Sunday Sunday SUNDAAAAY beiju celebration! With LUCO

Do you play the piano?  Did you used to play the piano?  Do you know someone who plays the piano?  Have you ever seen a piano?  Do you like special occasions?  Then this is the concert for you!

This concert has more of a personal story than usual.  Our featured soloist, Michi Hirata North, is celebrating her 88th birthday, which is very important in Japanese culture.  The name for this is beiju.  What she chose to do for hers is to play not one but two piano concertos and have LUCO as her backing band.  I'm pretty excited because she will have 88 years and a piano has 88 keys, but more than that I'm excited that somebody who has lived such a long time still has the energy to be the soloist on two concertos in the same concert.  You wouldn't ask somebody a quarter of her age to do that.  It's such an honor to be accompanying her.

If you have been thinking of learning an instrument and you are under the age of 52, then by the time of your beiju you will have played it for as long as I've played the violin.  So there's hope for all of us, although most of us probably won't be as good as she will be on Sunday, not least because it's her 80th year of being a concert pianist.

Here's what we'll be playing:

SCHUBERT Allegro moderato from Symphony No. 8, Unfinished.
Astute observers will note that LUCO just performed this a few weeks ago.  For those just joining this list, here's what I said about it last time:

Schubert only lived to the age of 31 - but that isn't why this symphony went unfinished, or at least it isn't the only reason, because he stopped working on it at the age of 25. It's possible that he got bored or distracted or contracted syphilis (yes, really). In spite of the fact that only half of it exists, it's one of his most famous works. The themes are catchy. It has that cool foreboding introduction. It's popular for youth orchestras to play, because it's short (I first played this in middle school). It's just really good, because Schubert really knew how to string a melody together.

This time, we are only playing the first movement.

BEETHOVEN Piano Concerto No. 5, Emperor
This piece is glorious.  LUCO performed it four years ago and the themes are still so fresh in my mind that when we started rehearsing it this time I thought we had just played it last year.  It is such a crown jewel in the piano concerto literature and it's just classic, awesome Beethoven.  It's also a real pleasure to play.

CHOPIN Piano Concerto No. 1
This will be the world premiere of an orchestration by Japanese conductor and composer Hidemaro Konoye.  I love a premiere!  I don't think I've ever played a piece by Chopin because he writes for pianists, so it's interesting to be playing a work that is so very much about the piano.  Even the violin and other instruments' parts are written like piano parts.  The lines flow in ways that would be idiomatic to a piano and not necessarily a violin.  I have to say that for that reason I like listening to Chopin more than I like playing his music, but since this is a concerto I get to do a good bit of listening as well. 

This concert will take place at the newly renovated Town Hall, on Sunday November 10th at 5pm.  You can buy half price tickets with the promo code HalfOff from this link.  If you wanna come for even less money and hang out with Eldan, reply to this email - I have one free ticket available for the first person who asks for it.

Special thanks to my fabulous partner Eldan who is typing this message to you since I have tendonitis and am hoping to recover in time for this concert.

As always, thanks for reading, and come say hi if you're there!