S2 E1: Jeffrey Biegel--Concert Pianist, Steinway Artist, Composer & Arranger

Welcome back to The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song and Clara Zhang and Eric Hunter. I hope you had a great summer. We took a 2-month hiatus to relax and work on our own individual projects. Now that we are all well rested and refreshed, we are very excited to be back on air. And looking forward to this new season.

We have some great guests lined up for this season. A couple of weeks ago, we did a special introductory episode for Season 2 where we go over the lineup. So check it out if you want to see what's in store over the coming months.

We also talked about our summer adventures and our other plans for The Piano Pod in the year to come. So don't miss out, the link is in the description.

Today we're proud to welcome our first guest of the season, Mr. Jeffrey Beagle, a world-renowned concert pianist, Steinway artist, recording artist, composer, and arranger. He has performed with many major orchestras throughout the world, such as the London Symphony, the BBC Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the National Symphony, among many others. And he is a professor of piano at the Conservatory of Music at Brooklyn College. Mr. Beagle is a great champion of new music, having commissioned over a dozen projects. His recording of one of them, Kenneth Fuchs Piano Concerto, won the 2019 Grammy Award for the Best Classical Compendium. Mr. Beagle's own compositions, Three Reflections originally written as a solo piano solo, includes a dedication to the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, will have its premiere as a piano concerto with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra on October 7th, 2021. So everyone, let's welcome Mr. Jeffrey Beagle. Yay! Thank you so much for joining us today.

Thank you, it's a pleasure.

And as we were learning about your career and life and music, I mean, we were so blown away. I mean, how many CD albums you've produced already?

Majority of the things I've done have been commissioning new works.

Okay, well, as far as I know, you have quite a lot of albums, and we were overwhelmed. And also we saw a lot of video clips of your performance from the past, even from early '90s on GMA, Good Morning America. And, and we found out you were actually born with disability, uh, deaf.

Yes.

So we would like to start with that. I mean, what, what a challenging life. And you had a surgery at age of 3 that And then you call it the reverse Beethoven phenomenon. So could you explain to us and tell us the story?

You know, I went through the childhood and teen years and even my 20s, uh, I never even talked about it because it just didn't seem like anything to talk about, and I didn't want to separate myself in any way for any reason. I never even told my teacher Adele Marcus at the Juilliard School that I was born that way. It didn't make a difference to me. It was my normal. But looking back, I mean, it was a journalist who asked me a question about my early childhood and I happened to mention that. I just kept going talking about other things and he said, "Whoa, stop, back up." And I started to realize that perhaps not being able to hear had a greater impact on my life in all ways. And it forced me to use other senses to become dominant, and that means touch and sight. And I was able to look around me all the time to see what was happening in the world because I couldn't hear it. But my parents knew there was an issue and took me to different doctors, and finally one doctor faced me to a wall and called my name, and I didn't answer. And that's when he realized that it wasn't because I didn't want to, it's because I couldn't. And that's a big deal. So that kind of formed the framework as to why music, because vibrations of sound became my first language. I was able to hear a little bit, very shadowy sounds of things. Like if you would cover your ears and try to imagine what you're listening to. And I would listen to sounds of music coming through big speakers, through the big, what we called stereo speakers when I was a child. And for some reason, as soon as I was able to hear, I started to go to a piano and try to make those sounds come out of the piano because they were in me. And I would start to play by ear, little things, whatever. And I would make chords in the left hand, but I knew I needed another one. I wasn't advanced to know to do this, but I just went to a neighbor tone, back to C. So I knew I had my— this development and back to where that was. Little songs that I heard heard as a child. And then I start to write little pieces. I still have them somewhere, little melodic things, little easy pieces. And the first experience I had— I mean, I had lessons at age 7. The teacher didn't want me to start until I was able to go to school and learn to read and to write and understand what I was looking at. The John Schaum series, I did Pre-A, the A book, the red, the blue B book, and the C purple book. And I did all of these. And all the Hanon exercises and all the Clementi sonatinas, 12 of them. And by 3 years, he sent me to another teacher, and I had a teacher, Morton Estrin, wonderful American pianist, for about 6 years. And then at 16, I went to Adel Marcus. But the first— when I was a kid, we called them record albums. The first record album we had, my parents bought me, was Vladimir Horowitz, Beethoven sonatas. You know, there's this one. That one's on there. But the big one was the Appassionata. And this was the first piece that I related to coming out of this handicap and meeting up with my destiny, basically, was this. In the silence followed by this chord. That's quite remarkable. So that was my exposure from early childhood moving forward into what would eventually be my life.

That's incredible. So you didn't actually start lessons until you were 7 years old? Wow. So you were just experimenting on your own before then. Could you talk to us a little bit about your studies with Adèle Marcus? She's such a legendary name.

