The long journey to becoming a pianist

For most of my life, music was something I kept hidden.

 

I grew up in Pikesville, Maryland, an athletic kid more comfortable on a Little League diamond than at a piano. My days moved between public school, Hebrew school, and whatever game I could get to next. When my mother picked me up early for baseball, my focus was on turning a fastball into a line drive, not refining a Chopin nocturne. Now, as I approach my 70th birthday, I realize those detours were actually the path.

 

Music had started early, though in an unusual way. At four years old, my parents found me on the floor arranging Coca-Cola bottle caps into patterns. I wasn’t playing music yet; I was organizing sound, instinctively searching for structure and symmetry. They sensed something in that quiet obsession and steered me toward the piano.

 

'In locker rooms and hallways where identity was measured in toughness, being a pianist felt like something to conceal'

 

But by high school, that side of me disappeared underground. In locker rooms and hallways where identity was measured in toughness, being a pianist felt like something to conceal. I hid my practice hours from teammates, chasing validation on basketball courts instead of at the keyboard. When I failed to make the final cut for the team, it left a deeper mark than I expected. It was my first real lesson that ambition and identity are not always the same thing.

 

 

Defining moment

 

So I pivoted. I left high school early for the University of Maryland, not entirely sure what I was pursuing – only that I needed a different direction. College forced clarity. Between distractions and a drifting GPA, it became obvious that music could no longer remain in the background. Under the rigorous guidance of renowned pianist and teacher Thomas Schumacher, I finally began to understand what serious musical study required: discipline, patience, endurance, and the ability to truly listen beneath the notes. His exacting standards forced me to confront the difference between merely playing the piano and genuinely communicating through it.

 

The practice room gradually replaced the playing field. A theater minor opened a parallel path into composition and dramatic structure. I became increasingly fascinated not just with technique, but with narrative – how pacing, silence, voicing, and harmonic tension could shape emotion as powerfully as dialogue in a film or play. The piano stopped being merely an instrument and became a language.

 

After graduation, the real education began.

 

I took every job I could find: musical director at Busch Gardens at 20, pianist at a seafood restaurant at Baltimore’s Harborplace, touring with the Guy Lombardo Orchestra. The venues ranged from VFW halls to the Waldorf Astoria on New Year’s Eve. None of it was glamorous, but all of it mattered. Night after night, performance taught lessons no conservatory could fully provide – how to sustain concentration under pressure, how to shape a room’s energy, how to recover from mistakes without panic, and how sincerity will almost always communicate more deeply than virtuosity alone.

 

Eventually, that road led to New York City.

 

 

Richard Atkins performs in a house concert

 

 

There was no breakthrough moment, no sudden arrival – just years of cabaret rooms, hotel lounges, private events, and constant reinvention. I learned that every room has its own tempo and emotional rhythm. Some audiences lean into delicacy; others need to be drawn slowly inward. Over time, I became less interested in impressing listeners and more interested in inviting them somewhere emotionally truthful.

 

Then came September 11.

 

My wife’s office was only blocks from the Towers. My young daughter sat in a classroom where no one quite knew how to explain what might be unfolding just beyond the walls. Like so many New Yorkers, we were forced into a reckoning. The life we had built suddenly felt fragile and disorienting.

 

We left.

 

 

Creative environment

 

New Mexico offered something New York no longer could: silence, distance, perspective. The pace slowed, but inwardly the questions only deepened. For a time, I stepped away from performance, running a local theater group and searching for a different kind of creative life. Yet the pull of the piano never disappeared. Eventually, I returned to it – not with the urgency of career ambition, but with a different kind of attentiveness.

 

At a certain point in life, you stop asking what will make you successful and start listening more carefully to what feels true.

 

In that quieter space, something shifted in my playing. The music that emerged was no longer about proving technical ability or chasing approval. It became more conversational, more reflective – less about performance and more about communication. A Shigeru Kawai grand piano became the instrument through which that voice emerged, capable of both intimacy and orchestral color.

 

'Over time, I became less interested in impressing listeners and more interested in inviting them somewhere emotionally truthful'

 

The result was an album, Pianistically Speaking. Listeners responded not simply to the compositions themselves, but to the life experience embedded within them – the pauses, detours, restraint, longing, and hard-earned lyricism that can only arrive with time.

 

And now, after decades of unexpected turns, quiet breakthroughs, and roads that rarely led where I anticipated, I find myself returning to a destination that once felt impossibly distant.

 

On Saturday evening, October 24, 2026, the lights will dim at the hallowed hall on West 57th Street. The audience will settle into that familiar Manhattan hush that exists just before the sound of that first note.

 

I will walk onto that stage not as the young pianist searching for validation, but as an artist who finally understands that music is less about arrival than revelation.

 

It turns out I was simply taking the long way to Carnegie Hall.

 

Richard Atkins plays Weill Recital Hall, Carnegie Hall, New York, on 24 October 2026.