NORTH HOLLYWOOD : Seniors Salute Mother’s Day With a Concert

Chopin’s mother would have been proud.

In a classical salute to Mother’s Day, about 60 senior music lovers gathered at the Valley Storefront Jewish Family Services in North Hollywood on Friday to listen to pianists over 60 play selections such as a mazurka by the 19th-Century composer Frederic Chopin.

The concert, which also featured renditions of Brahms by violinists, provided a Mother’s Day activity for mothers who would be alone on this holiday.

“I’m very proud of her,” Joyce Caplan, 51, said of her mother, Muriel Shapiro, who organized the concert and played Chopin’s Fantasie-Impromptu. “She was a piano teacher when I was growing up and she teaches (at the Valley Storefront). This music has to be passed on and preserved.”

Caplan does her best to help her mother by furnishing her with old classical music sheets she finds in her antique business in Sherman Oaks. Shapiro, who is in her 70s, likes to share the music with her students.

Other audience members came to the concert at the senior center simply because they had no one with whom to share Mother’s Day. One of those was Marion Walson, 77, of Studio City, whose two sons live in Wyoming.

A pianist herself, Walson hoped the concert would inspire her to spend Mother’s Day practicing on the black-and-white keys at home.

“I think it’s great that older people are still supple and able to perform,” Walson said. “We’re not over the hill.”