She's still— I mean, I'm glad to hear that people still remember who she was. I guess they think of Adèle Marcus now the way I thought of Joseph Levine and the names Isabelle Vengerova and, you know, these incredible powerful personalities. And Adèle Marcus was 70 when I went to play for her. It was an experience. I told her what I was playing, and she would say, "That's very advanced repertoire." I remember saying I was learning the Chopin Concerto in E minor, so I was playing, I said— She says, "Oh dear, do you always start with the third movement?" I said, "No, I just happen to really like that, and it was kind of what I wanted to learn first." That was my first experience with Adele Marcus, but she would play and the sound was something I had never heard come out. I mean, she would get a sound that was very vocal, and she used to say that her father was a cantor, rabbinical cantor, and you could hear when she would teach, she would sing It was an incredible kind of experience. You would hear this very soft cantorial sound coming out of her mouth. I do that when I teach too. Like, she would go, "Ti-ri-ti, ti-ya-ti, ti-ri-ti, ti-ya-ti, ti-ri-ti, ti-ya-ti." Everything that she sang came out of her fingers. I couldn't figure it out how to do it. Frustrated her to pieces. She also didn't understand why I had all these fingers, you know, I could do anything that she would tell me to play quick as anything and she would love having me do that, you know, we would do— She would say, "Yeah, that's fun, that's great." You know, she could shape all that. But she would try to get the musical sound and level to match that pianism, and it was frustrating for her. And I never told her that I couldn't hear as a child, and I was very inhibited. That was hard. She used to say, "I don't know how to pull the music out of you." And it took a while, and finally it started to happen. And it just had to be— probably I needed someone to do that for me, and she did. She used to talk about Joseph Levine. I didn't know who he was really, and she was a student of his and assisted him for 7 years. And Joseph Levine was a brilliant pianist, and his wife Rosina Levine, they took the Juilliard School right through to the middle of the late '40s, middle '40s, 1940s. Then their students took the traditions further until the end of the 20th century. And she said to me once, which was a very strange experience, I don't remember what I was playing even, it could have been this— —Streamen Etude. And usually she would stop you every 2 measures or pounding out the rhythm or whatever it was. And I finished playing the piece and she was sitting in there chair. It was in her apartment at the time. I was not at Juilliard School yet. And I looked at her and I thought, well, she's either going to scream at me and tell me never to play the piece again, or something else. And it was something else. And she said to me, you know, she sat there like this and said, you know, and she didn't really look at me. I think she was spooked out. And she said, It's very interesting, dear. I didn't know what she was going to say because every word she said meant my life, you know. And she said, you remind me of Mr. Levine. You look like him when you hover over the keys. You play like him with the high wrists and you sound like him. And I didn't understand what she was really What are you talking about? Because I didn't know enough about him. And then that kind of propelled me into a new avenue to— I went and bought the LP recordings of the immortal Joseph Levine, recordings that he did on piano rolls. At least we had that. And, you know, I went into a lesson once and played this for her. I played that, and I remember playing it once. That was a Levine piece, and she said, "Learn the Blue Danube, the Schulzepler Blue Danube." I didn't really— I heard his recordings, I thought, "I gotta play it." That's how I hear it in my head. And I went into a lesson once and played it and she walked out of the room. Oh, that wasn't a good thing. She came back and said, "Dear, you can't play it like the recording. He didn't play it that way." Like, how did he play it? That's the way it says. They took the piano rolls and sped them up so that they would fit on the whatever. She said he played it much more musically and more stylistically. You don't go by those rolls. Ah, that is hilarious. And she said that Rosina Levine came to her once and said, you know, Adele, this is not the way my Joseph played. But that's the technology they had. That's what we had.

I mean, he would do— he played the double 13.

So I get it. I understand that now, which actually was a relief because who's going to be able to play like that? I mean, you know, I heard him differently. And I realized, well, oh, so, you know, that did seem rather fast how he would play. And she had me learning a lot of double note pieces that he would do, like— to practice that. That's hard, the Etude. And then I remember studying with her this. Schumann Toccata and all these other pieces that he played, and it was a wonderful adventure to do that and study them with her because she remembered having played played then. So there was that component of it, but then it was also studying with Adele Schnabel. Yeah. And she went and studied with him in Berlin for 2 years. And I'll never forget playing, uh, the Schubert D Major Sonata with her. That was quite remarkable how she would do, you know, And I didn't understand what she was doing, but she said it so clearly. She said, "That Ländler, the way to get the style—" and it was very simple. She says, "It's every other measure you have the lilt after 2." So the— 2, 3. So the little lift after 2, every other measure. I was like, oh, just, well, that's how, that's how it is. And Schnabel was fabulous. So many things he would teach her, but he told her 2 lessons on each piece. You bring it, I show you, you come back next week, next, you get it or you don't.

Yeah, he was famous for that. Jeffrey, I'm sorry, can I ask, can I interrupt you for a second? I have a question about technique. You just played excerpts of so many difficult pieces that are just in your fingertips. I mean, it's kind of mind-blowing, and it makes me wonder, have you always had that kind of technical facility, or is this something that you learned with Adele Marcus, and how did she teach technique?

