Tagged: piano

Tuesday, January 22, Joyce Yang will return to San Antonio for a piano recital. She has played with the San Antonio Symphony, collaborated with violinist Augustin Haedlich, but this time will be solo at Laurel Heights United Methodist Church. Her program has music by Beethoven, Chopin, Bartok, and Rachmaninoff.

"The Second Sonata is a great example of that passion on the verge of hysteria. It is unusual Rachmaninoff in many ways - it was edited several times, and can seem schizophrenic!"

In pop music, pieces featuring the "original artists" are usually big sellers. These are the performances we heard first and are used to -- not the cover songs performed by other artists years later. Some pieces are so familiar that we mentally hear the scratches and pops on the 45's that we had at home back in the day.

When I sit back and think upon my youth my thoughts often turn to television; I am an American after all. One program that gripped me in those days was "In Search of…" where Leonard Nimoy would explore various topics; everything from Bigfoot to the mysterious underwater monoliths thought to be the foundations of Atlantis.

Think back to how families used to celebrate the Holidays. For some of us, it was sitting in front of the TV watching a Charlie Brown special, and going back another twenty years, Dad would play disc-jockey, keeping the records spinning on the Hi-Fi. Back another generation, families grouped around the piano with someone, who hopefully spent some time practicing, played Christmas carols for the mini-multitude to sing along.

Franz Schubert, incredibly talented and poor as a church mouse, wanted the chance to make a decent living from his music, and finally, near the end of his life, he got publishers interested. The down side was that his works were to be dictated by what would sell, and Schubert found his outlets wanted simple music that would sell rather than the big Sonata's that he was interested in.

Franz Schubert had great friends, and he needed them. His father wanted him to teach school, but Franz was built to compose music, and what started as a family hobby turned into an all consuming passion. Giving up his teaching job, Schubert turned to his friends, and with their help he was allowed, slowly and painfully, to become the artist he knew himself to be.