Piano teacher almost walked out of audition for show after they kept her waiting
A WOMAN from Caerphilly who appeared on Channel 4’s The Piano has said she almost walked out of her audition.
Piano teacher Nerys Porch, 50, reduced singer-songwriter Mika to tears after she gave a rendition of the Welsh song Anfonaf Angel with a male voice choir at Cardiff Central railway station during the episode.
Nerys, who both played and sang, summed up the experience as “the next best thing to [her] wedding”.
She recalled feeling “ecstatic” after her performance, which was shot at the station last year.
Describing her audition, Nerys said: “They kept me waiting for about 30 minutes and they said, ‘Can you wait another 40 minutes?’. I said, ‘I’ve got to check the ticket on my car’. I walked back to check that I’ve got enough hours because I didn’t even look at the time when I bought the ticket. So I was walking back to the car and I thought ‘I’ll just go home’.”
Nerys remembers thinking her husband would be “really annoyed” if she decided to go home and so she returned to the audition and performed Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata for the producers.
“They told me, ‘I think you’re going to meet Claudia Winkleman,’ and that was it,” she added.
The piano teacher is no stranger to performing in front of big audiences as last year she was part of a choir which sang at King Charles’ coronation.
Nerys said The Piano’s host Claudia Winkleman was “really lovely”. She added: “I felt like I could have sat there all day chatting to her.”
Nerys’ 90-year-old dad also joined her for the big day. According to the musician, he is one of the reasons she got into playing the piano in the first place.
“My parents would say I always played the piano because my dad sang,” she said. “He’s 90 now and I still sing to him, and he does try to sing with me as well . . . It’s always been our connection.
“I properly had lessons from the age of seven and it went from there. I’ve got to thank my parents because I was never good at anything else except playing the piano. That was it. That was my passion.”
She added: “Since it’s been on, I’ve been playing more and more because when you teach you don’t tend to play as much as you used to because you’re teaching all the time. It’s really nice now and seeing everybody playing and their love for it has just brought the love back to me.”
The Piano is available to watch on Channel 4.