Kelly Muller Semi-Finalist at LA County Music Center Spotlight Auditions

Congratulations to Studio student Kelly Muller who was selected to participate as a semi-finalist in the prestigious Los Angeles County Music Center’s Spotlight Awards program. She was one of 15 semi-finalists who were selected from a field of over 430 students.

We’re are proud to say that Kelly is the 7th such semi-finalist to represent The Alpert Studio over the course of 7 years.

Let’s all wish her good luck and “break a leg” for the finals, which will be held in February. Good job, Kelly!

Join us in Ontario on Saturday, January 21

Please Join the Alpert Studio for an extraordinary, glowingly reviewed compilation opera -as it’s broadcast live from the Met!

Featuring the world’s best singers, glorious music of the Baroque masters,and a story drawn from Shakespeare, this is something that all of our students and families should not miss. In “The Enchanted Island” the lovers from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream are shipwrecked on the other-worldly island of The Tempest. The work showcases arias and ensembles by Handel, Vivaldi, Rameau, and others. With an all-star cast featuring Placido Domingo and many current stars of opera, this is a must see!

Hope to see each and every one of you there, to experience this unique and special opportunity to see The Metropolitan Opera Live in HD.

Saturday morning January 21st, at 9:55 am, at the Ontario Mills AMC 30. Running time is 3 hrs 40 mins.

For event information click here. Ticket information here.

(Tickets can be purchased at the door or online for $22 adults /$18 children up to 12. Also, AMC staff has been known to accept AMC movie passes at the door, but don’t count on it.)

This beautiful selection is from a song cycle of Maury Yeston, contemporary composer and music educator. Can you hear the Schubertian influence? It’s performed here by my own son, Brandon, and it’s a perfect way to honor fathers everywhere. Happy Father’s Day, everyone!
–Bill Alpert

Urinetown Lives!

Urinetown The Musical

Back by popular demand, this stellar production will now be able to be seen for nine more performances at the Grove Theater in Upland. With brilliant score, book and cast, this production is not to be missed!

The Grove Theater – 276 E. Ninth, Upland CA
(909) 920-4343.

Friday and Saturday May 21 and 22 at 7:29 p.m.
Sunday May 23 at 2:00

Friday and Saturday May 28 and 29 at 7:29 p.m.
Sunday May 30 at 2:00

Friday and Saturday June 4 and 5 at 7:29 p.m.
Sunday June 6 at 2:00.

The Grove Theater – 276 E. Ninth, Upland CA
(909) 920-4343.

Call the box office (909) 920-4343 for ticket prices and reserve your tickets today

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Our dear friends John Walz, Edie Orloff and Roger Wilke write:

Greetings from Europe. We are having a wonderful tour with the Pacific Trio. We have done concerts in Poland and Germany so far, tomorrow we are in France, then back to Germany. We finish up in Munich, playing at the Gasteig, which is the release concert for our new CD of American works.

This, the latest of many European tours by The Pacific Trio, brings home to us the universal nature of music. A great performance of live music will capture the imagination of people across any culture, social class, political or religious belief. Our performing artists have done much to promote understanding and cooperation across the far corners of the Earth.

Frequently we see the world in a distorted view of controversy, conflict and turmoil on TV and in newspapers. Yet as a race, humans share much more that connects us than separates us. Follow our intrepid three friends across the planet and you’ll find living rooms and auditoriums full of diverse audiences that celebrate the universality of great music.

In what city, country or continent could Gershwin’s Second Piano Prelude (arranged for trio) not melt your heart?

Studio students Jessica and Mike Ciao recently took the challenge and contributed their selected recordings. Will you take the challenge too?

Listening Challenge Selections:
Can you name a famous violinist that performed in each of the following time periods?
1900-1935
1936-1950
1951-1979

and one more for posterity, Alison Krauss, 2007 recording

Alpert Studio Students are invited to participate in a musical theater master class for dance and vocal performance, presented by noted Broadway star Eden Espinosa and choreographer Sergio Mejia.

Eden Espinosa began singing at the age of three and performing at age five.¹ After graduating from Canyon High School, she worked at local theme parks prior to being discovered by the BKLYN casting director. Espinosa worked on creating the title role of the musical at the Denver Civic Theatre for nearly two years. Prior to BKLYN’s Broadway run at the Plymouth Theatre, Eden made her Broadway debut in the original company of Stephen Schwartz‘s musical Wicked, where she understudied Idina Menzel’s Elphaba. Espinosa departed Wicked in August, 2004. BKLYN began its Broadway run on October 24, 2004 and closed on June 26, 2005. (extracted from Wikipedia)

