A New Video Portfolio!

I’m pleased to announce that the site recently underwent an upgrade and they tell me one of the new features is a brand new video portfolio. This means instead of scrolling through all of the videos on one looooong page, you can now browse through the entire lot or narrow down your search by type …

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An Open Letter To The Los Angeles Unified School District

I recently composed and sent the following letter to the Los Angeles Unified School District in response to the proposal that all art and music be eliminated from elementary education. Of course, if you’re here to begin with, you likely know why this is preposterous, regardless of budget demands. But I still felt I should publish my letter here as well and if you live in the LA area, please take a moment to contact your respective board member and encourage them to do the right thing.

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WFMT Artist Of The Year

What an honor it is to be named as one of the five finalists for WFMT’s 2011 artist of the year! You can listen to the segment which will include a special broadcast of a track from the upcoming HEARTbeats album today (Friday, December 30) starting at 4:00pm CT.  The station asked me to write an introduction for the track so I thought it would be nice to include it here as well.

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New HEARTbeats videos

There’s nothing quite like working with good friends and when I have the chance to combine that with doing charitable work, it makes a good thing great! Several months ago, I had the pleasure of recording a very special arrangement by Randy Kerber of Somewhere Over the Rainbow that featured Christine Brewer and me. And if that weren’t enough, my good friend John Williams was gracious enough to conduct the orchestra and work with Randy on some last-minute fine tuning to the score. Fortunately, we had a film crew on hand to document the recording session and the video turned out great!

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Not one, but TWO terrific things happened today!

My latest album, The Known Unknowns, went on sale today at Amazon and iTunes for its July 26, 2011 release. This has been a very special project for me and my wife, violinist Helen Nightengale, who is also the album’s producer. The album also features the Angeli Resemble, a spectacular group of colleagues and friends. I plan on writing much more about this in the near future and although you might not know it from the number of blog posts, I’ve actually been doing quite a bit of writing lately; in fact, I wrote all of The Known Unknown’s liner notes.

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Some Thoughts From The Tchaikovsky Competition

It is a strange experience to be here in Moscow as a judge for the 14th Tchaikovsky Competition, because my last connection with this competition in this city was 50 years ago at the 2nd competition. The former Soviet Union, and at that time the recent shock of Sputnik, was still fresh on our American psyche not to mention the impact of one tall and lanky Texan pianist named Van who four years earlier, had rocked our world and gave us the dream of ticker-tape parades and super-stardom.
Over the half century, there has been a sea change throughout the world, in music, and internally. Young people today definitely feel that they are more ready to pounce on this prize and instantly change their lives (and ours) than we fantasized in 1962. The reality, of course, is that the winners’ careers can be helped and abetted, but the real change that needs to take place must happen internally with each individual who has been lucky enough to have been exposed to this remarkable arena.

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Songs My Father Taught Me

I’m in Moscow right now as a judge for the XIV International Tchaikovsky Competition but I wanted to post a note letting everyone know that today at 4:00pm Central Time, 98.7 WFMT is going to broadcast Song My Father Taught Me, which I’ve been recording with them for the past year. The program looks back …

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The additional photos I promised

I wanted to post a quick note to everyone pointing out that the additional photos from the recording session with the great Jessye Norman are now available at the HEARTbeats website. In addition to seeing Jessye and more of the recording crew, I enjoyed composing a short introduction for the photo gallery that truly sums up my feelings about the session and how much I admire Jessye.

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