I had what was called pianistic ability. There's a difference between pianistic ability and technique. She would say, "Technique is like money. It isn't everything, but without it you can't do anything." To me, a technique is the style in which one takes the pianistic components and marries them to what's happening in the music. It could be a totally different pianism for everything. I mean, let's say you're doing— she would teach me how to do double notes, for instance. I always had this ability to play, you know, fast, whatever. But it meant nothing. She used to say, "Good." You know, she would yell at all the kids, "You're all fingers, fingers, fingers, but you're not making music." And she would teach double notes. For instance, she would say to do the Schumann, let's say legato on top, staccato underneath, because the thumb and 2 are our strong fingers. She wanted to make 4 and 5 the strong fingers, so we would do— very purely mechanically to grind it in to make the weak fingers strong. Then little by little, what I like doing is shifting accents. So instead of— I would do—

See what I'm doing? Or—

It's hard to do, but it's shifting the strong beat to the weak beat. I, for me, I mean, I learned a lot from Adele, but I took that as a stepping stone to something else. Like, I say to students to put the metronome on and make the weak beat the strong beat of the metronome. If it's this— So that's a strong beat, but it becomes the weak beat. And I'm big about— people ask me, and Adele used to be— you get a tempo from an upbeat. So I get the tempo from the upbeat, but I feel the weak beats give us the tempo. And, and, and, and, and, and. So to me, weak beats are important because the heartbeat is strong, but you get a better sense of tempo for pulse from weak beats. And I always tell my students, play to the heartbeat of the listener because if you play—

now they could play it fast like this isn't that great?

I'm like no! Because it's not cha ba cha ba cha! You've got weak beats there that are breathing too and that's very important; a lot of pianists tend to go over that. My pet phrases basically are a combination of what Adèle Marcus said and what I think is a good way to get people to do it: sing what you see and play what you sing. Let the fingers follow the voice. And that has trained my fingers. You know, I have a friend, Glenn Dicterow, the violinist. He once wrote something about Barbra Streisand. About her voice and how it inspired him as a classical artist. I have felt that way. I wrote to him and I said, "Glenn, I felt that way my whole life listening to her voice." And I wrote what he printed in social media and sent it to her office, and she loved it and sent a beautiful note back to him because it's not just because it's pop music or Broadway music or she did classical music very beautifully. The human voice is the most important instrument we have. And I always tell students, sing out loud. "Oh no, I'm afraid I can't find my voice." I said, "If you want it to come out of your fingers through the instrument, it has to come out of here. Your fingers are not part of your body." And they look at me like I'm from Mars. What do you mean my fingers aren't part of my body? And I do the same thing with children as adults. I say, you are a tree. This is like kindergarten coloring book, you know? You are a tree. I am a tree. This is my tree trunk. These are the branches. These are the leaves. These are the roots. And the pedal is like the soil. It enhances what's above it. It enhances the sound. I said, if you sing what you see, it'll make your fingers become more vocal. And that's what I learned from Adele Marcus, is the singing touch, because she sang. As if you sing, whatever you sing, it's going to come out of your fingers. If you want a lower voice to come out more then you sing that voice. Your fingers will follow that, an inner voice, whatever it is.

Like if you do—

immediately the lower voice came out a little more there. I wanted it there because I sang it. So I treat the piano like an orchestra but also a choir. Chorus. I feel it's very vocal that way. So that was what studies with Adele Marcus were. I could go into some of the tirades because she would get very frustrated and really let us have it.

Oh please, we don't want to miss out on that. Give us a couple.

You're supposed to be talented. Why did I give this to you? I was doing 12-time Garian Rhapsody of Liszt. Oh God. That night she called me and said, "I may have been a little tough on you. Keep going with it. You're going to play it really well." It ended up— all the pieces that she really got down on me for became my best pieces. I'll never forget, I had to actually take a cassette recording and erase the lesson because it was just like she was yelling how long to hold a pedal down, not to count. And she'd go like— 1, 2, 3. Screaming at 3 because I was holding that C for so long. So now I just did— she brought out that E. All of these things, but it was all singing. And the thing that she would do that was remarkable, she would sing the note before she had to play it. That was such a great lesson. Like, all that kind of stuff she was great with. She played so beautifully. Now, she did say something to me once because I was doing I was doing Prokofiev 3, and she, you know, Byron Giannis studied with her and he plays the best Prokofiev 3, the old recording in Russia with Kondrashin conducting. It's incredible. But I had trouble with it because I was playing—

see what I mean?

It was the same. She says, "Oh no." And she heard Prokofiev play the 3rd Concerto. In New York, 1921. She said he had— it was a sound she said she couldn't get out of her ear. It was a resonance like— it's such an uneasy, kind of creepy quality to that. But I would play And she was like, "Well, that's just black and white, dear." She said, "You have to point your fingers." She actually said, "Your hands are not built for this music." I mean, if you said something like that to a student today, they'd go, "Ah!" You know, they'd be like, close the lid and walk away and do something else. Well, yeah, I felt a little weird when she said that, but I think we were tough back then. I mean, certainly cried after lessons, but She didn't pull any punches. She told you what the reality was. She used to say, "Better you hear it from me than the critics." But then she taught me how to point my sound, how to practice. And she would say, "To get the staccato, you need to practice very slowly in staccatissimo, or point your fingers more." Sound. Think up, don't think down, think up. Up. C.

Up, up, up.

