Bruce Brubaker on all things piano
Plants form a plantscape -- more or less continuous -- across a continent: the carefully tended jardin and the yard of "weeds" surrounding an abandoned house. Fallen dead trees in a forest, or overgrown city lots might seem like problems in need of solving... Elite classical musicians have often held themselves apart from other musicians, or even other classical players: "I'm better that that." "His playing was so stupid," or "uninvolved," or … [Read more...]
Taipei Yesterday, I was eating the best beef noodles in Taipei with Lun-Yun and his family -- genuinely extraordinary food, in the beef, the taste of the wood used to cook it, the unctuous broth with chopped green pickle mixed in. Before, we had small pieces of pork spareribs cooked in a steamer with rice groats and a hint of spicy pepper -- a Taiwanese reading of what I thought was a Shanghai dish, that I used to eat with Jacob Lateiner at the … [Read more...]
Today's the first really cold day that I have been in Boston this fall. At New England Conservatory this afternoon we had the preliminary round in a competition to pick a student pianist for a performance of Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. (The performance will be in April with Hugh Wolff.) These competitions are a continuing part of conservatory life. A few schools with many excellent pianists do this--specify a particular … [Read more...]
From Florida, Bob Katz has sent a test CD of the mastered version of part of my new recording. This morning I'm listening. He's sent along a list of many clicks and noises he removed. There's question about the basic sound. He's chosen a dither he likes and done a bit of EQ and stereo image shifting. The underlying recording was too diffuse, he thought. He wants a bit more "edge" and a clearer sense of where the piano is on the stage. It's … [Read more...]
This morning I was mowing down some of our meadow. All around our little house in the woods there's a swath of grasses and flowers that gets mowed once a year, in late fall. And after the tall stuff is gone, bright green mosses are revealed in many patches. After three hours outdoors, I practiced Chopin's Polonaise-fantaisie and some Haydn (for Taiwan in two weeks, where it will go with Bussotti and Curran). There wasn't really enough time at the … [Read more...]
UbuWeb Hipster Runoff the other piano blog: Stephen Hough at Telegraph.co.uk … [Read more...]
"Glass Etude" on YouTube "Brubaker recital proves eclectic, hypnotic, and timeless" -- Harlow Robinson's Boston Globe review of my Jordan Hall recital Bruce Brubaker hosts 4 weeks of "Hammered!" on Q2 "Onstage, a grand piano and an iPod" -- David Weininger's story with video by Dina Rudick "Bruce Brubaker on Breaking Down Boundaries" -- extensive audio interview at PittsburghNewMusicNet.com "Heavy on the Ivories" -- … [Read more...]
Music is changing. Society's changing. Pianists, and piano music, and piano playing are changing too. That is Pianomorphosis. But we're not only reacting... … [Read more...]
I'm Bruce Brubaker -- not Bruce Wayne! And yet, while I chair the piano department at America's oldest institution of professional musical training, New England Conservatory in Boston, increasingly technology turns my professional piano playing life into a kind of "caped crusade." Recordings such the new American piano music CDs I make for Arabesque reach a lot of different listeners, and seem to break through some old divisions of high … [Read more...]
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