Robert Fertitta's long-awaited organ and piano recital was last night. We had a relatively small, but very enthusiastic and appreciative crowd, and ended up raising $392 in free-will donations! Dr. Bill Decker was there; it was lovely to see him as always! He told me his favorite piece on the program was the Faure Nocturne No. 6 (my favorite as well!). Darren Motise, a friend of Robert's and mine, came down from New York to see the concert as well! It was so great to have both of these friends visiting from out of town and bringing people together to hear such amazing music. I saw Pastor Steve today and he told me that everybody he's talked to has been raving about how wonderful the recital was!
Here's some pictures from the recital:
I introduce Robert at the beginning of the recital
Robert explains his program
Robert plays Brahms on the piano
Robert plays the organ, while I assist in pulling and pushing stops
I continue to assist while Robert plays
The sheet music for Faure's Nocturne No. 6, which Robert played immediately after the intermission
I'm visiting my grandparents in Indianapolis. We arrived at around 9:30 p.m. last night. Early this morning, I ran 4.5 miles on the Indianapolis Canal Towpath in my new spikes. Fun fun! I got back to the house and everybody was gone (except my father, who was still sleeping) so I made myself breakfast. My grandfather had been at the Rivi (a club my grandparents belong to) to exercise, my grandmother, aunt, and Maeve went out to get breakfast, and my uncle went to work early in the morning.
At noon we went to the Good Friday Eucharist service at Saint Paul's. The choir (a partial choir today, the service being early on a weekday) sang in the back of the nave today; it was a nice, simple service.
For lunch, I had some left over ziti, a dish of mango slices, and a bowl of squash, apple, and curry soup (which was DELICIOUS!). That's one of the things I love about visiting my grandparents - the food is awesome! :-D
We went to the Fashion Mall just North of Indy in the afternoon. Maeve was given free samples of hair product and she bought some lipstick, then she wanted to go to the Body Shop and she ended up getting perfume there!
For dinner, we had my grandmother's home-made cod fish sticks, along with backed potato slices and sweet potatoes, and home made coleslaw (which my grandmother makes super spicy with lots of brown mustard). So much good food!
It was very cool sitting at a table with eight people tonight at dinner, as well. I love that big family feeling! :-D We had some good laughs today.
It rained all day today, but tomorrow it should be nice, and hopefully we'll go to a museum or the zoo or something.
Robert Fertitta's Recital - One Week Away
Dr. Robert Fertitta's piano and organ recital is exactly one week away! It's going to be an incredible event, I know! It's so exciting that one of the greatest musicians in the world - a student of the legendary Nadia Boulanger in the early 1970's - is going to be performing a concert - free admission - in Bloomsburg!
In addition to being an incredible performer, and having absolutely endless knowledge of musical structure and analysis, Robert is a professional stained glass photographer. He was gracious enough to photograph all of our windows entirely for free! The photographs came out wonderfully! Truly fantastic! To the right is our great West window at the First Presbyterian Church of Bloomsburg, as photographed by Robert. I'm guessing this large window to be around twenty-five feet from top to bottom.
To be blunt, Artur Rubinstein is one of the only pianists in history who performed Chopin's Polonaise in A-flat Major, Op. 53, correctly.
Nine months ago, my dear friend, Dr. Robert Fertitta, was studying and analyzing this piece and shared modified scans of each page of the score to myself and several other musical colleagues - challenging us to figure out what was meant by the modifications.
Today, I figured out exactly what was meant. Further, I realized that by this analysis, Artur Rubinstein is one of the few performers who have played the piece correctly enough to use as a model, at least in recording.