C. There's so much character in that, but if I didn't hear her play it, I wouldn't have known. Because that's what teaching is. You have a lot of teachers who maybe, they don't have to play for their students, they could tell them. I need to do both. I always say, you know, it's an oral art to teach, O-R-A-L, but you learn more from A-U-R-A-L, what you hear. The piano is the teacher. And I tell my students, you know what, your voice is going to be your best teacher. Whatever you sing, and even if you have a lousy voice, you're a good enough musician to be able to sing it the way you want it to sound on the piano. You just don't realize that's what it takes to do that. And when they start, it turns into a totally different piece. Disconnect between the person and here, or disconnect between the person and the audience or something. You feel a wall there. I'll never forget one of the greatest lessons I ever had was Lucille Ball, I Love Lucy, Lucy. And I knew a friend of hers, 5 months before she passed away, he was able to, within an hour, he said, "Go to her house tomorrow at 4:30." I was in California. And visited Lucy for 2 hours. I mean, she was amazing. She says to me, "Do you talk to your audience before you play, or just walk out and play?" I said, "We usually just walk out and play." And she says, "Well, I don't understand that. I couldn't do that. We couldn't just go out and shoot an episode without having an interaction with the audience to kind of loosen us up, loosen them up." She says, "Otherwise there's a wall between you and your audience." She says, "You should try, you should talk to them first." I said, "It's hard to do that." She said, "It's hard to do that when it's a big hall." She says, "Well, use a microphone. Just talk." Get them— warm it up. And I was playing some concerts after that and I did that and I talked about the music a little bit and it freed me a little bit and it gave me a feeling of belonging with the audience more. And it really worked. And when I got back I called her office and said, "Please tell Lucy she was right and I'm going to do it forever." It was a great master class in communicating communication away from the piano, but just audience and artist, you know, stage to audience communication. And those are all things that I've taken with me for over 30 years since that meeting. It was really interesting.

Wow, I mean, thank you so much for sharing all the wonderful stories. And I also want to find out a little bit more. Let's talk about Steinway. You are a Steinway artist and you've done some a few Steinway collaborations, you know, produced an album, and also you've done some experimental things back in 1997, livestream. I mean, during that time, I remember I was using AOL, and then my phone line was actually the internet access. So you are way ahead of time in terms of your mindset. So could you tell us about the collaboration with Yes, it was an idea I had.

I didn't even have a computer yet. I didn't have an email address. It was 1997. I remember reading the USA Today. I was traveling somewhere and it said cyber listings. I'm like, well, that's interesting, they're doing things online. Hmm, but wouldn't it be cool to kind of do what they did in the 1950s and where there was one or two TVs in the apartment building and everybody would meet there to watch I Love Lucy? Lucy or something. How about a concert online? A lot of people don't go to concerts. Well, then bring it to them. How about a classical concert you could see and hear in your home, in your office, whatever? And I saw Cyber Listings was in USA Today, a newspaper. And I thought, how about Cyber Recital? A cyber recital. Cyber was the word of the day. And I approached Peter Goodrich, who was the director of artist services at Steinway Sons in New York. I said, Peter, how would you like to have the first live classical streaming recital from the Rotunda? He says, that's kind of cool. Then they asked me what kind of piano. I said, I want the $500,000 Steinway with that the Wild Case and all the signatures in it. It's the half-million Steinway. They got it. We scheduled it, and I did some fundraising and hired a team to come to do it. Uh, we did it on July 8th, 1997. The transmission was a little delayed because a lot of it was dial-up, and there were very few what they call T1 lines. What did I know? And we did it again, July 25th of that month. And I remember my son's school, the library had a T1 line. They watched it. It was streaming. It was live. It happened. And then I was approached by a company called Sightways, I think it was, in the Netherlands. And they brought me over to Europe to do one there. First European livestream. And then we saved the files. The audio engineer, his name was Norman Greenspan, he was terrific. Anyone watching this who may remember Norman Greenspan's name, did concerts all over the New York area. He said, "I saved all your files on DAT." I said, "What's DAT? What's dat dat dat?" He said, "Digital audio." So the DAT files he saved. He says, "If you ever want to make a recording of this one," One day, here they are. He says, they're not edited because we didn't edit. You just played through, not mastered or anything. So the acoustic of the Rotunda was so remarkable. If you've ever been to the old Steinway Hall, that wasn't until recently, it was it. The Rotunda, the sound, it made us sound great. Those beautiful pianos, you just sounded so good at the Rotunda of Steinway Hall, I used to love playing there. Even going back to the late 1970s when friends would try buying pianos there, I loved going just to play the pianos. And that's where it took place. Saved those and that was the first major collaboration with Steinway.

Jeffrey, you are a leading pioneer of concerto projects and you've collaborated with so many artists. So, could you tell us a little bit about that, please?

