Video: Nin-Culmell--Muiñeira (Galicia)

Here's another piece I discovered on YouTube. I'm pretty sure it was served up as a "Suggestion" video to one of my own. Given the spotty information accompanying the video, it took a little hunting to find the music. The piece is Muiñeira (Galicia) by twentieth century German/Cuban/Spanish/American composer Joaquín Nin-Culmell. It's number 24 from Tonadas, a suite of 48 pieces in four volumes.

Nin-Culmell was born in Germany, the son of Cuban-Spanish parents and brother of famous author Anaïs Nin (whose full name was Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell). He was also a student of the great Spanish composer Manuel de Falla.

A muiñeira is a Spanish song typically played by a Galician gaita, which is a kind of Spanish bagpipe. The piece does sound bagpipey to me, especially the grace notes in the middle section. The lack of individual note attacks on bagpipes prevents you from playing the same note twice, so if you want to repeat a note you use a grace note to articulate it. This is exactly how Nin-Culmell uses grace notes in the middle section.

As far as I can tell, this piece was also what I call a "YouTube Bullseye"—a piece that has exactly one video on YouTube. Of course, now that I've recorded it, it's no longer a bullseye.

Video: Corelli/Godowsky--Pastorale (Angelus)

I've written previously about Repertoire Season, the time of year shortly after a ConcArt recital when I start hunting down pieces for the next recital. During Repertoire Season after the ConcArt-II recital in November, 2009, I was considering trying to learn something by Leopold Godowsky, a twentieth-century Polish composer. I wasn't really confident I'd find anything, because my main criteria for pieces are that they are beautiful/entertaining, shortish, and playable. Godowsky has a bit of a reputation for writing very difficult piano music (and difficult piano arrangements of other composers' compositions). But then I stumbled across a video by pianist Magdalena Baczewska of Godowsky's arrangement of Arcangelo Corelli's Pastorale. I think it's one of the most beautiful pieces I've ever heard. It's fairly short, and it didn't sound too difficult at all. (It turned out to be quite a bit trickier than Baczewska's wonderful performance suggests).

Pastorale is the sixth (and final) movement of Corelli's Christmas Concerto, one of his twelve concerti grossi. A concerto grosso is a Baroque form of orchestral music. There are two groups of performers (the concertino and the ripieno) that engage in a kind of musical dialog. I think Godowsky's wide but relatively sparse piano arrangement really captures the sound of the concerto grosso.

For the video, I had the idea to emphasize the dialog by switching to the bass camera angle exclusively for the recurring "response" theme in the piece. I think the idea was better in conception than execution, though. For the first statement of the response, I didn't have a good bass angle take. And since the response theme is short, the frequent camera switches kind of interrupt the video flow.

The second problem with the video is due to the position of one of my light stands. It was too close to the camera for the wide angle shots. This lights up dust floating by the lens. More seriously, it gave me a lens flare that I didn't notice until I'd finished recording. (You can see it as a light circle where the right side of the piano meets the treble leg). I managed to reduce the effect by setting levels in editing, but it's still pretty obvious.

I'm nitpicking, though. I love this piece so much that I can't not love the video!

Is it Spring Already?

Time to take inspiration from my wife and my cousin and come out of blog hibernation. It's been a wild few months, but I hope to get a week in April to record some new videos. Until then, let me sneak in a little celebration of a recent YouTube milestone. On March 29, I reached 20,000 views of my videos on YouTube. 10,000 in the last six months. Thanks to all the people who watched them, the 27 people who have subscribed, the 90 comments and the 119 thumbs up. Too bad about the one thumb down. :-(

Repertoire Redux

It's that time of year again. The ConcArt is behind us, holidays are over, cold weather has settled in. It's Repertoire Season!

I've wondered in the past in this blog whether I would be able to keep up old repertoire while adding new stuff. Well, I'm finally losing some of my old pieces. And it just doesn't really seem worth it to me to be spending more time on them when my new pieces are so demanding. I always thought it would be a good idea to keep the old ones to pull out in case people ask: "Do you play any Rachmaninoff?", or "Play that Beethoven I like". But let's face it. People aren't exactly stopping me on the street and demanding I play the third dance from Ginastera's Op.2. And now that I have (HD) videos of most of the pieces I've played in the last couple of years, I feel better about letting them go.

So what's this new stuff that's taking so much time? I have two new pieces in the can: Leopold Godowsky's Alt Wien ("Old Vienna") and George Gershwin's Prelude I. These two are memorized and up to speed. Maybe not quite ready for public performance, but close. A third piece is in the works, and I'm pretty sure I'll be able to get it down. It's Toccatina Op.36 by Nikolai Kapustin. I have half of it memorized and close to speed. It's a pretty insane piece, so it's taking a lot of work.

Beyond those three, I've been reading a lot. I'm trying to decide between two baroque pieces (Bach vs. Scarlatti). I have a classical piece I might do (Field). There's an Albéniz I'm considering, but I'm still hunting for this year's "gotta play" Spanish piece. Still on the lookout for a big, over-the-top romantic piece, too.

ConcART III Review

Another ConcART event is in the books. And I'm happy to report it continues to be a great success. The numbers were down a little this year: about 35 people made it to the recital with another dozen showing up during the art show. But it's still a thrill to pack that many people into your living room for a piano recital and party. We're thinking of expanding a little next year and coming up with some creative additions to the ConcART template.

