Note By Note: New Piano Documentary

A representative from Plow Productions (a New York-based film production company) emailed to inform me of their most recent documentary, "Note by Note: The Making of Steinway L1037". It is about the actual making of a hand-crafted Steinway concert grand piano, which can take up to a year to manufacture. I've always been interested in this subject, but quite frankly I do not know much about the whole process of what it really takes to make a piano from start to finish. This film explores the many aspects of piano-making and what it means to create something so special and unique in today's climate of cheap mass-produced products. It includes viewpoints from various craftsmen, tuners, and artists such as Lang Lang and Harry Connick, Jr. Go here to read more about the film.

The movie will open in New York on November 7th (it will also play in other cities), and it looks like a DVD will be available soon. It has already won Best Documentary Feature at the 2007 Sarasota Film Festival, and has been officially selected at many other film festivals. Check out the trailer embedded below or watch it at Plow Production's website.



Did I mention how excited I am to be contacted by someone associated with a film production company? How very cool!

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American Voices and George Crumb

I’m trying to find some scraps of time to get back into new blog entries this week. My schedule has been extremely busy lately because of multiple performances in Dayton, but it’s been really fun to get back into the professional music-making life after a restful summer.

Last week at DPO I played some really cool American orchestral works: Bernstein’s Symphony no. 2 (The Age of Anxiety) and Jennifer Higdon’s blue cathedral. (Norman Krieger was the piano soloist on the Bernstein; it was quite an excellent performance.) The fall line-up at DPO is dedicated to American composers exclusively, as part of the NCR Made in America Festival (supported by NCR and the National Endowment for the Arts).

This week I am involved in a special festival performance of George Crumb’s Ancient Voices of Children, his beautiful song cycle from 1970 (based on texts by Spanish poet Federico García Lorca). Crumb is one of America’s most treasured art-music heroes, having contributed many massive and thoroughly unique chamber ensemble masterpieces to the American repertory over the last few decades. Ancient Voices is scored for a pretty strange cast of instrumental and vocal forces: mezzo-soprano, boy soprano, oboe, mandolin, musical saw, harp, amplified piano (and toy piano), and percussion (three players).

The texts are evocative, earthy, and emotionally direct. Crumb responds to Lorca compositionally through music that is just as direct and earthy: Highly decorated melodies, a wide palette of musical colors, and special sound effects are incorporated into a sound world that seems ancient yet energetically alive and virile.

Crumb has always written well for his primary instrument, the piano, and he is one of the chief innovators of music that is played “inside” the (grand) piano. I am required to play directly on the piano strings in this piece, and I thought it would be interesting for readers if I shared a couple of these techniques through some pictures.

The photo below shows me plucking the strings (like a harp) using an upward finger gesture from the string. I should mention that this technique (and all of the others shown here) are made sonically possible only by depressing the damper pedal and allowing the strings to vibrate freely.


 
This next picture shows the preparation of a very cool (and extremely loud!) technique using both hands on the lowest strings of the piano. You can see that my left hand thumb is poised at the edge of the lowest bass strings (just in front of the hammers), which will perform a rapid glissando across the notes of the bass region. At the same time, my right hand will swipe some bass strings (using my fingernails) which will create a “whistling” sound. These two gestures combine to create a powerful "whoosh" that will knock you out of your seat!



Here’s what my hands look like AFTER I’ve played the gesture (notice where the hands have moved):



Finally, here is a picture of an even more strange and wonderful example of Crumb’s endless creativity in generating instrumental sound through extended techniques. This technique is called “chisel-piano”: I hold a metal chisel (precisely 5/8 inch wide) in my right hand with the point resting firmly on a specific string and produce sliding pitches by moving the chisel up and down the string. You can see that I have specific places marked with bits of masking tape. These bits of tape, which are place on the strings directly next to the ones I have to “chisel”, show me where to move the chisel to produce specific pitches. My left hand plucks the string to get it vibrating. Then I move the chisel rapidly from pitch-point to pitch-point, creating a ghostly and eerie sound completely removed from any other sound normally associated with the piano.



Yes, I know what the request will be for this post: can I please hear these effects? Well, if you can, come see the concert! This piece (as well as any of Crumb’s other compositions) needs to be experienced live to get any idea of what his music is all about. If you can’t make it, I’ve posted a video here of a portion from one of Crumb’s solo piano works. (Someday when I'm less busy I'll get the equipment/software to do my own sound files on the blog...)