I'll try to make it as brief as I can. Piano concertos to me are a wonderful chamber music collaboration, and the first time I ever played a concerto, I was 11, and it was this Mozart. That to me was a wonderful thing to do. I didn't I did not play it with orchestra, but I entered a competition and made the finals. I was 11. Then I played— a year later, when I was in 6th grade, I remember playing the 3rd movement with the chorus teacher playing the orchestra part for graduation. That was when I was 12. When I was 13, I learned the Grieg Concerto, the Schumann Concerto, and then I learned the Liszt Concerto when I was 15. And the Saint-Saëns Concerto when I was 17, when I was studying with Adèle Marcus. I had not played with an orchestra yet, and I always wanted to, but the first time I played with an orchestra was in Long Island, and the great composer Tanya León was a conductor. Tanya was my first conductor. Wow. And now we're in college together, and she's doing incredibly. But Tanya was the conductor, and we did the first movement of the Saint-Saëns Concerto Number 2. At Hofstra University. And then later on, I had not played with orchestras. The next time— you know, the first time I ever played a full concerto with an orchestra was with Sikstin Erlin conducting the Juilliard Philharmonia, Prokofiev Concerto Number 2. That was my first time playing a concerto. Looking back, ay-ay-ay, but that was an incredible experience. Rachmaninoff Third Concerto I didn't play until I was— until 1996. '97, '96 or so with an orchestra, and I had learned it 14 years before that. So the concerto was an important part of my life. Playing for living composers is an extremely important part of this driving passion to want to raise so much money for composers to write music. I played for Maya Kupferman, American composer, who was my prior teacher to Adèle Marcus, Morten Esstrøm's friend. Morten, Morty, did a lot of his music. And he handed me a score, I was 12 years old, this incredible— it's on my website— the Sonata Mystikos. That forms the framework of that incredible sonata. Memorized, learned it, played it The Meyer. What an experience that was. Those were the seeds. Then in the 1990s, I played The Ballad of Revolt by Harald Sæverud. And there were these sharp accents in that piece. And at the competition in Oslo in 1988, Sæverud must have been in his 90s. He came backstage stage, grabbed my arm, and he liked what I played. He says, "Do you know what those notes in the left hand were?" Those sharp notes, this is the gunshots during the war. And he probably referred to World War I, as far as I know. What an impact that had. It's another seed. Then there was working with Lalo Schifrin when he wrote his Piano Concerto of the Americas, which Steinway Foundation commissioned in 1991 for a 1992 premiere with Cristina Ortiz. I learned that and played it in Honolulu in 1992, I believe it was, and Lalo came and he was there and we talked a lot after. 4 years later I recorded it in Europe with Lalo conducting. One experience to play music by and for a living composer By November, December 1998, I had the bug. I thought, why not go into the next century with creating a whole new set of concertos by composers? And Ellen Tate Swillick was the first. And, you know, now today, of course, people say, well, did you select her because she was a female composer? I said, no, she was a great composer. I never thought of things like that. And she agreed to take the journey on the yellow brick road with me on this one. I had to raise all the money for her fee and get all the orchestras to co-commission it and donors. And what was I thinking? But I just felt so driven about it. And I raised all the money. And it was the first largest consortium of orchestras for a piano concerto, actually for any music at the time. There was another composer doing something similar at the same time we didn't know each other were doing. And it was a composer having commissioning a new piece that he was writing. And so this was the first big consortium, and it was Cincinnati Symphony, September 2000. Ellen was there. Having a composer come on stage to greet the orchestra and the audience after and hug you, it was just— there are no words for for it. And I got bit by the bug and I thought, I want to continue doing this. I think this is the right thing to do. And then I created the first 50-state project in— it must have been November of 2000. And it was Concerto America. I went to Charles Strauss, composer of Annie and Bye Bye Birdie. He was a student of Nadia Boulanger and Darius Milhaud and Copland. I mean, This was an incredible guy, wrote pop music and Broadway music, and he decided to write Concerto America. That was the project. Every orchestra had this project in their email by then, and I raised the money for it so they didn't have to pay for it. 9/11 happened, and I just abandoned the idea of the project, but it did get premiered in the Boston Pops and Honolulu Symphony. And then, then started the idea of commissioning more music by people I went to Juilliard with, like Lowell Lieberman and Richard Daniel Poor, and then William Bolcom, and more and more. And I decided that would be the way to go, but not just within the U.S. borders. The Lieberman Third Piano Concerto is an incredible piece of music. I mean, the Second is great, but Lowell loves the Third, and that really should be played by many more pianists. Pianists these days. I decided to take it outside the borders. We had 17 orchestras in the U.S., Milwaukee Symphony premiere, and then a European orchestra in Germany, and we did 5 performances in Germany, which brought Europe into an American composer's consortium, which was unusual, never happened. And then after that, with Bill Bolcom, I brought in Canada for the first time. Time with Calgary Philharmonic and Chorus because I wanted to develop repertoire for piano, orchestra, and chorus. And then Ellen Zwilich, 10 years after the millennium, wrote Shadows for me, and that brought in the Niagara Symphony to be in the project. Now Shadows, during the pandemic, she restructured for piano and 7 players, and the world premiere of that is September 20-something in Idaho with the the Idaho State Civic Symphony. So that will be a premiere of a new version based on the pandemic of a piece she wrote 10 years prior. And then Jake Runestad's Dreams of the Fallen and P.D.Q. Bach's Concerto for Simply Grand Piano and Orchestra brought an orchestra in Finland.

