The Piano Society

No. 384 of the ongoing ITYWLTMT series of audio montages is this week's Friday Blog and Podcast. It can be found in our archives at https://archive.org/details/pcast384

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Blogger’s Note: As we review our many musical shares from our musical forum activities under our ongoing “222 Day Binge Challenge”, the Friday Blog and Podcast will revisit some themes from past Tuesday Blogs. Today’s montage is part of that exercise. The Tuesday post in question was issued on January 24, 2012. The below commentary is taken almost verbatim from the original post.

Today’s Friday Blog and Podcast repurposes a topic we explored during January 2012 under what we coined “Pianothon month” The three works featured were uploaded from The Piano Society’s main and free website. As it rightly states, “Piano Society is proud to present its large collection of more than 5,600 high-quality classical keyboard recordings, produced by our artists consisting of both professionals and skilled amateurs.”

The Society page host most of Schubert’s piano sonatas, and Tom Pascale recorded two of them, including the one I retained to open the podcast. Tom grew up in Brooklyn, New York and studied mathematics at Fordham and Yale, and later pursued a career in banking while raising a family in the New York suburbs. After years of obligatory piano lessons, Tom quit in his teenage years and never entertained the idea of making music a profession. But listening to classical music, attending concerts, and finding time to play the piano has remained an important part of his life. Tom's experience in music is personal he does not play publicly but does enjoy sharing his amateur music-making through recordings.

The middle work, Dvorak’s Eight Waltzes, is also provided by a Mathematician/amateur keyboardist. Chris Breemer is a Dutch IT tech support specialist by day, and a born-again pianist (thanks to the discovery of the Piano Society in the mid-2000’s). Additionally, he enjoys playing with other people: accompanying church services, playing piano regularly together with other people, having a violinist partner, a cellist partner, and a piano partner.

The final work is a concerto performance by Neal O’Doan and the Seattle Philharmonic. In 1999 he retired from his professorhip at the University of Washington Music School in Seattle, Washington having taught piano there for twenty-three years. O’Doan has a few concerto recordings on the Society’s website, all with semi-professional or student orchestras from the Pacific Northwest Moszkowski’s Piano Concerto No. 2 is an 1898 composition dedicated to pianist Josef Hofmann.

I think you will love this music too.