Presented by Broadway Experience
Adult class (14 & up) Sunday, June 28th at 3:00pm
Youth class (7 thru 13) Monday, June 29th at 10:00am
Participant Fee: $65.00

The Studio Theater • 1400 N. Benson Ave., Upland CA

For information call (909) 982-5736 • http://broadwayexperience.org

By reservation only. Sign up early for this very special event, as class sizes are strictly limited

Judges Joe Randeen (left) and Earl Richards during semi finals

INLAND IDOL FINALS

Where: La Mirada Performing Arts Center, 14900 La Mirada Blvd.
When: 6:30-9:30 p.m.
Cost: $14 each,
Information: www.inlandidol.com/tickets, 951-371-5239

Congratulations to vocal students Mercedes Machado and Eryn Moore for their recent accomplishments at the recent San Bernardino County Music Educators Solofest Competition. Both singers advanced to the competition finals and ultimately took first place in their respective age divisions.

As winners they are awarded full scholarships to the prestigious summer music camp at Idyllwild. This coveted prize has been enjoyed by many studio students in the past, all giving rave reviews to the experience.

Congratulations to all students who participated in this event, and heartfelt thanks to our friend, pianist and accompanist Janet Noll for her invaluable support.

The story is taken from the welcome address to parents of the freshman class at Boston Conservatory given by Karl Paulnack, pianist and director of the music division at Boston Conservatory. It’s a rather long post; please, please read every word. You’ll be glad you did.

“One of my parents’ deepest fears, I suspect, is that society would not properly value me as a musician, that I wouldn’t be appreciated. I had very good grades in high school, I was good in science and math, and they imagined that as a doctor or a research chemist or an engineer, I might be more appreciated than I would be as a musician.

I still remember my mother’s remark when I announced my decision to apply to music school-she said, “You’re WASTING your SAT scores.” On some level, I think, my parents were not sure themselves what the value of music was, what its purpose was. And they LOVED music, they listened to classical music all the time. They just weren’t really clear about its function.

So let me talk about that a little bit, because we live in a society that puts music in the “arts and entertainment” section of the newspaper, and serious music, the kind your kids are about to engage in, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with entertainment, in fact it’s the opposite of entertainment. Let me talk a little bit about music, and how it works.

The first people to understand how music really works were the ancient Greeks. And this is going to fascinate you; the Greeks said that music and astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study of relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and music was seen as the study of relationship between invisible, internal, hidden objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us. Let me give you some examples of how this works.

One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the “Quartet for the End of Time” written by French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1940.

Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered the war against Nazi Germany. He was captured by the Germans in June of 1940, sent across Germany in a cattle car and imprisoned in a concentration camp.

He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and a place to compose. There were three other musicians in the camp, a cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist, and Messiaen wrote his quartet with these specific players in mind. It was performed in January 1941 for four thousand prisoners and guards in the prison camp. Today it is one of the most famous masterworks in the repertoire.

Given what we have since learned about life in the concentration camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing music? There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture-why would anyone bother with music? And yet-from the camps, we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art; it wasn’t just this one fanatic Messiaen; many, many people created art. Why?

Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life. The camps were without money, without hope, without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect, but they were not without art. Art is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say, “I am alive, and my life has meaning.”

On September 12, 2001 I was a resident of Manhattan . That morning I reached a new understanding of my art and its relationship to the world. I sat down at the piano that morning at 10 AM to practice as was my daily routine; I did it by force of habit, without thinking about it. I lifted the cover on the keyboard, and opened my music, and put my hands on the keys and took my hands off the keys. And I sat there and thought, does this even matter? Isn’t this completely irrelevant? Playing the piano right now, given what happened in this city yesterday, seems silly, absurd, irreverent, pointless. Why am I here? What place has a musician in this moment in time? Who needs a piano player right now? I was completely lost.

And then I, along with the rest of New York , went through the journey of getting through that week. I did not play the piano that day, and in fact I contemplated briefly whether I would ever want to play the piano again. And then I observed how we got through the day. At least in my neighborhood, we didn’t shoot hoops or play Scrabble. We didn’t play cards to pass the time, we didn’t watch TV, we didn’t shop, we most certainly did not go to the mall. The first organized activity that I saw in New York , that same day, was singing. People sang. People sang around fire houses, people sang “We Shall Overcome”. Lots of people sang “America the Beautiful.” The first organized public event that I remember was the Brahms Requiem, later that week, at Lincoln Center, with the New York Philharmonic. The first organized public expression of grief, our first communal response to that historic event, was a concert. That was the beginning of a sense that life might go on. The US Military secured the airspace, but recovery was led by the arts, and by music in particular, that very night.

From these two experiences, I have come to understand that music is not part of “arts and entertainment” as the newspaper section would have us believe. It’s not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pass time. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we can’t with our minds.