Jeffrey, can I jump in for a second? Sorry to interrupt you. First of all, I wanted to mention the P.D.Q. Bach. Concerto is on YouTube, which I was checking out the other day, and it's absolutely hilarious. I recommend for everybody to go search that up. I have a technical question for you because I'm just sitting here in awe of what you're able to do at the instrument. And you have so much repertoire at your command from every different time period, you know, Baroque to the most contemporary. How are you able to remember all this music? Like, how many hours of repertoire do you even have in your fingers? I don't know.

I mean, I work on what I need at the moment, and then if I know something's coming up, I like to— you know, I always say the things you remember the most are the things you learned when you were young. That's true. Brain cells soaking it up like a sponge. You know, sponges get old too. And I just remember things that I'll say, let me go get the and I said, "I can't find it." Now I'm playing the thing. I was like, "How do I remember that?" And I just think it has to do with that, just remembering things that you— I always say to students, "Don't stay on the same piece forever. It's not going to make it any better. You're going to go back to it 60 years later and you'll get it." They say, "I got to wait that long?" I said, "Yes, so did I." But you know, you get things as well as you can, but you remember things. Wonderful. But with new music, I use the score. I've been using score now for almost everything because I don't trust it for some reason. I trust my memory for certain things, but for performing— even when I was doing online concerts for the Sonata Piano Camp in Vermont, we were remote, still are to some extent. And everything I did with all the YouTube concerts online in the pandemic forced in a way to go away from concertos 'cause you couldn't go to orchestras and dug out all the standard repertoire. I was playing so much standard repertoire again, which was great. It was a weird way to have to do it, but it was a positive way to deal with the situation. So that's how—

Yeah, so speaking of pandemic, you've done quite a lot of compositions. I saw some of the YouTube clips. And so could you tell us about your life during COVID I remember the last concert I did was in Florida in March, which was Kenneth Fuchs' piano concerto.

And I came home and that was it. I went to teach at Brooklyn College that week, last day, that was it. We shut down. And that was like March 8th, 9th, 10th, around there. By the 27th, I was feeling really caged in. I don't think I did the YouTube. I started doing weekly YouTube concerts from home and music of all styles. And I decided to write. I really haven't written much piano music at all because I thought, who am I competing with? I mean, Chopin, forget it. But it was a time in my life and in the lives of everybody where we were soul-searching, returning within, and I just heard music in my head. And so I'll play a little of this first piece I wrote March 27th. It's a waltz of hope. And it goes, it develops. And then a few weeks later, you know, one of my siblings got COVID and I was devastated and upset. Who knew what was going to be with anything? So I wrote a second Waltz of Hope.

It develops—

after that, develops more. That was the second piece. What's interesting though When I write music like this, and I don't know if she knows it or not, I've certainly plastered it as much as I can everywhere around her to let her know, to Barbra Streisand, when I write music, I hear your voice. I hear Adele Marcus's voice. People would say, but do you hear your voice? That is my voice. It's the voice I don't have, my raspy, horrible singing voice. But you do. Those are the voices you hear. And I hear that when I'm writing these kind of pieces. Later on in the year, like come September or so, I wrote a little sonatina, like an homage to Clementi. But it was after Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away. I just didn't know. I was kind of starting to feel burnt out in October. And online teaching, online playing, I wrote these pieces, I just said, "It's just not there. Nothing's there." I remember my wife said, "Go write something. Go write some music." I thought, "Nah, there's nothing there." I sat down and I thought of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In a way, there's a strange connection. I've never met her, but my father-in-law knew her. They grew up in Brooklyn together and he knew her when they were teenagers. And I don't know how much they knew each other, but they called her Kiki Bader because her sister called her Kiki, and they called her Kiki Bader. Why did I feel this connection? Maybe because of him. Oddly, he passed away 3 months to the day before she did. And they were both attorneys. He was a real estate attorney, and she, of course, became Supreme Court Justice. I felt this need to write something about her, which inevitably filtered in this past July into two more pieces, one for JFK and one for MLK, Martin Luther King. That's the three reflections. The second movement of that concerto was the only piece. And during the pandemic, I wrote this piece for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, which will be which has been orchestrated by a student of mine at Brooklyn College, Harrison Sheckler, who's now gone on this year to start his doctoral studies in Tucson. And he's going to orchestrate the other two movements. It's an amazing job he did. That's what Dallas will be doing with me in October. And I thought, what do I write? Where do I begin? I thought, well, think of the names. And a friend of mine told me later on, well, Schumann did that with Carnaval. Took all the names and wrote music out of their letters. I said, oh, that's right. I didn't think about that. I didn't want to be Robert Schumann. I didn't even think of anything at that point. And who could be? I mean, my gosh. So I thought, let's make an alphabet of music. A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z. Yeah. Well, what if it's— Can you use a D-flat? If it's a B, which is an R, is D, and a B, a G, or a T, or H-flat, can you make it flat? Yes. And then those form the seeds of the piece. So I have R, B, G, On and on. Then I come to her name, Ruth. What do you do with You have a D, a G, an F, and an A. So can I do—

or what do I do?

