Providence: This is a little like old home week for Rhode Island-bred musicians. Ron Leonard, longtime principal cellist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic returns to the area for the Music on the Hill chamber series Friday and Saturday, and David Crohan, the blind pianist who grew up in Mount Pleasant and for years ran a restaurant on Martha’s Vineyard, will be in Wickford Sunday for a recital mixing Mozart and Chopin with show tunes and hits from the Great American Songbook.Crohan, who has been blind since birth when he was exposed to too much oxygen in an incubator, started picking out tunes on his grandmother’s out-of-tune piano when he was 3. As a youngster he appeared on a Boston television show, during which an appeal was made to get him a piano.
Crohan, who has been playing restaurants since he was 19, credits his aunt with helping him get around the keyboard. She started him out playing stride, which requires a leaping left hand. Had he stuck with traditional jazz, which doesn’t require so much jumping about, he doubts whether he would have gone as far with the instrument.
When it comes to classical music, Crohan has had to learn pieces through an arduous method with a Braille score. He feels the embossed symbols for notes and rhythms (they look nothing like traditional music notation) with one hand and plays the notes with the other, committing the passage to memory as soon as he plays it. Then he switches hands.
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