Virginia Reels

These are images of rehearsals of Virginia reels for Life Let Us Cherish at Chowan.

Life Let Us Cherish

Friday night I presented a lecture-recital entitled "Life Let Us Cherish: Parlor Music in Antebellum North Carolina" as part of the 2009 Chowan University Pianofest. Click here for the full text of the lecture.

In the morning I got up and walked our beagle. Then I spent the rest of the day tending to details so that the evening would go smoothly. This was the most involved of the Skinner Anthology events yet. A singer, twelve dancers, a timpanist, a bassist, and a reader collaborated with me.

The dancers were Chowan students, coordinated and taught by Ashley Brooks. They worked hard and did an excellent job of dancing Virginia reels in period costume. Programming the reels was more problematic than I anticipated as it takes about eight minutes for six couples to dance a full round of the reel. That means eight minutes of constant sixteenth notes for the pianist. Playing that much fast music accurately during performance can tire the pianist's hand and mind, not to mention playing the music for several rehearsals in which we did the entire reel several times in a row! Nonetheless, a high point of the evening was the presence of these young dancers and their interest in the project.

Steve Harders, who also teaches at Chowan, read the Twain quotation with an excellent accent and also declaimed the various headings in the "Battle of Prague" with appropriate drama.

Lori Parker sang a few verses of "Life Let Us Cherish" at the beginning of the concert. We decided to transpose the song, and since the piano part is pretty easy, that worked out fine, although I rarely practice transposing these days.

Our version of "Battle of Prague" included another colleague, Dr. James M. Guthrie, on bass, and our student, Alex Welch, on timpani. Dr. Guthrie imrpovised/composed his part as we rehearsed, and Alex started by improvising. Dr. Guthrie and I gave a little input along the way.

Other colleagues attended and were encouraging in their feedback. One commented on the Daniel Hall piano sounding better than usual, which I believe is mostly due to the repertoire, much of which is transparent in texture and stays in the middle third of the keyboard.

Serenade

I performed two concerts recently with tenor and good friend Jeff Prillaman. Following a Bizet aria, I played Iucho's work based on themes from La Muette de Portici. At another point, I played Herz's "Mademoiselle Sontag's Waltz" Playing this waltz in the context of a vocal recital focused my attention on the fact that a lot of the writing sounds like sparkly coluratura - appopriate for a work there bears the name of one of the mnost famous sopranos of her day.

Last night we performed at historic St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Petersburg, VA. Robert E. Lee attended worhsip there and his son was married there.