I did this. And Bader is B-A-D-E-R. Ginsburg, G-I-N-S-B-U-R-G. And then I put them all together and created this kind of hoping she's in heaven spiritual stuff happening with all the themes, all the themes, and then climaxed with this. The Star-Spangled Banner, and then big climax, the gavel. And then it ends just with her name. They had a nickname, K-I-K-I, Kiki. So that became that piece, and from being burnt out to being creative. I don't know if that would have happened if not for a pandemic. Uh, I wasn't going in that direction. I was just commissioning music and planning projects, but it was a year of reflection, a year of soul searching, and just evolving and surviving. And a little strange year. I mean, I think as we live through things, we deal with it. If you survive through it. I don't think we're going to really feel the impact of this until later on. It's like a PTSD. We won't really get it until we try to get back into whatever we knew. But it was an interesting part of the journey. And if you told me a year ago you're going to write a piece and it will be orchestrated and you'll play it with the Dallas symphony next year. I'd say, well, that's a nice dream to have. And you will raise money for Ellen Tate, who will look to write a piece about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Denise Graves will sing it with you in Dallas. I'll be like, you're a real dreamer. But sometimes things just happen because they're supposed to. And I raised money during the pandemic not only for that project but also for a project in two years from now, um, to celebrate Rhapsody in Blue's centennial. So I asked to be the composer for Rhapsody in Red, White, and Blue. I raised all this money during the pandemic so the orchestras don't have to pay toward his— worst thing you could do to an orchestra now is say, can you help support a new project of you coming out of a pandemic? So working on the premiere in that, I would like to make the 50 a project that I started 20 years ago. So the pandemic had a different effect on everybody, and I guess just my voice within, even from the time I was unable to hear, it just came back to haunt me in a way, and that's why I wrote music and raised money for commissioning new pieces to come.

Wonderful. Thank you. I know we want to keep going. We want to hear more stories. However, we are running out of time, as always. So we just want to ask a few things. So you mentioned about, you know, the Ruth Bader Ginsburg piece being orchestrated and being a concerto, and you're going to perform with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra on October 7th? And is it going to be live streamed or?

I don't believe they live stream, but they will record. I have to ask them how that's going to happen. Okay. Ginsberg Movement, but see, it only started as the Ginsberg piece. Then I decided to— I was feeling burnt out again. Why? So I wrote a piece for Martin Luther King, Reflection of Equality, and right after that, Reflection of Freedom, a tribute to John F. Kennedy. I thought, that's a concerto. So it will be JFK, RBG, MLK will be the concerto. I don't have a date yet to do the premiere, but it's starting to get a little buzzy, so we'll see.

And you have some other projects coming up, so could you tell us briefly? You have November 5th, "Islamay" by Balakirev under Steinway label coming up.

They're going to release the "Islamay" fantasy by Balakirev, which had previously recorded for Grand Romance, but there wasn't room on the disc for that, so they'd like to release it now, which is very nice. I believe that's coming out in November.

That's a single download. And also you have your personal recording— I mean, label. Yes. And coming up, actually, by the time we release this episode, I think it's out on all music streaming services. So can you tell us a little bit more?

Sure. Rhapsody in Bloom, one of the most recorded pieces in the history of recordings. But this will be the 1924 version in the orchestration that was first written, and it has soprano sax and different— it's a different sound in many respects. Piano part has a lot of extra measures that were cut, so that will be on my label Naturally Sharp, and it's with the Adrian Symphony and Bruce Kiesling conducting, and we actually We actually had to postpone that quite a bit, but finally in June we did the recording sessions in Adrian College in Michigan. And so that's coming out in September. And that's an edition by Ryan Banyagali. It's fabulous. He did his whole dissertation on that rhapsody. And it's quite interesting to hear it this way. So that's coming out. Wonderful. Yes. And then another premiere in January that had been postponed many times by— Planets Odyssey for piano and orchestra with the Canton Symphony. My dear friend Gerhard Zimmermann will conduct.

Great. Thank you so much for that. Now we want to ask more questions, but lastly, do you have any advice for young artists, upcoming artists, to students?

Yes. Study as much as you can when you're young. Make as many friends as you can when you're young, because they may be composers one day that you will commission to write music for you. But I always just narrow it down to one line: follow your yellow brick road. Sometimes the things you force you work to happen don't, and some things you work less to happen do. And I think, I mean, I've learned a lot over the years too, but I pushed as much as I can because it was— I mean, before technology, I mean, honestly, I used to just take a book and call conductors at home. I really tried to get through somehow. I mean, I remember Arthur Rubinstein was playing a recital in Long Island. I was a little kid. I couldn't get near him through the crowd. Something made me run outside after him when he was going to the presenter's car to go back wherever he was going. I had him all to myself. So don't let people say no. Follow your heart. If it feels right, it is right. If it doesn't, or something doesn't sit right, walk away from it. Um, okay, like that. You just be true to yourself. Know thyself is what Adele Marcus used to say, and it's true. And she used to say we make our own careers. I understand that, um, you have to control all of it yourself to some extent, um, and let others help you, but don't expect others to do it for you. That puts a lot of pressure on them. When I grew up, it was like, make a New York debut, win competitions, get a manager, you're a star. No, it's not the way it works. Some people have been very fortunate to have elder statesmen artists help them along and help get them situated in managements and have wonderful careers. It's fabulous. That happens very rarely. And now with the technology and the internet Use it to your advantage. Make friends. There's so much people could do today with technology we didn't do.

