The Steinway, sleek, black and magnificent, towers over, if not mocks, the blond-colored, toylike fortepiano next to it.

They look funny sitting side by side, but they’re together in the Westbrook Recital Hall for a reason.

Ann Chang-Barnes will play both for a handful of invited guests and friends, including retired music professors, local arts administrators and her fellow Woods Charitable Fund board members.

The petite pianist, her dark hair pulled back and dressed in casual recital black — slacks and a cuffed, long-sleeved shirt — takes her place at the tiny instrument and explains to the small crowd that the small, wooden piano is her latest endeavor before launching into Haydn's “Sonata No. 32 in B minor.”

She's tenacious yet sensitive in her performance, closing her eyes, letting the tender parts of the piece wash over both her and her audience, which also includes her pianist husband, Paul, armed today with a digital camera.

A finger injury, suffered a couple of weeks earlier, doesn't seem to bother her. If it does, she's not letting on.

As the final note of the sonata fades away, a smiling Chang-Barnes turns to her guests and says, "There you have that."

She performs two more pieces on the fortepiano — a Mozart sonata (K570) and Beethoven's famous "Moonlight Sonata." She plays the Beethoven piece “the way the composer intended,” she says.

Chang-Barnes then moves to the Steinway and concludes her concert with pieces from Schubert and Schumann.

"You forget what a superb pianist she is because she is into everything else," her friend William Smith, Meadowlark Music Festival board president, says afterward.

Indeed you do.

Because Chang-Barnes’ claim to fame is not piano performance, but for putting Lincoln on the chamber music map with Meadowlark, a festival that noted violist and public radio personality Miles Hoffman calls "the very model of a major summer music festival."

The Meadowlark Music Festival opens Wednesday with a concert featuring brass and organ at First-Plymouth Congregational Church. The festival is in its sixth year, but this is the last with Chang-Barnes at the helm. She is stepping down as Meadowlark's artistic director to take her career in another direction or, more appropriately, back to where she started — as a performer.

"I can't imagine not being a musician," she said.

Sometimes the biggest revelations come out of the smallest incidents.

That was the case for the 43-year-old Chang-Barnes, who admitted she may have overreacted to her injured finger.

It wasn't as if she slammed it in a car door or took a chunk of it off while chopping onions.

This was minor, really.

She trimmed a fingernail too short and it became infected. She couldn't play for a week.

It doesn't sound like a big deal, but an idle pianist is often a frustrated, stir-crazed one. It's comparable to a writer not writing or a golfer not swinging a club. It's not a good thing. And for Chang-Barnes, all these wild thoughts began to circle her brain, including "What if the finger doesn't heal?"

"It wasn't (serious), but it could have been and, wow, was I floored by the emotion of that thought," she said. "It made me think about a life without music."

It was unbearable.

Chang-Barnes has known nothing else but the piano since she was 5. Born in Seoul, South Korea, she and her family emigrated to the United States and made Chicago their home when she was 9.

By that time, Ann had found her calling. It was strange, but not unusual, she said.

Strange because no one else in her family was musically inclined. Her brother, older by two years, wasn't, nor was her mother, a nurse, or her father, who worked for an engineering company.

But not unusual because in Korea children are pointed in these directions.

"In Korea, that's what girls do," she said. "You play the piano or violin. It's a driven culture."

Her talent took her to Indiana University, home to one of the nation's top music schools. There she earned her bachelor's and master's degrees and a doctorate of music in piano performance.

She also met her husband, Paul. They married in 1985 and taught at DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind., before coming to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1995.

Paul is co-chair of UNL's piano department and is known nationally for his collaborations with composer Philip Glass as well as his work with the American Liszt Society.

Ann's career has gone in another direction. And, as Meadowlark's Smith said, people really do forget she is a talented pianist because of the other things she's been doing.

Her limited number of performances over the past five years depresses her. “But I was doing something else,” she said. “These things took a lot of time, and I’m not embarrassed by that.”

When Chang-Barnes arrived in Lincoln, she balanced her job at UNL as senior lecturer in the School of Music with being a mom, a full-time job by itself.

She and Paul have three children — Sarah, 14, Hannah, 13, and Peter, 9 — who Chang-Barnes calls “well-adjusted,” but “it has nothing to do with me,” she said modestly. "It was a miraculous gift they came out that way."

Her "low-maintenance" children allowed her to pursue her music interests, first as a Lincoln Friends of Chamber Music board member and eventually founding the summer music festival.

A New Yorker told Chang-Barnes that a chamber music festival never would fly in Nebraska.

Why would it? The state doesn't have the population base — or music tradition — to benefit from the way the Ravinia Festival does in Chicago, nor does it have a beautiful scenic setting like Aspen.

