Among Elizabeth Borowsky’s two-dozen-plus Upper Valley students, Amalia Hickey doubts that she’ll ever play the instrument for audiences of more than a few friends.

Yet Hickey keeps going back to the keyboard, which grips her imagination the way wielding a field hockey stick lights up her instinct to compete for Lebanon High School.

“I love the grand sound,” says Hickey, a junior. “And I love that all 10 of your fingers are playing together and working together to create music.” 

Her love for the piano multiplied a couple of years ago when Borowsky started composing, as annual birthday presents, solo pieces on which Hickey could hone her skills. As she does with all her students, Borowsky tailored these to Hickey’s taste, personality and skill.

“I was never drawn towards classical music and Elizabeth found that out after I had tried to play a couple of pieces but didn’t have the motivation to finish them,” Hickey recalls. “Every birthday piece she has written for me sounds like it could have words to it, or it could be danced to. I have so much fun playing her pieces that it keeps me motivated to keep learning.

“She is the reason I did not quit the piano.” Such reactions from Borowsky’s younger students – ranging in age from 7 to 16 – to their birthday solos are as much music to her ears as is the applause of live audiences, which the coronavirus pandemic continues to deny her.

“I’m giving them that vote of confidence, that I have faith that they are willing to try,” says Borowsky, who moved to Lebanon from Baltimore in 2015. “The results … far exceeded what I could have anticipated.”

By early 2020, Borowsky had written almost 80 solos for students of her Piano Prodigies studio [www.pianoprodigies.com], and was toying with the idea of recording and packaging 100 of them – if and when time ever allowed.

Enter COVID-19. With her Upper Valley dates as well as her worldwide touring schedule on hold until further notice, Borowsky treated the opening as “the golden opportunity to move it forward.” The ramping-up of her “100 Solos for Piano Prodigies” project coincided with the move of her studio to a converted space in a former industrial complex on the Mascoma River, from the Lebanon house out of which she was moving.

Today, two skylights in the high ceiling and a bank of northwest-facing windows gently illuminate the new space, walls and ceilings painted in white. Surrounding Borowsky’s Steinway grand and an upright piano – on which she expects soon to start teaching again in person – are a battery of audio and visual equipment that allows her to conduct lessons remotely as well as to record her students’ solos and to choreograph video recitals.

“I am filled with joy every time I come into this space,” Borowsky says during an interview there in mid-April. “Everything you see here has been touched, from ceiling to floor. The acoustics took the longest to figure out.”

From her wide and deep network of musicians, Borowsky consulted two sound technicians who advised her, among other adjustments, to cushion the floor with carpeting and the windows with ten-foot-tall velvet curtains, which she said “got the balance of the acoustics just right. “It was, ‘Yeah: Control!’”

Over the summer and fall of 2020, Borowsky raised money, through a GoFundMe page, to not only record the solo compositions but to devise and develop the artwork for the packaging of the recording. Support came, and continues to come, from many sources, including the families of her students – some of it in unexpected forms: her youngest student, 7-year-old Arjun Gupta of Hanover, has told Borowsky that “he intends to learn all 100 pieces, and he’s working hard to make that happen.”

The project began with Poseidon’s Palace, a solo recording that Borowsky composed for the ninth birthday of Gavin Nartowicz, one of Borowsky’s first Upper Valley students. “They are musical gummy vitamins,” she says of the solos. “They’re fun to listen to and play, but chock-full of artistic and technical nutrients.”

In a recent email, Gavin’s mother wrote, “We’re very excited for you and this (100 Solos) endeavor! Gavin’s last birthday piece (from 2020) is still his favorite piece to play.” Borowsky calls the project “a perfect combination of my experiences of and passions in life” as a performer and a teacher.

One of three children of world-touring cellist Cecylia Barczyk, Borowsky took up piano at age 4, while her brother Emmanuel gravitated to the violin and their sister Frances the cello.

At 7, Borowsky began playing recitals in Baltimore, and by 9, she was touring eastern and central Europe.

With her siblings, she played and occasionally still performs concerts as the American Virtuosi, and collectively and individually, they often collaborate with their mother.