We could— we couldn't do. Absolutely.

We're at a disadvantage, but don't abuse it.

Absolutely. Thank you so much. So we have this fun segment of the show every episode, and this is called The Piano Pod's Rapid Fire Questions. So it's a rapid fire. So we're going to ask I have some really fun questions and I would like for you to respond in short answers. Short is the key to make this one really fun. Ready or not, question number 1: What is your comfort food?

I feel like I'm on The Dating Game. That's a tough question to ask a musician. I relate everything to food. M&Ms. I haven't had them in so long.

I lost some weight. It's okay, we all have. Great. So number 2, cats or dogs?

I've always had dogs, but cats would be great too. I'm a dog guy.

Beagle, what do you expect? Absolutely right. So what is your word or words to live by?

Integrity, respect, grateful.

Okay, thank you. What is the most important quality you look for in people? Respect. What is the worst quality in people you want to stay away from? Entitlement. That's a good one.

Name 3 people who inspire you, living or dead. Beethoven. Hmm.

Adele Marcus. My parents. My wife and kids. You got 5, sorry.

We will change the question. And which historical figure or composer do you want to learn or take lessons from if he or she were alive?

That's a tough question because there's— you want certain things from certain composers. Um, I would say Chopin because it's the instrument that we're dealing with and it's the sound. He was the one who wanted The Piano Pod to sound like the voice. I mean, you could study with other people too, and Beethoven for things. I would like to ask certain questions. That's part of why I like the commissioning process. You can actually— I can actually call Ellen Zwilich and say, on that measure, I can't talk— and say, do you want me to like go up a little here and use those notes you didn't have because you jumped down an octave? And you'd be like, of course.

Well, now is your chance to do that. So which historic figure or composer do you wish to hang out with or ask the question at the bar if he or she were still alive?

Beethoven. Because there's so many things in the score, like, well, I'm using this piano. Do you really want to mark that forte in your score? No, it's too loud. Mark it down. Great. It's beautiful. So many questions for him because he kind of revolutionized the use of the instrument as it is in his lifetime.

All right, my turn. Name one piece in your current playlist.

Oh, playlist.

I don't even have a playlist. Like, it's fresh and new. I don't have a playlist. I couldn't even make that up because I like to see what's going on at the moment and I click on it.

So what's, what's the last piece you listened to?

Uh, I was just— I don't even remember which one it was. It was a whole bunch, but I love The Piano Files of Mark Ainley on Facebook and Instagram because he shares recordings by artists we've never heard of. Absolutely stunningly beautiful performances from the middle of the 20th century. People that just didn't become famous, but their work was so incredible. So I definitely recommend, you know, visiting The Piano Files of Marc Ainley, A-I-N-L-E-Y. They are really fascinating. I mean, I could click on the Schulzebler arrangement of the Blue Danube, and there's over a dozen different recordings on YouTube by pianists I never heard of playing it. It's remarkable.

That sounds like an incredible resource. Okay, uh, well, what's a book title that you are currently reading?

I'm not reading anything right now. Okay, right now it's— right now it's, um, uh, The Planet's Odyssey of Daniel Pertu and, uh, The Legend of Bijan and Bani by, um, Farhad Poupel, a new piece that I'm going to learn for next year, uh, Iranian composer. So the book titles are now the, like, new music. So I haven't been able to really go away and just read something.

Fair answer.

Totally run away and watch HBO Max. I just watched a really wacky series. I really like The White Lotus. Whoa, whoa, you know why I liked it? The scenery, the music sounded like Renaissance Hawaiian music for choir. The music was fabulous. I really enjoyed— I mean, the series, it was crazy, but the music and the scenery was fabulous.

I'll have to check it out. All right, everybody loves this next question. You only get one piece to listen to for the rest of your life. What is it?

Rachmaninoff Third Piano Concerto.

Lovely. Okay, final question, fill in the blank: music is blank.

A language.

Ding ding ding! You won the question, so you're the winner. Yay! I get a new Steinway B? Yeah, all right. All right. I hope. Count me on your way. Yeah. Thank you so much for this wonderful conversations we had. We really are so inspired by your stories and your beautiful music. You just demonstrated a little bit for us. So, and thank you for joining us today. So we would like to remind our audience that your— Mr. Beagle's digital recording release from his own label, Naturally Sharp, will be available actually soon, or maybe about the time that we release this episode, all on digital outlets. And that's the Rhapsody in Blue in 1924 version. Version. And also you will be performing— it's the premiere of your piece, Reflection of Justice: An Ode to RBG, which you're going to be performing with the Dallas Symphony on October 7th. And November 5th, release, Steinway label, Islamay. And January, you will be premiering A Planet's Odyssey by Daniel Pertu. Yes. So yes, and I— we want to thank the audience for joining us today.

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We'll see you for the next episode of The Piano Pod. Bye everyone! Goodbye! Ciao! Thank you, Mr. Bibo. Thank you.

Thank you so much for coming on our show.

I love you. Thank you. Thank you so much.

Grazie.