Secretary of state plays piano at awareness concert

WASHINGTON – A musician long before she became an academic and then a world-famous diplomat, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice took to the Kennedy Center concert stage Saturday to accompany a young soprano battling an often-fatal disease.

Rice’s rare and unpublicized appearance at the piano marked a striking departure from her routine as America’s No. 1 diplomat. A pianist from the age of 3, she played a half-dozen selections to accompany Charity Sunshine, a 21-year-old singer who was diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension a little more than a year ago.

The soprano is a granddaughter of Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif., and his wife Annette, who Rice has known for years. The Pulmonary Hypertension Association, formed in 1990, presented the concert to draw attention to the disease from which more than 100,000 people are known to suffer.

Largely unknown in the United States until about 10 years ago, it has no known cause or cure, but genetic studies and a search for treatment are under way.

Sunshine has persisted in her career and performed with orchestras in Hungary, her grandparents’ home before the Holocaust, Denmark and the United States. On Saturday, in a concert entitled “An Evening of Music, Friendship and Awareness” and hosted by Lantos, she drew the secretary of state to play selections by Verdi, Mozart and Jerome Kern.

Eileen Cornett, of the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, accompanied Sunshine on a half-dozen other pieces.

Lantos introduced Rice as “a warm friend” and said the concert was her idea, describing how her eyes filled with tears as he told her about his granddaughter’s illness.

“We have to do something about this and enhance public consciousness,” he quoted Rice as saying. “Let’s have a concert and I will accompany her at the piano.”

Rice, whose first name is a variation on the Italian musical term “con dolcezza,” which is a direction to play with sweetness, learned to read music at the age of 3.

As a child she performed, won piano competitions and planned a career as a concert pianist.