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Please join me at my blog, blog.montparker.com, for my latest writings and to leave your comments. |
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  The Composer's Landscape
Project!Carol Montparker, pianist and commentator |
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A new series of recordings are already becoming available!—Of the seven [2-CD] sets, BEETHOVEN, CHOPIN, and MOZART have already been produced: (Each set includes one disc of concert performances, and the other a disc of commentary and program notes, focusing on one composer at a time.) The price for each set is $25. Please see the ORDER page to place your order. (Later in the year, BACH, SCHUMANN and SCHUBERT will be added.) The Composer’s Landscape Project emerged from a series of programs I gave at Steinway over the course of two years. Each event was a deep exploration of a single composer’s piano works, (with a focus on the particular challenges of that composer for the pianist), followed by my performances of selected works.
What gets more complex is the “topography”: the peaks and valleys, patches of bramble or thicket to plow through, open plains to traverse, gullies to leap over, winding circuitous melodic lines to follow, clotted harmonies to grasp, busy thoroughfares where all the voices converge, and most importantly, the strata,--layers as deep as the Grand Canyon, which we must plumb and peel away in order to find meaning at the CORE. (The metaphors are endless!) I have drawn mostly from past live, unedited performances, filling in with recent home-self-produced recorded tracks. Jeff Baker, a crack audio-engineer, miraculously eliminated some coughing fits and slamming doors, and equalized recording levels. But there will be variations between some of the tracks according to the pianos and halls. Personally, I love what each instrument brings to a performance provided it is as beautiful as the Steinways I have been lucky to use in these recordings. And as these are live performances, and not spliced and diced in a studio, there are some signs of my “humanness” , which I also have learned to embrace, in favor of the spontaneity and continuity. Carol Montparker |
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Steinway & Sons and Carol Montparker invite you to a Venetian Carnivale : Recital and Book Party To celebrate the publication of A Pianist’s Journal in Venice (a musical travel journal depicted in watercolors) with musical accounts of Scarlatti, Liszt, and Chopin  Friday evening, December 2, 2011 at 7:30 PM Steinway Hall, 109 West 57th Street, New York, NY For information please call: Andrew McKeon at 631-424-0525 x 3741 |
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A few words and metaphors will explain why I call the series
The Composer’s Landscape. Given, that Music is a language,
it also has a broad spectrum encompassing many styles, genres and dialects. In fact, each composer has a language of his
or her own, and a page from any score has its own terrain and contours, directly related to, and one might say,
a pictorial
depiction of the language of that composer. An experienced musician can behold a page from a score and discern whether
it is a page of Schumann or Mozart, just from the look of it: the landscape, even though the same system of notation,
lines and spaces notes, phrase-marks, dynamic markings, are common to all.
The newly published sequel to the well-loved
book, Anatomy of a New York Debut Recital, that
became a little classic, and an essential part of
music libraries in universities and conservatories.
One pianist’s compelling personal accounts in
diary-form of the emotional roller-coaster of
preparation and performance-- the sheer exhilaration
to the anxieties, told with humor and surprising
candor, have proven to be universal, according to
the overwhelming number of responses from students
to renowned artists over the years.
"Recorded live (with no
patches or editing of any kind) in a variety of locations including New
York's Steinway Hall, Carol Montparker sparkles radiantly across a broad
spectrum of repertoire. What immediately strikes the listener In
Mozart's K576 Sonata is the grace and sheer communicated warmth of
Montparker's playing, qualities that spill over into a small selection
of The Well-Tempered Clavier preludes and fugues, and two Schubert
favorites, the D 946
