From The Ft. Worth Star-Telegram:
While Fort Worth next month will crown concert piano royalty, Dallas this week gets a visit from reigning piano superstars the 5 Browns.
The sibling quintet — Deondra, Desirae, Gregory, Melody and Ryan, one of the hottest tickets in piano performance today — will appear with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra at the Meyerson Symphony Center this weekend.
The 5 Browns’ new autobiography, Life Between the Keys: The (Mis)Adventures of the 5 Browns (Dove Books, $24.95), chronicles their meteoric crescendo, if you will, from prodigious tykes (they all started piano lessons at age 3) to Juilliard students (the first family of five to attend simultaneously) to classical-music stars living with rock star-like fame.
Each short chapter is a humorous, sentimental or insightful essay written by each of the pianists, who range in age from 23 to 30. Collectively, they offer a story of a family that’s so normal (guess what — they argue!) and yet so remarkable. Worth picking up the book is the chapter, written by Melody Brown, about life at Juilliard — especially the way students “steal” practice rooms from each other (it involves stinky food).
And while the devout Mormon family now calls Utah home, it has Texas ties: The kids were born in Houston, and in the book, Desirae Brown recalls traveling to Fort Worth at age 10 for the Cliburn finals and feeling a kinship with the lone female finalist. “To my young mind, we were sisters in music,” she writes. “. . . If she could become a professional pianist, I could, too.”
As a bonus, a live CD of one of their concerts is included in the book.