Below is a video performance of a movement ("Primeval Sounds - Genesis I")from George Crumb’s solo piano masterpiece Makrokosmos I, Margaret Leng Tan performing. You can witness one of the wonderful special effects I mentioned above, the glissando effect on the strings. (Notice that there is a small chain placed on the bass strings during most of this movement; it adds a “rattling” sound to the music.)

Guest pianist Andrew Russo will be playing this work in the first half of our Wednesday night concert devoted to the music of George Crumb.

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A Giant is Gone

The great operatic tenor Luciano Pavarotti has passed away at the age of 71. He was, perhaps, the most widely celebrated classical music icon of his time.

Read the NY Times notice here.

Anthony Tommasini takes an honest and critical look back at Pavarotti's wide-ranging career.

Most classical music bloggers will certainly link to many of Pavarotti's juicy operatic scenes from the 1970s through the 1990s as a memorial tribute. Since this is (sometimes) a piano blog, I'll offer a different but appropriate selection: Luciano sings a lovely Italian song in a smaller space with just piano accompaniment (Leone Maggiera, pianist). He's seen here in the more intimate art song format, allowing the focus to be on his exquisite artistic and interpretive abilities unobstructed by concert hall super-stardom.

It is difficult to be unmoved by Pavarotti's presence in this performance of Tosti's Non T’amo Piú. RIP, LP...

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...and another moment of rest...

Another vacation period commences. Blogging will be discontinued here for a little over a week.

OK, how about some recommended reading offsite? Here you go:

Jason Heath on This Crazy Business (3 parts, all about musicians and our mindsets).
Chris Foley's posts on piano practice (quite a few under this path).
Alex Ross on music education (July 2006).
An interview with Randall Scott Faber (1999), co-author of the famous "Piano Adventures" piano method.

Why not learn something about musical acoustics? Or maybe the Baroque Suite?

If you're tired of reading, watch something instead. Below is a video of Vladimir Horowitz playing some rather bizarre and thunderous Scriabin ("Poem Vers La Flamme").

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Pollini plays "Feux d'artifice"

Legendary Italian pianist Maurizio Pollini performs Debussy's Feux d'artifice (fireworks) in Japan. This beautiful and exciting work is the last of the French composer's twenty-four preludes, which were finished in 1913. The video is completely out of sync with the audio for the first forty seconds, but appears to be more on target after this point.

Pollini's playing is completely economical here. Notice how his hands always display impeccable technical poise, and how often the fingers remain in contact with the keys even in the most agitated passagework. Particularly impressive is the delicate quality of sound during the soft glissandi in the middle of the piece (around 1:55 into the video).



Did you catch the distant-sounding fragment of "La Marseillaise" at the end? Remind yourself of this tune (it is the national anthem of France) and then watch again.

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Richard Alston performs "Troubled Water"

Here is a video of pianist Richard Alston playing “Troubled Water” by composer Margaret Allison Bonds. This selection relates to a post I wrote a few days ago about musicians of African heritage, where I linked to William H. Chapman Nyaho’s excerpted recording of the same piece. The performance here is really solid, but I’ll have to concede that the video’s sound quality is not too great. Nevertheless the piece is presented in its entirety. Don’t be fooled by the relatively calm groove set in the opening; the water reaches quite a rockin' boiling point in this virtuosic reworking of the spiritual “Wade in the Water.”



Richard Alston is Assistant Professor at Essex County College in Newark, New Jersey.

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Medieval Times in Dayton

The Dayton Philharmonic will be performing Carl Orff’s massive Carmina Burana next weekend on May 18 and 19. This 20-plus collection of songs celebrating bawdy and hedonistic texts from the Middle Ages is scored for full orchestra (plus TWO pianos, of which I’ll be playing one) and multitudes of singers. Our performance will employ no fewer than three choruses (one men’s chorale, one full chorus, and a children’s choir) and three vocal soloists. It’s going to be a great deal of fun for everyone involved.

Here’s a performance of “O Fortuna” (one of the most famous numbers from this work) by the Bordeaux National Opera in France. Many will instantly recognize it because it is severely overused as “background” music in movie trailers and commercials!



