Tirana, Albania — a city of contradictions, where Ottoman minarets stand beside brutalist concrete, where the sound of the ezani bleeds into European pop from open café windows. This is where it started.
Not in a conservatory. Not in privilege. In the raw, unfiltered chaos of a country still finding itself after decades of isolation. The piano was not an escape — it was an argument with silence.
The instrument doesn't care where you're from. It only cares if you're honest.
Piano Performance. Ann Arbor's grey winters and the relentless rigor of practice rooms that smelled of rosin and ambition. Four years of dismantling everything learned, rebuilding from the ground up.
Bach in the morning. Bartók at midnight. The space between — a kind of beautiful suffering that only musicians understand.
The fog rolls in and everything dissolves — the city, the noise, the doubt. What remains is the instrument and the infinite space between the notes. This is where craft becomes art.
Currently sharpening the blade. Preparing for what comes next.
Classical music is not a museum piece. It is alive, violent, tender, and desperately relevant. Every performance is a conversation with the dead — and an argument with the living.
From the concrete blocks of Tirana to the fog-draped hills of San Francisco, the journey has always been the same: sit down, shut up, and play until the instrument speaks back.
This is not background music. This demands your full attention — or none at all.