'Grand' day for music at ECC

Elgin Community College's Blizzard Theatre on Saturday hosted an array of pianos to rival a Busby Berkeley musical number.

These pianos weren't moving, but the more than 4,500 fingers on them were -- furiously.

The 13th annual American Grands concert started with a bang Saturday with perhaps the four most recognizable notes in Western music: the opening of Beethoven's "Fifth Symphony."

Twenty-four pianists, from adolescents to pensioners, took turns playing in unison on 12 Yamaha grand pianos loaned to the college by Cordogan's Pianoland.

Saturday saw three performances in the American Grands series and nearly 460 pianists from 47 area towns playing to a roughly 650-seat house packed from the pit to the rafters.

"Put Super Tuesday out of your minds because today at American Grands, it's Super Saturday," conductor Colin Holman said after the opening number.

Saturday's concerts featured a crowd-pleasing lineup of pieces -- from classical standards like Mozart's "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik" to popular standards like "Ol' Man River."

The pianists dipped into the Rodgers and Hammerstein songbook more than once -- performing their waltz from "The Sound of Music," "Edelweiss" and the musical's title song.

The performances have grown in popularity each year, with the college adding a third evening performance in recent years to accommodate a larger audience and more performers.

"It's grown pretty much every year," said Heidi Zwart Healy, spokeswoman for the college's Visual and Performing Arts Center. "There's really nothing else like it."

Nowhere were the hours of practice more evident than during the Bill Haley hit "Rock Around the Clock" and two pieces by Leroy Anderson, when the pianos sounded like a single instrument.

The most exciting moment came during the finale, John Phillip Sousa's "Stars and Stripes Forever."

As two dozen pianists banged away at Sousa's iconic march, the rest of the pianists, American flags in hand, surrounded the audience, which began to clap when an American flag descended from above the stage and continued applauding until the final bar.