A Fear-less, Horizontal Approach to Staccato playing

Most piano students become DIS-connected when asked to play staccato. Their full blown trepidation wedded to DETACHMENT is so conspicuously on display during scale and arpeggio playing that a teacher must first devise mental cues to bring the student down to earth, in a comfortably secure traction with the keys. It's no surprise then, that…

An adult piano student’s musical journey began in Holland

Marie, a pupil of long-standing, bestowed a heartwarming narrative about her piano study and its European roots. Uncannily, when I'd posted a beautiful rendering of Chopin's Db Nocturne in one of my blogs, she commented that pictures imported through the soundtrack were places she had known as a child, so her memoir flows from these…

A Heart-wrenching blend of Music and Memoir

A one-woman show playing at the Berkeley Rep (adapted and directed by Hershey Felder) is so emotionally riveting that it must reach Broadway and beyond. In The Pianist of Willesden Lane, Mona Golabek weaves a dramatic wartime story in music and words, producing a unique theatrical experience. With the expressive framing of the Grieg Piano…

About Coffee, Cats, and Non-legato

This blog mishmosh is as ridiculous as Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, a best-selling children's book title, though it's the perfect segue way to an unmatched set of events that transpired yesterday in Berkeley. Coffee was my first preoccupation after Marta Vago, a long lost "connection" to my late piano teacher, Lillian Freundlich, surfaced…