Concert pianist Rochelle Sallee takes no chances. If anything ever happens to her centennial edition Schimmel grand piano, she’s got a spare, a Steinway, right beside it.
She never jumped out of a plane without a reserve parachute either. An FAA-certified rigger, she packs other people’s reserve chutes. A former commercial airline pilot, she’s a certified flight instructor, including for gliders and at one point had her own flight school.
While Sebastian’s drop zone lured her to the area more than a decade ago, she left for a larger city – Orlando – to pursue a classical piano career. Now she intends to make Sebastian work for her in that realm, too.
Since her return to the area this spring, she is hoping to play the second movement of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto in conjunction with the Easter Cantata at Christ by the Sea Methodist Church. She is preparing music from “Carmen” to hopefully perform at events for Vero Opera. And she is also trying to convince Space Coast Symphony Orchestra to schedule the entire Rachmaninoff concerto for its 2015-16 season.
She played Mendelssohn’s Piano Concert No. 1 in February of last year when Space Coast performed at Trinity Episcopal Church and before that, in 2011, Chopin’s E Minor Concerto at the Waxlax at St. Edward’s School.
It’s the lighter side of music she’s banking on, and for that she counts on word of mouth from parties she has played for in barrier island homes. She’s is also working with David Busch to play at events catered by his business, Chelsea’s Market.
Playing music for films was how Sallee’s career started in earnest, when she landed alone in Los Angeles at 16, having skipped three grades in school and persuaded her parents – powerhouses in their own right – to let her test her wings, so to speak. “They couldn’t stop me,” she says with a shrug.
Indeed, they nurtured her independent streak. Her father, a physician, moved the family to Germany when Sallee was a toddler – just so the family could ski, she claims. By then, she was already playing piano, and began training in earnest at the age of 4. At 8, she moved back to California, where her dad taught at UC-Davis.
Sallee continued piano lessons and at 14, got her first job playing in a restaurant in Sacramento. At 16, when she moved to L.A., she got her union card. Her youth was her ticket, inspiring others to help her.
She was “adopted” by the Village Recorder, an important pop music recording studio, and given shelter in the home of a Beverly Hills family with a grand piano she could play. As an afterthought, she went to college, the start of perpetual student syndrome that only wrapped up last year when she earned her master’s degree in piano performance, on top of undergraduate degrees in aviation and music.
After three years in L.A., she decided to try musical theater direction, moving to Salt Lake City to work for Pioneer Theatre, a regional repertory theater conveniently located near excellent skiing. “I got really extreme with my skiing,” she says. “We’d get off the lifts and climb up higher to cliff-jump. My friends said, you need to try skydiving. I did and it changed my life.”
She moved in upstairs above the skydiving center, switched careers and “went heavy hardcore into flying.”
Today she has over 36 hours of freefall time and over 3,000 sky dives.
Meaning, her music career keeps her soaring too, from playing Chopin’s F Minor Concerto with the Budapest Orchestra in a cathedral in Perugia, Italy, to playing private parties like her annual performances in the Indian River Shores home of Richard and Arlene Vogel.
“I have about nine or ten hours of Broadway, pop, and film music that I can play off the top of my head,” she says. “That’s one of the reasons I came here: people love to have music at their parties.”
After “a really strong seven years of classical music, practicing six hours a day, 365,” she likes to say she’s playing the Three B’s: Bach, Bacharach and Billy Joel.
“I enjoy it equally. It’s less stressful, and trust me, when someone comes up teary-eyed and tells you ‘I was really moved,’ it’s like giving a present and them giving a present back.”
She’s also auditioning students for nor more than half a dozen spots, having just filled in for the students of Christ by the Sea’s music director, Marcos Flores, while he was away in Italy this summer.
She has also spoken with Ray Adams, artistic director of Vero Beach Charter High School’s Visual and Performing Arts program, about giving talks to the budding artists there on how to speak in public.
“Conservatories are starting to teach public speaking because there’s a huge demand for people who are going into this field to know how to research their pieces so they can speak to the audience.”
It was 14 years ago that Sallee came to Vero to check out paradise from a parachute – Sebastian’s drop zone boasts an ocean view on the way down. After moving here with her daughter and then-husband, she missed playing music.
“I was a skydiver who needed a piano,” she quips. Through a magazine article, she found one – a Hamburg Steinway – being played by Flores at Christ by the Sea. They have been friends ever since and they call each other “brother” and “sister.”
She also found Oak Harbor’s Austrian Bosendorfer grand piano, a spectacular instrument that kept Sallee on the club’s holiday entertainment list even after she moved to Orlando
Today, so many walkers and joggers in her Barber Street neighborhood stop to listen to her practice that she has set a chair on her front porch “so they don’t have to stand in the sun.”
Her return to piano involved stepped up training. For that, serendipity struck again when she found a recording she wanted to learn to play and called the performer, Michael Lewin of the Boston Conservatory. He told her the music was unavailable. “I said, OK, I’m going to play it by ear. He said, good luck – it’s pretty tricky. When you get it down come on up to the conservatory and play it for me. And I did.”
She ended up taking multiple lessons with Lewin, flying to Boston as often as once a week – on commercial flights.
