Once Again, Tonight's The Night

    Tonight is our winter piano recital.
    The ritual post-recital reception mini-cupcakes and the guacamole dip, without which we cannot have a piano recital, are ready:

    As, hopefully, are all the other goodies of which we'll partake after we've shared our pieces with our audience.
    We're all a little nervous.  I'm a little nervous. 
    But our pieces are as ready as they're going to be, and everyone seemed fairly chill at their lessons last night,  some more than others:

    Me, I'll be playing the love theme from one of my favorite of all favorite old  movies,  "Les Parapluies de Cherbourg" (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg).

    Maybe some of you old foreign film buffs out there have seen it.  It's one of those movies that, if you've seen it once, you'll  probably want to see it at least 10 more times. Or more.
    Anyway, the movie came out in 1964 and all the dialogue is sung throughout in French to the beautiful music of composer Michel Legrand.
    The song I'm playing is from the scene between a 16-year-old girl and her 20-year-old sweetheart, who has just learned that he's been drafted and must leave the next morning to go off to fight the war in Algeria.  The girl begins sobbing and begging the boy not to go, telling him that she loves him, she can't live without him, vowing she'll never love another her whole life.  The boy just keeps singing "my love, my love", telling her that he must go, promising her that he'll think of nothing but her, ever.

        At the end of the scene the the boy looks forlornly from the departing train back at his beloved, who runs along the platform after the train until it's gone from sight and she's left standing alone on the platform.
    A truly a classic movie scene.
    The piano arrangement I'm playing is one I put together a few years ago from the music from this scene. I tried to capture the elements of the dialogue between the two characters:  first, when the boy breaks the terrible news to his girl, then the outpouring of sorrow and love between the two, then the big scene of the train pulling away, the girl running after the train, then finally standing alone on the platform.
    Tom says that when I play this piece he can almost smell the coal smoke from the train.
    If I get it right tonight hopefully everybody in the recital hall will be able to, too.