Chang-Barnes took that as an insult — a slap in the face of sorts. It was another example of provincialism by the New Yorker, the kind of person who believes good music, theater and art can only be found on the East Coast.

Nebraska did have one thing going for it — Chang-Barnes. And having somebody tell her it couldn't be done, well, "that was all the encouragement I needed."

The key to making it work was making it different, she said.

"It never started out as a bunch of concerts at Kimball (Recital Hall)," she said.

Instead, the four-day festival has just one concert at Kimball, a headliner performing the final evening. Before that are concerts in unusual settings, including one in a meadow at James Arthur Vineyards and two others tied to family bike rides on the MoPac Trail.

"The festival is designed to encourage more participation by families, to get younger people involved, to get them listening and appreciating chamber music," said longtime friend Joseph Kraus, a UNL music professor and Lincoln Friends of Chamber Music board member.

The festival has appealed to a broader audience, Kraus added, because it brings in atypical chamber music groups, especially for the performances at the vineyards.

Indeed, the James Arthur concerts have taken on a life of their own, often selling out weeks in advance. Patrons come early to picnic, with many of them pulling out all the stops, from dressing up to using fine china, in order to win prizes.

One year, a group brought a pony and tied it to a covered wagon for a western motif. Another group paid tribute to Elvis and another to Santa Claus.

Performers have included Quartetto Gelato, whose instrumentation features an accordion, cello, violin and oboe, to last year's Rastrelli Cello Quartet, which played arrangements of popular music, including jazz great Dave Brubeck's "Take Five" and the theme from the James Bond movies.

Hoffman, who has arranged his fair share of festivals and performed at the 2003 festival with the Cypress Quartet, isn't surprised at Meadowlark's success. He credits Chang-Barnes.

"She has that lovely combination of being both very smart and very wise in addition to being talented and having good taste," he said.

Chang-Barnes is thrilled, of course, to see the festival take off — to become, as one music critic called it, “the biggest summer buzzword between Ravinia and Aspen."

"This (New Yorker) was terribly wrong," she said. "Lincoln is sophisticated and supportive of the arts. I hoped (Meadowlark) would be embraced, and it has been."

But now that the festival has found its feet, Chang-Barnes is ready to return to her roots, the piano. She never planned to stick with Meadowlark long term. When any one person is identified with an event, it can be "dangerous," she said.

"It needs to stand by itself for what it is instead of being Ann Barnes' little project," she said.

Six months ago, around Christmas time, her mind drifted to the old fortepiano sitting in the Westbrook basement.

She’s not sure why it happened, but it did.

The fortepiano had its heyday between 1750 and 1850, when it replaced the harpsichord as the keyboard of choice for composers and performers.

Unlike pianos today, a fortepiano has a wood frame instead of iron. It doesn't have as many strings, nor are they as thick. It also has fewer keys than the modern piano.

The fortepiano remains relevant today because many of the greats — Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven — composed on it.

That's why UNL commissioned one to be built 25 years ago. The school wanted its students to hear its relevance.

As Chang-Barnes said, "It's like telling art students to paint like Picasso, but never showing them what a Picasso looks like."

But times change. And as piano faculty members retired, the fortepiano lost its significance at the School of Music and eventually was banished to the basement.

"You know what happens when you put things in the basement?" Chang-Barnes said. "If it's like my basement, you never see it again."

Chang-Barnes had the fortepiano moved from the basement to her office, where it sits next to a modern piano. And it later was moved to the recital hall for her concert.

She has taken it upon herself to learn more about the instrument and to champion it again. Next month, she will participate and perform in a fortepiano event in Belgium.

"I'm the last person to do this," she said. "An historical instrument? That's not who I am."

She probably said the same thing five years ago about organizing a chamber festival.

That's not who I am.

"It goes to show you that you can never know what to expect in life," she said.

Reach Jeff Korbelik at 473-7213 or jkorbelik@journalstar.com.

Meadowlark Music Festival schedule

7:30 p.m. Wednesday — Boston Brass with Samuel Gaskin and John Cummins, First-Plymouth Congregational Church, 20th and D streets. Tickets: $15.

7:30 p.m. Thursday — Chiara String Quartet, Nature Center, Pioneers Park. Tickets: $15.

7:30 p.m. Friday — Boston Brass, James Arthur Vineyards, Raymond. Tickets: $15.

9 and 10:30 a.m. Saturday (bike tours) — Chiara String Quartet, Grace Lutheran Church, Walton. Tickets: $5.

7:30 p.m. Saturday — Arnaldo Cohen, Kimball Recital Hall, 11th and R streets. Tickets: $15.

Note: Children are admitted free to every event. For reservations, call 488-9555 or visit www.meadowlarkmusicfestival.com.