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Like many pianists in my field, I’ve had the Anthology of Art Songs by Black American Composers on my shelf for decades. NYFOS has made good use of it over the years, often programming those concert pieces alongside popular songs by Eubie Blake and Fats Waller. It was...
I had a remarkable moment onstage yesterday. I have not, in truth, loved performing very much in recent months, for reasons too complicated and perhaps too unknown for me to explain. But yesterday at Caramoor, I felt the magic of musical communion with an audience...
When I was a child, my favorite part of every lesson was the last five minutes when I got to play duets with my teacher. We’d rip through Schubert’s Marche Militaire or the four-hand piano reduction of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, and I was in heaven. Sure, I liked...
We had to move our dress rehearsal from Caramoor to my house. The weather was predicted to be bad—yesterday we already saw signs on the highway asking us to stay off the roads during the storm. We woke up to find that they had been right. It was a very nasty day, with...
We complain about all the Zoom lessons and What’s App meetings we’ve had to endure in the last two years, but they can also be a blessing. Case in point: yesterday, when Meredith Wohlgemuth and I had a Catalan coaching with our guest teacher, Albert Carbonell. Two...
It was a long one. But as the clock ticked I couldn’t tear myself away from rehearsal. Things were popping at the end of the day and there was no way I was going to buzz out early. I shouldn’t have been surprised. The whole day had been encouraging. Everything was...