Between tours as a soloist and an accompanist and composing her own works for recording, Borowsky built a following of private students in Baltimore. Teaching, she recalls learning, is about balancing “critique with humor.”

“I’m not their Mom,” she asserts. “I’m not their aunt. I’m just their coach, their teacher… The key is just to listen, and then to adjust.”

Between her long days in the studio and her walks with her dog Max, Borowsky isn’t letting grass grow under her feet while waiting for concert halls near and far to reopen.

In addition to composing five pieces that the New Hampshire Music Teachers Association commissioned last summer, and organizing a virtual concert and documentary celebrating her mother’s retirement after 38 years of teaching at Towson University in Maryland, Borowsky spent part of the winter composing a 3½-minute movement that teen students of the Lebanon Ballet School performed during City Center Ballet’s Spring Showcase, “Moving Forward,” on May 21, 22 and 24.

“I ran into her in the yogurt aisle at the Miracle Mile Price Chopper, and asked her what she might have for music we could use,” recalls ballet school alumna Kassady Small, one of the choreographers for the showcase. “I was looking for something easy for the girls to dance to, that had the emotion I wanted. “It’s so nice to find someone right here in town who understands the artistic process.”

While Small’s students have danced to a recording of And Still We Dance, which Borowsky describes as “an homage to Piazzola,” on a live Facebook stream (visit citycenterballet.org to learn more), Borowsky hopes someday to collaborate in person with its choreographers and dancers. So far in the pandemic, the nearest she’s come to performing live was this past February’s Piano Day at the Omaha (Neb.) Conservatory of Music, where she led a socially-distanced master class and workshops, played a recital and even conducted a yoga class.

While preparing for the outing tested her multi-tasking skills, she says, “it forced me to really think about what I’m doing, and for whom I’m doing it.”

It also led to her solos reaching piano prodigies beyond the Upper Valley: Recently a teacher she met in Nebraska texted her with the news that two students performed pieces from “100 Solos” at an Omaha recital. “The gal (who) played Adventure of the Planets had been in a bit of a slump with practicing before we started working on it,” the teacher wrote, “but she is so inspired after connecting with that piece!”

Speaking of music to your ears… “It’s so rewarding to see that it stands on its own,” Borowsky says of the ‘100 Solos’ project, “that it is valuable to others.”

To learn more about Elizabeth Borowsky, visit pianoprodigies.com.

Fresh out of Plymouth State University with a bachelor’s degree in acting, Sam Clifton was, well, reveling in the chance to play a lead role in his debut at the Christmas Revels.

And, between his own moments in the spotlight at the Lebanon Opera House last December, the 2015 graduate of Lebanon High School was paying close attention to the Mummer’s Dance – the number that every year interrupts the main storyline of Revels North’s long-running celebration of the solstice.

“While I was standing by as a spectator, I got an idea of the basic plot, and the importance of Saint George,” Clifton recalls. “You get to slay the giant and the dragon. You’re the hero. What more could you ask?”

What he learned by watching – and by listening – Clifton wove into his vocal performance as George in All Shall Be Well Again – the 17-minute animated film that Revels North is sharing on small screens in lieu of the live performances that the coronavirus pandemic is making impossible. “I haven’t been able to do a lot of voice-acting work so far,” he says. “I thought this would be a way to get a solid role onto my résumé.”

For the leadership of Revels North, the film emerged last spring and summer as a way to bridge the seasonal gap, and to keep Revels – which had to cancel its schedule of live music in the name of singer and listener safety – on the Upper Valley’s radar screen. “It wasn’t long before we began to realize that there was no way we could plan on live performances,” Executive Director Brian Cook says. “There was so much that we couldn’t anticipate.”

Instead, Cook, Artistic Director Nils Fredland, and members of the Revels North board of directors started brainstorming, and quickly eliminated the idea of trying to do a hybrid live through online technology. “Singing with people in Zoom is miserable, because of the delay,” says Revels Board President Kim Rheinlander, a Lebanon resident.

With input from Revels creatives, they found consensus around the idea of a short film – mixing animation and footage from previous years’ Revels – that area audiences could stream on their computers, and watch on Community Access Television (CATV).

“It got us excited like nothing else was going to,” Cook recalls. “It was going to be the costliest option, in a year where maybe fundraising would be harder than usual because of the pandemic. But it really energized everybody, and seemed the most likely to get the audience excited.”

The Revels board bought into the plan from the outset. “Suddenly there was a spark,” Rheinlander says. “People really embraced it. It was something so different, and something positive.”

With money from a variety of sources – including an anonymous donation of $10,000, plus $7,500 from a Vital Communities crowdsourcing campaign, a Covid-relief grant of $7,500 from the New Hampshire Council on the Art, $5,000 from regular underwriter Mascoma Bank, on top of earlier contributions from regular individual benefactors – Revels North enlisted a Keene, NH-based nonprofit, The SALT Project, to weave animation around a storyline invoking Revels traditions.

“A big part of our thinking was to seek out local artists, who need the work right now,” Cook says. “When the pandemic hit and lingered on, their livelihoods went up in smoke. We really wanted to support them as much as possible.” Toward that end, Revels hired the No Strings Marionette Company in Randolph, VT, which had crafted puppets for the 2015 show at Dartmouth College’s Hopkins Center for the Arts. The troupe crafted and brought to life a puppet host for the film, in the persona of Jack Langstaff, the founder of the original Christmas Revels pageant in New York City, and who had established a comparable program in Cambridge, MA in 1971.

Langstaff, who would have turned 100 this year, was the father of Carol Langstaff, the Sharon resident who founded Revels North in 1974. “When I first saw the puppet, I thought that that was just the best,” Rheinlander recalls. “I’d crossed paths with Jack over the years, when he would come up to see the shows during the time Carol was putting them on, and he was a very, very powerful and strong personality. This is very much in his spirit.”

Rheinlander first found herself caught up in the Revels spirit as a child in Cambridge in the early 1970s.  “I was, like, ‘What is this thing? This is so cool,’” she says. “It was very engaging, and I really wanted to be a part of it.”

Upon moving to the Upper Valley in the mid-1980s, Rheinlander became a part in a variety of capacities, from backstage technical support to singing and acting with the ensemble.

Even after joining the board of directors, Rheinlander stayed active with the productions until 2019, when Revels moved the solstice pageant from the Hopkins Center’s Spaulding Auditorium to the Opera House. While the latter seats 800 people, to Spaulding’s 900, the 2019 show, drew a combined 3,000 people to five performances. Many of them, Rheinlander found while conducting exit interviews, had never seen the show at Dartmouth. “I was so excited that Revels finally came to Lebanon,” Rheinlander says. “It’s a much more traditional theater.”

“The people I talked with were so enthusiastic, and we were very excited about having a second show there this year. The arts community has been growing so much in Lebanon, and we were excited about being a part of that. We’d talked with the AVA Gallery about doing a pre-show event there this year. There seemed like a lot of opportunities.”

With All Shall Be Well Again, Rheinlander added, the Revels leadership and rank-and-file “hope to keep things going, keep people enthused, knowing we’re still around.”

Revels’ Executive Director isn’t worried. “The film is just lovely to behold,” says Cook, who performed in Revels while growing up in Norwich and took the reins in 2017. “The animation feels very, very true to the Revels spirit, a respect for traditional style.”

And while Revels North will miss its main revenue source – ticket sales – the organization wants to make the movie available for free for members of the Upper Valley community who might be struggling financially and otherwise during the pandemic, Cook adds. “It is a message of hope that dovetails with our message, our mission, of bringing light to the darkest time of the year,” he says. “People right now are experiencing the darkness in a very real way.”

Sam Clifton hopes that even when live performances of Revels resume at the Opera House – preferably a year from now – devotees will revisit All Shall Be Well Again the way they do traditional holiday programs such as A Charlie Brown Christmas, The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, and Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. “We can now add this to the others on the list,” Clifton said. “Anything we can do to spread our message to a larger audience is a good thing.”

Revels North was scheduled to start streaming All Shall Be Well Again on November 20. The local cable station CATV was scheduled to start showing the film on Thanksgiving Day (November 26 at 2pm) with subsequent screenings on Giving Tuesday (December 1), and on December 21 (the winter solstice), Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and New Year’s Day. To learn more, visit http://www.revelsnorth.org.