Tickets available here. (I might be able to swing a few half-price tickets for some lucky inquirers. Let me know if I can be of service…)

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Couperin's Le Tic-Toc-Choc

Today I was teaching one of my students about the various music periods (and their oh-so-fluid chronological edges) and I remarked how music from the Baroque tends to be dominated almost entirely by J.S. Bach in modern piano recital programs. Often overlooked are the beautiful pieces penned by French Baroque masters such as François Couperin and Jean-Philippe Rameau. Like Bach's music their keyboard works were (mostly) intended for harpsichord but transfer wonderfully to the piano in most cases. One of Couperin’s most exciting pieces is a little perpetual motion machine called “Le Tic-Toc-Choc”; the French words of the title are a collection of onomatopoetic words that mean pulsing, knocking, and clashing. (The piece is also known as "Les Maillotins" after a family of rope-dancers!) This absolutely characterizes the piece for the keyboardist, since he/she is required to play constant sixteenth notes (“pulsing”) while both hands have notes that overlap within the same octave (“clashing”). The result is a really fascinating rhythmic collage that sounds more complex than what the music in each separate hand suggests. (See a PDF copy of the score here.)

I found a great performance of this piece on YouTube by pianist Grigory Sokolov (winner of the 1966 International Tchaikovsky Competition and a frequent interpreter of French Baroque music on the piano). Though the video isn’t synced too well to the music, pay careful attention to how Sokolov uses his hands one over the other to play much of this music that stays within a very close range. The quality of the articulation is superbly clean.



It would be rewarding for listeners if more pianists (and their students) tried to venture into this territory more often (I include myself in this criticism). Yes, Bach is very profound, but we shouldn't always exclude the rest of the most attractive Baroque literature. (If any of my students wants to take on some Couperin, step right up and let me know!)

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Steve Reich's Eight Lines

I will be performing with the Dayton Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra on April 20 at 10 AM and 6:30 PM at the Victoria Theatre in downtown Dayton. This group is basically a subset of the Dayton Philharmonic, an orchestra I have been involved with for about five years.

The program is comprised of some Bach, Handel, and a really neat and groovy contemporary piece by composer Steve Reich: Eight Lines (composed in 1983). This piece is scored for two pianos, two flutes, piccolo, two clarinets, bass clarinet, and strings. I'll be performing on the Reich as "Piano 2"; "Piano 1" will be covered by my good friend and colleague Dave Skvorak. The piece has great rhythmic drive, slowly changing musical textures, and jazzy melodies which all interact in beautiful kaleidoscopic layers. To get a taste, here's a video of an excerpt of Eight Lines (performed by the London Steve Reich Ensemble).




If anyone is interested in attending this concert, please click here to get tickets online, and here are directions to the Victoria Theatre.

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Video Performance: Keith Jarrett Plays "All The Things You Are"

Here's a great rendition of the jazz standard, "All the Things You Are", played by the legendary pianist Keith Jarrett, drummer Jack DeJohnette and bassist Gary Peacock. These three performers have played many times together in the classic jazz trio format (piano-bass-drums).

The entire performance is wonderful, but pay special attention to Keith's long introduction -- an unbelievable cascade of fast notes played with the utmost clarity and precision. You can hear every single note clearly yet sense how all those notes work together in larger gestures. This is a sure sign of some great fingerwork!

You'll probably notice something else interesting about Mr. Jarrett's performance -- sometimes he gets up from the bench and plays while standing! Well, Keith Jarrett is one of those world-class performers who absolutely loses himself in his performances. He really "gets into it" and if he's particularly inspired he may stand up, writhing/dancing about and even "singing" along with his own improvisations. That's right -- most of this performance is improvised. Almost everything in this piece (besides the main theme and the song's harmonic structure) is invented on the spot by the three musicians working together.

So...don't get too distracted by this kind of physical theatricality. (And please, any of my students out there shouldn't come into the next lesson thinking it's a good thing to stand up while playing. Hmmm....what have I gotten myself into here?) Some people do get bothered by this. But I think it's just his way of becoming completely absorbed in the act of spontaneous creation. After all, the music they make together is beautiful, and no two performances will ever be the same.

I hope to put some more of Keith Jarrett's performances on the blog in the future -- keep checking back as I add to the "Video" category.

Read the interesting interview with Jarrett in Salon.com (from 2000). Wikipedia article on Jarrett here.

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Experimenting with YouTube Embedding

In future posts I'd like to embed video content (where appropriate) to make this blog more interactive. So this post is my first try at embedding video from YouTube.

You should see a video screen below; it's a performance of Robert Schumann's incredibly difficult Toccata by the great Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter. Press play to see the video.





Want to find out more about this pianist? Check out the entry for Richter at Wikipedia.

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