Some of you may know Samuel Barber’s heartwrenchingly beautiful piece “Adagio for Strings.” If you don’t know it by that name, then some of you may know it as the background music which accompanied the Oliver Stone movie PLATOON, a film about the Vietnam War. If you know that piece of music either way, you know it has the ability to crack your heart open like a walnut; it can make you cry over sadness you didn’t know you had. Music can slip beneath our conscious reality to get at what’s really going on inside us the way a good therapist does.

I bet that you have never been to a wedding where there was absolutely no music. There might have been only a little music, there might have been some really bad music, but I bet you there was some music. And something very predictable happens at weddings-people get all pent up with all kinds of emotions, and then there’s some musical moment where the action of the wedding stops and someone sings or plays the flute or something. And even if the music is lame, even if the quality isn’t good, predictably 30 or 40 percent of the people who are going to cry at a wedding cry a couple of moments after the music starts. Why? The Greeks. Music allows us to move around those big invisible pieces of ourselves and rearrange our insides so that we can express what we feel even when we can’t talk about it.

Can you imagine watching INDIANA JONES or SUPERMAN or STAR WARS with the dialogue but no music? What is it about the music swelling up at just the right moment in ET so that all the softies in the audience start crying at exactly the same moment? I guarantee you if you showed the movie with the music stripped out, it wouldn’t happen that way. The Greeks: Music is the understanding of the relationship between invisible internal objects.

I’ll give you one more example, the story of the most important concert of my life. I must tell you I have played a little less than a thousand concerts in my life so far. I have played in places that I thought were important. I like playing in Carnegie Hall; I enjoyed playing in Paris ; it made me very happy to please the critics in St. Petersburg . I have played for people I thought were important; music critics of major newspapers, foreign heads of state. The most important concert of my entire life took place in a nursing home in Fargo, ND, about 4 years ago.

I was playing with a very dear friend of mine who is a violinist. We began, as we often do, with Aaron Copland’s Sonata, which was written during World War II and dedicated to a young friend of Copland’s, a young pilot who was shot down during the war. Now we often talk to our audiences about the pieces we are going to play rather than providing them with written program notes. But in this case, because we began the concert with this piece, we decided to talk about the piece later in the program and to just come out and play the music without explanation.

Midway through the piece, an elderly man seated in a wheelchair near the front of the concert hall began to weep. This man, whom I later met, was clearly a soldier-even in his 70′s, it was clear from his buzz-cut hair, square jaw and general demeanor that he had spent a good deal of his life in the military. I thought it a little bit odd that someone would be moved to tears by that particular movement of that particular piece, but it wasn’t the first time I’ve heard crying in a concert and we went on with the concert and finished the piece.

When we came out to play the next piece on the program, we decided to talk about both the first and second pieces, and we described the circumstances in which the Copland was written and mentioned it was a dedication to a downed pilot. The man in the front of the audience became so disturbed that he had to leave the auditorium. I honestly figured that we would not see him again, but he did come backstage afterwards, tears and all, to explain himself.

What he told us was this: “During World War II, I was a pilot, and I was in an aerial combat situation where one of my team’s planes was hit. I watched my friend bail out, and watched his parachute open, but the Japanese planes which had engaged us returned and machine gunned across the parachute chords so as to separate the parachute from the pilot, and I watched my friend drop away into the ocean, realizing that he was lost. I have not thought about this for many years, but during that first piece of music you played, this memory returned to me so vividly that it was as though I was reliving it. I didn’t understand why this was happening, why now, but then when you came out to explain that this piece of music was written to commemorate a lost pilot, it was a little more than I could handle. How does the music do that? How did it find those feelings and those memories in me?

Remember the Greeks: music is the study of invisible relationships between internal objects. This concert in Fargo was the most important work I have ever done. For me to play for this old soldier and help him connect, somehow, with Aaron Copland, and to connect their memories of their lost friends, to help him remember and mourn his friend, this is my work. This is why music matters.

What follows is part of the talk I will give to this year’s freshman class when I welcome them a few days from now. The responsibility I will charge your sons and daughters with is this:

“If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing appendectomies, you’d take your work very seriously because you would imagine that some night at two AM someone is going to waltz into your emergency room and you’re going to have to save their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8 PM someone is going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do your craft.

You’re not here to become an entertainer, and you don’t have to sell yourself. The truth is you don’t have anything to sell; being a musician isn’t about dispensing a product, like selling used Chevies. I’m not an entertainer; I’m a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You’re here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well.

Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music; I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don’t expect it will come from a government, a military force or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that’s what we do.

As in the concentration camp and the evening of 9/11, the artists are the ones who might be able to help us with our internal, invisible lives.”