Blog Posting by Thomas Ball, Cinema and Photography 18', FLEFF Blogger

The FLEFF concert on Tuesday night of FLEFF integrates choral singing, opera and orchestration.

In tandem with this year’s theme of Geographies, the multimedia graphics of the concert included maps of erased regions and nationalities.

One map in particular lays out the geography of what is currently North America with the regions and territories that belong to indigenous peoples.

In a previous profile of Jairo Geronymo, the pianist spoke at length about his study of sight reading.

As the FLEFF Opening Concert began, Geronymo had to put that training to the test.

As Jairo and Deborah Martin, pianist, started to play the first section of Musorsky’s Pictures from an exhibition, the duo found themselves facing technical difficulties.

While Geronymo played from paper note sheets, Martin opted to used digitized notes on her Ipad.

When the tablet failed to progress to the next sheet of notes, Jairo used his sight reading skills to improvise the other half of the composition.

The improvisation made the transition seamless. Soon the tablet caught up to the performers and the rest of the concert proceeded without incident.

When I originally talked to Geronymo, he told me that he began training in sight reading as a teenager he saw his own skills lacking.

“Well, no one in Brazil knew how to sight read very well” he explained.

He went on to say that mistakes made in a performance setting usually occur with the simpler, opening parts of a composition. By the time the more complex pieces get introduced, the performers reach perfection.