The calm before the storm

As usual, I began the party with a welcome and introduction before launching into the recital. My little stories before each piece were once again very warmly received. And I think this year I was more prepared than ever before, so the performances went very well. I was most worried about the Brahms (Hungarian Dance No.2) being messy, but it came off very clean. I had no problems with the Handel (Harmonious Blacksmith), and several people commented later that they liked this one a lot. The Corelli/Godowsky (Pastorale) offered the only real flub of the day, but I recovered pretty seamlessly. Of course it was at a spot that usually gives me no trouble, but that's the way things go. The trickier spots that I was concerned about were fine, and the performance was good. So overall, I'm very happy with this one. The Nin-Culmell (Muiñeira) went great. I don't think I could have played it better, and I heard several joyful outbursts at the end. As expected, the Schumann/Liszt (Widmung) was a crowd favorite. This piece was very well prepared and I was really able to put myself into the performance. The final piece (Falla's Ritual Fire Dance) turned out to be the second crowd favorite, which surprised me a little. It's a great end-of-program piece. Johanne confirmed to me later that the performances were all comparable to my practice performances, and that the tempos were all dead on. (One of my biggest issues is playing too fast when I'm nervous, which then causes other performance problems).

The art show was also a big success. Johanne sold eleven paintings. And the sales seemed a little more intense to me than past years. Many people had strong favorites and went straight to the office to make sure they got their first choice. This year we also offered CDs and DVDs of the first two ConcART recital programs for sale. We sold 26 discs. I was a little surprised (but happy) that the CDs were more popular than the DVDs. The ConcART-II CD was the biggest seller (10) followed closely by the ConcART-I CD (9).

Bottom line: I declare ConcART-III the most successful ConcART yet. Even with fewer people, we sold almost as many paintings (in fact, more per-guest), and the desire to buy seemed much stronger to me. Add in the disc sales and it's undeniable that our guests were very generous to us this year. Most importantly for me, the more I think back on it, the recital really was the best so far.

On to ConcART-IV!

Get 'Em While They're Hot

Some time last year, Johanne and I got the idea that I should record video and audio for all of the pieces from ConcART and ConcART-II, and offer DVDs and CDs for sale at this year's show. After nine days of recording, six piano tunings, hundreds of hours of audio and video editing, hundreds of dollars in discs, cases, paper and ink, days of babysitting the disc burner and printer, 800 cuts and 150 folds, I finally finished them all.

And here they are: $10 apiece, buyer's choice, until I run out!

ConcART III

It's the most wonderful time of the year... ConcART time!

Our first art-show-slash-recital was in October, 2008. We followed that up with ConcART II in November, 2009. Both were more successful than we dared hope. Now we're just two weeks away from ConcART III, which will be held Sunday, November 14, 2010.

Johanne has been busy with pastels and oils (including some great explorations with the palette knife). I've been busy 'shedding for the recital part. There are some challenging bits, but I really, really like this program.

1. Hungarian Dance No.2 -- Johannes Brahms
2. Air and Variations (The Harmonious Blacksmith) -- George Frideric Handel
3. Pastorale/Renaissance No.8 -- Arcangelo Corelli/Leopold Godowsky
4. Tonadas No.24 - Muiñeira (Galicia) -- Joaquin Nin-Culmell
5. Myrthen Op.25 No.1/Widmung -- Robert Schumann/Franz Liszt
6. Danza Ritual del Fuego -- Manuel de Falla

Come to Austin, see the show!

Video: Rachmaninoff--Prelude Op.23 No.5

After the first ConcART recital (in October, 2008), someone asked me if I had ever played any of the great Russian composers. I decided then and there that I'd answered "no" to that question for the last time. So I started hunting and in December, 2008 decided on this Prelude by Sergei Rachmaninoff. I figured "I've got ten months to learn it for the next ConcART... no problem".

Well, I may have underestimated the piece, or overestimated my skill, because I don't think ten months was quite enough, given my short, after-work practice schedule. I did play it at ConcART-II in November, 2009, and it went well enough. But I promised myself I'd work it a little harder for the video. So I gave it a half-year's rest and started over.

Overall, I'm happy I learned the piece, because it fills what was an obvious gap in my repertoire. It's a beautiful piece and it's fun to play, even if it serves up the occasional trainwreck. And I learned something else from this piece, too. Rachmaninoff had really big hands.

Rachmaninoff: Prelude Op.23 No.5 from Ken Barker on Vimeo.

Video: Albéniz--El Puerto (HD)

El Puerto was the first piece I recorded when I got my piano back in the summer of 2008. Two years later I finally got around to redoing it in HD with a good audio recording.

Isaac Albéniz wrote twelve pieces (four books of three) in his masterpiece, the Iberia suite. El Puerto is the second piece in book one. It's a very special piece for me, not just because I love it so much and I played it so much in my youth. Iberia was also a favorite of my teacher, Douglas Voice, who performed all twelve pieces in concert. Douglas passed away in 1998. I still think about him just about every time I play this piece.

I'm quite happy with the video. There's a lot that can go wrong in this piece. But this performance is pretty clean.

Albéniz: El Puerto from Ken Barker on Vimeo.

Video: Liszt--Sonetto 104 del Petrarca (HD)

Here is the latest installment in my series of HD remakes of SD videos. The old video of this piece is nearly two years old, and was only the second piano video I made. Definitely time for a makeover. Sonetto 104 will always be special for me, since it's one of the pieces I performed most towards the end of "the performing days of my youth". It's also one of the first I recovered when I started practicing again in 2007.

Liszt: Sonetto 104 del Petrarca from Ken Barker on Vimeo.