Bend, Ore., native Adent was 2 years old when her family started baby-sitting somebody else’s piano, she said.

“I’d come home from church and plunk out the song we had sung … in the same key we had done it in church,” she said.

Her father, who had musical training, realized his daughter was “wired for music” and started her on lessons, she said.

It came a little too easily.

“I was able to do well and not work dreadfully hard, which was a lovely combination,” Adent said.

But doubts and burnout nagged at her; like Baumgarten, she had never tried anything else. In college, at Biola University in California, Adent took a semester off from music. As a young mother living in John Day, Ore., she took years off.

That was after fancy but soulless gigs such as playing dinner music at a Ritz Carlton hotel in California.

“You sit and play while rich people eat their really expensive toast,” Adent said. “I began to feel like, ‘Put in a quarter and watch her go.’ I was ready to set it aside.”

A few years playing nothing but Mom in John Day cured that.

“I’m a musician,” she said. “I keep trying to run away from it and fight it, but you know what? I am a musician.”

In her early 40s, with her children growing up and moving on, she dove back into lessons and a major life commitment.

“God wired me to make music,” Adent said. “I am going to be the most fulfilled, and he is going to receive the most glory … if I do it with all my heart.”

Today, not yesterday

Adent, 54, loves sweet tunes and lush swells of sound.

“There’s something about a beautiful melody that just grabs me. I like pieces that I feel like I can sing, which means Chopin,” she said. “The stuff I play well is big, flowy, full-bodied sound. How many colors of the rainbow can we pull out of this?”

She’s both a serious classical player, as well as a playful improviser.

“The ability to flex and roll has always been a part of me,” and it has helped her make diverse connections and get diverse gigs, she said, including weddings, funerals and other private functions.

The improvisational spirit is useful even in the strictest repertory situations, she said. The challenge of playing a well-worn composition for the umpteenth time is like the challenge of acting in a play, she said. The text is laid out in demanding detail, and yet your own personality and feelings must shine through in each new performance.

“Even though the notes are on the page … I can have a freedom to play them in a new way, a fresh way, because it’s today and not yesterday,” she said. “Classical music so often is thought of as reproducing some dead guy’s idea. If you just try to reproduce it, it will be a snoozer, and you’ll never win, because you’re not the dead guy.”

Adent’s three children have all moved along, and her husband supports her long hours of teaching and practice by taking care of the household chores, she said.

“He is an absolute dream,” she said.

Some musical spouses get deathly sick of hearing the same pieces over and over, she said, but not Nathan.

There’s a larger lesson about life here, Adent added: “Learning about life through music and music in life, the way it braids together, you can hardly separate the two.”