What is meant by this? Simply the adherence to the beat of three. Note that the very first measure is a quarter note, followed by an eight rest, followed by a group of two and then four sixteenth-notes. The quarter note is beat one, the eighth rest is beat two, the third sixteenth note (the first in the group of four) is beat the three. Going by the beat of the sixteenth note, the first measure is as follows:
Then in the second measure, the eighth note of the E-flat chord is beat one. One is the downbeat in this beat of three, so this E-flat chord should be the downbeat of the second measure. HOWEVER, most pianists completely ignore this. They completely ignore the 16th beat for the first measure, turning it into a beat of two or a beat of three which ends not on the beat three which Chopin specified, but rather on what is supposed to be beat one of the second measure. The only two pianists I know of - and I've listened to a myriad of performances in this study - who perform measures one and two correctly as written (and the rhythmically identical measure groups of five and six, nine and ten, and eleven and twelve) are Artur Rubinstein and Evgeny Kissin. Those two pianists play the first two measures of the Polonaise rhythmically correct, like this:
1-2-3-1-2-3
Most pianists play the actual beats something like this, written here in actual beats:
1-3-1-2-3
Notice the first beat two isn't there... practically all pianists completely skip the second beat of the first measure and render it completely insane rhythmically. This translates into this:
1-2-3-1-2
Now you see that this mistake also makes the first two measures equivalent to fivebeats, even though it is actually six beats. So where does the sixth beat have to go when a pianist plays it wrong like this? Not on beat three of measure two, but rather on beat one of measure three. This bring about another problem...
In measures three, four, seven, eight, and thirteen through sixteen, the beat of three is constantly turned into a beat of two by pianists. The groups of sixteenth notes in measures three and four (as well as the rhythmically identical seven and eight) are almost always played, written here in their actual beats, like this (the second three is crossed out to show that it is a dead, useless, senseless beat the way most perform it):
2-3-1-2-3
This translates into this beat:
1-2-1-2-unspecified beat (rhythmically useless)
Now this makes no sense because of the grouping. Why does this happen in so many performances? Partly because beat one of measure three is being turned into a beat three for measure two, making up for the omission of beat two in measure one. So as most pianists play the Polonaise, measures one through four go like this rhythmically, using actual beats here (The measure is specified by the color of the numbers, B3 = beat of 3, B2 = beat of 2):
B3 B3 B2 B2 1-3-1 - 2-3-1 - 2-3- 1-2 -3
Does it get anymore discombobulated than this? Notice how the measures are split up nonsensically! The beat, very simply, is actually like this:
B3 B3 B3 B3 1-2-3- 1-2-3- 1-2-3- 1-2-3
So, if this is entirely caused by the omission of beat two in the first measure, then both Rubinstein and Kissin should play measures three and four correctly, right? Wrong. Kissin plays the first two measures correctly and then still makes beat two the downbeat in a fake beat of two. This doesn't just happen in measures three and four, it also happens in the following measures with nearly all pianists (in fact, as far as I know, every pianist who has recorded this piece except Artur Rubinstein):
That's eighty-nine out of one-hundred-eighty-one measures. Basically, most pianists play somewhere in the neighborhood of 49% of the entire masterpiece rhythmically incorrect. Now this is a very subtle thing, but if one goes through and listens and analyzes, Rubinstein is the only performer to be found who plays this entire piece as it is written correctly.
Lets celebrate by listening to the great Rubinstein himself playing. Here's to one of the greatest performers who ever lived!
A very fun piece to play. This is myself playing the Fugue section of Johann Sebastian Bach's Prelude and Fugue in D Major BWV 532 on the Casavant Freres pipe organ at Saint Paul's Episcopal Church in Indianapolis, Indiana. This organ has 90 ranks and 5,144 pipes.
I definitely have a Stravinsky obsession. Igor Stravinsky was arguably among the top six or seven 'classical' musicians in the world during the entire 20th century. His compositions are insanely gorgeous.
One of my favorite Stravinsky compositions, 'Scherzo a la Russe'. Three minutes of utter genius and beauty:
Here we see Stravinsky himself practicing/conducting a movement from his 'Pulcinella' suite. Words cannot describe this. He has such a definite vision of how his music is to be performed - seeing the composer himself directing an orchestra playing one of his own gorgeous masterpieces.... AMAZING:
Possibly my very favorite Stravinsky composition, 'Petrouchka'. This is a section of the Fourth Tableau, just a portion of the immense masterpiece that is Stravinsky's 'Petrouchka':
In this video, Stravinsky himself conducts the final movement of his own 'Firebird' Suite. The last two or three minutes are absolutely spectacular. The entire video is beyond words:
