Flower Piano, an S.F. tradition upended by pandemic, returns to Golden Gate Park.
Botanical Garden’s first program since pandemic started
Liam Ramakrishnan, age 3, was not planning to perform at Flower Piano. He’d never played the piano. But there he was at the keys of an expertly tuned Schafer & Sons before an audience spread across the Great Meadow at 10 a.m. Sunday. It was free-play time, an hour before the professionals would start, and after two years and two months without this popular tradition at the San Francisco Botanical Garden, patrons were happy to hear anything, even a 3-year-old pounding at the keys.
“It’s my favorite activity in San Francisco,” said Liam’s mother, Alexandra, who had been to every Flower Piano since the concept of hiding 12 concert pianos amid the flora and fauna began in 2016. “It’s nice they brought it back. It’s a very unique event, which is why we love it.”
Normally held in July, the event was last staged in 2019. It runs through Tuesday, and after its return on Friday, crowds grew each day until the line Sunday ran from the garden kiosk out to Martin Luther King Drive and toward the Lincoln Way boundary of Golden Gate Park.
Flower Piano is the first public program held at the Botanical Garden since the pandemic started. Delle Maxwell, the garden’s board chair, summed up the emotion in a speech to members and sponsors Sunday morning. “When the pianos were set up on Wednesday,” she said. “I got teary.”
The format entails a few professionals playing sets of about an hour each day, the rest of the time filled by anyone with the nerve to sit down and capture the audience. Some are amateurs, but most are either professional performers or aspirants.
Paul Hogarth’s last scheduled performance was at Martuni’s piano bar on March 27, 2020, which was also his birthday. It got canceled and since then he’s been cooped up with his 1928 Baldwin grand piano in a Nob Hill studio apartment so small that the piano is also the couch. He tried Facebook Live at “Paultuni’s,” as he calls the studio, but he missed the audience feedback. So when Flower Piano opened Friday, he was there in his piano-keysbedecked shoes and his iPad set list of 26 show tunes, one for each letter in the alphabet — from “Anything Goes” to “Zombie Prom.”
“It’s fantastic to be back,” Hogarth, 43, said after singing a heartfelt version of “La Cage Aux Folles” at a concert-quality Kawai under the trellis at Zellerbach Garden stage. “This is my third day in a row. I get here at 10 and I play until 6.”
He’d play straight through, but there is a loosely enforced 15-minute time limit for any set, other than the booked professionals who each play a onehour concert. It is the variety that keeps it lively. Hogarth had just gotten up from belting out “La Cage” when another player sat down on the still-warm bench to play a moving version of Pachelbel’s “Canon in D.”
All of those different hands are hell on a piano, and so is the weather. The pianos stay in place all weekend and are covered at night against the fog and mist. Saturday night brought a smattering of rain, so piano tuner Robert Soper was there by 8:30 a.m. to remove the covers.
“It’s a pain, but it’s a lovely pain,” he said after lifting his ear from the wire strings. “With the changes in humidity, the tuning gets shot very fast.” The rain causes a problem for the felt components. “Felt absorbs moisture like nobody’s business,” said Soper, who came armed with a blow dryer and a tin of ointment to do battle.
All 12 pianos, including two Steinways, two Baldwins and a Yamaha, belong to Dean Mermell and Maura Fortissimo, partners in Sunset Piano located in Half Moon Bay.
“This works because of context,” Mermell said. “Nobody expects to see a piano outside of a living room, so when you put it under a tree in a beautiful setting, it creates a disconnect in your brain that allows wonder to grow.”
There is also little separation between audience and performer. One couple even crawled under the piano at the Moon Viewing Garden, lying down and holding hands to feel the vibration.
With all these pianists, there is always the chance to discover a virtuoso. Hogarth discovered one in an 11-year-old he came upon playing his own compositions.
“It’s not just the audiences and playing for people, it’s watching other people play,” he said before getting back in line to continue working through his alphabet of show tunes. Hogarth has a day job at a political website, but he took a vacation day Friday and planned to do the same Monday and Tuesday. He’ll be in the Botanical Garden from 10 till 6, performing wherever he can find a set of keys and a bench vacant long enough for him to sit down and open his songbook.
“It makes people smile,” he said, “and hopefully sing along, too.”