Greg Parker - voice recital

Last night, Dr. Parker (our departmental chairperson) gave a fine recital.

The thing I like most about Dr. Parker's singing is his musicality. He takes care with many musical details that quite a few other singers would simply ignore. In this way, his way of singing reminds me of Murray Perahia's piano playing. Perahia always expresses the music thoroughly, and to do so, he does a lot of things that are hard to do and that other pianists don't bother with. This extra care makes all the difference. We might say it really makes the performance into art.

The most memorable moments of the night for me were songs of Faure and Finzi that are such deep contemplations of love and loss. Those deep moments refreshed my sense of the value of classical music for humanity.

Finzi's set Let Us Garland's Bring continues to impress me in that the music works so well with the texts. I think it must be very hard to write music for Shakespeare's texts that doesn't sound superfluous.

I'm grateful for arriving at fall break with a greater sense of purpose and an understanding of what it means to teach here and how to go about it. I am really pleased with the quality of my colleagues in the music department. Each one offers very high quality work, and I believe that our students have a great opportunity to learn because of the team that has been assembled here.

Learning

I've been learning old and new lessons the last several weeks -


Faure studied with Saint-Seans. I think that explains the various piano figurations in the A major Sonata for violin and piano.


Most musicians go through at least two stages if they stick with it long enough:

stage one - you think everything always comes out fine in your performances regardless of your preparation - and you're wrong!

stage two - you think your perfromance didn't sound very good, but when you listen to the recording you discover you were wrong!


Now for something really basic: you need to practice every day if you want accomplish anything.