Season 2, Episode 1, Part 1: Jeffrey Biegel - Concert Pianist, Arranger, Composer

You're listening to The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song, where we talk to the brightest minds in the industry about how they're bringing the piano into the 21st century.

Welcome back to The Piano Pod and welcome to the very first episode of Season 2. I am Yukimi Song.

I'm Clara Zhang.

And I am 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 you this season. A couple of weeks ago, we did a special introductory episode for Season 2 where we go over the lineup, so 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 with Yukimi Song in the year to come. So don't miss out, the link is in the description.

Today we are 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, include 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, I didn't even talk 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 the 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 as a child. And then I started 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. I did all of these. And all the Hanon exercises and all the Clementi sonatinas, the 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 Adão 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. And 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. Um, could you talk to us a little bit about your studies with Adele 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 Adele Marcus now the way I thought of Joseph Levine and the names Isabel Vengerova, and these incredible powerful personalities. And Adele Marcus was 70 when I went to play for her. And 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, "Tee-ah-tee, tee-ah-tee, tee-ah-tee." 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— —Prière à la Magnétude, 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 her 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 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 Schulze-Éffler 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 too. 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 them differently and I realized, well, oh, so you know that it 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, the Etude. And then I remember studying her, 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 how he played them. So there was that component of it, but then there 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, 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 little lift after 2 every other measure. I was like, "Oh!" She says, "Well, 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 does 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 use, 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 the strong beat of the metronome.

If it's this— So that's the 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, ha, boom, or like, ha, ti, na. 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, you know, fast. Isn't that great? I'm like, no, because it's not. Because 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 Adele 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. 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. 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 cannot. I said, if you want to come out of your fingers through the instrument It has to come out of here. Your fingers are not part of your body. 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 petal 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. I said, 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 those 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 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.

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 it. Like she'd go like, "One, two, three!" Screaming at me 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 this kind of stuff she was great at.

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 Janis 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 Third 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— 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. We 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. Point your fingers more. Hear that sound? Think up, don't think down. There's so much character in that, but if I didn't hear her play 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 'You're 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, and 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 masterclass in 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. 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 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 Steinway?

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 Do what they did in the 1950s where there was one or two TVs in the apartment building and everybody would meet there to watch I Love 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. Of the day, a newspaper. 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 wild case and all the signatures in it. The half-million Steinway." They got it. We scheduled it, and I did some fundraising and hired a team to come to do it. We did it on July 8th, 1997. The transmission was a little delayed because a 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 that, that, that, that? Digital audio. So the DAT files he saved. He says, if you ever want to make a recording of this one day, here they are. He says, they're not edited because we didn't edit. We 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 Project. That 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 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, 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 Adele 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, and now we're in college together, and she's doing incredibly. But Tanya was the conductor. 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— the first time I ever played a full concerto with an orchestra was with Sikstin Erlin conducting the Juilliard Philharmonia for Prokofiev Concerto No. 2. That was my first time playing a concerto. Looking back, ay-yi-yi, but it 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 Adele Marcus, Morton Estrin's friend. Morton— 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. And 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 came up on 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. He says, "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, 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 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 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. 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 US, 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 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.

This concludes part 1 of our interview with Jeffrey Beagle. Tune in next time to hear about Jeffrey's compositional process, how he spent lockdown, and his advice for young pianists, as well as more incredible playing demonstrations.