Bonnie Wagner used to put on piano recitals in her Los Altos home. And as she’s grown into a 17-year-old, senior-to-be at Los Altos High, the popular concert has moved to the bigger Los Altos United Methodist Church.
This Sunday, the recent winner of the local Rabinowich piano competition is slated to perform works by Bach, Ravel, Beethoven and Chopin.
“Everything’s going pretty well,” Wagner said of her two- to three-hour daily rehearsals. “I really love all the pieces. Especially the Ravel and Chopin. The Chopin is a really hard piece, and it’s (practice) been a good experience. Any Chopin is really beautiful.”
Wagner has been seriously playing piano for 10 years, but her interest in the instrument surfaced when she was about 4 or 5 years old while living in San Francisco.
“My mom told me I’d go up to the piano and start plunking out little tunes on it,” she said. “And I started taking lessons as soon as we moved to Los Altos.”
And those lessons have molded her into a fine pianist, who has performed this year at the Junior Bach Festival in Berkeley and the Wayne Nadeau Festival and Competition in Stockton. For the past several summers, Wagner was a scholarship recipient at the Hartwick College Institute in New York.
At the Rabinowich competition in Palo Alto, Wagner was the judges’ favorite out of 30 pianists with her 15-minute set of Ravel and Bach pieces. “It felt really great to win,” she said. “I finished second last year, so I was this close.”
When she’s not sitting behind her piano, Wagner sings and tours the world with the Los Altos High Main Street Singers, whom she estimated practiced 230 hours and performed 97 concerts last year. The group’s most recent jaunt was to Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic during the spring, and it is eyeing Japan and the Philippines for next year.
“It’s hard to keep that and my piano practicing in control – sometimes I have no time on my hand. They’re both really rewarding experiences,” said Wagner, a student of Janet Smith of Saratoga. “I like playing piano the best because I’m better at it, and have been doing it a lot longer.”
Wagner, who holds a 4.0 grade-point average and enjoys English and math the most, said the keys of successfully entertaining her audience are to have confidence and a lot of fun.
Sunday’s hour-long concert begins at 7 p.m. and is free and open to the public. The Los Altos United Methodist Church is located at the corner of Foothill Expressway and Mag
