In the Hands Podcasts

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Original piano recordings, featuring music old and new. Login to Add this to your PlaylistPrimary Format : Classical Language : English Also Listed as: City : Minneapolis State/Province : MN Country : USA Region : NA User Tags: User Votes: RSS Feed Website People found this Podcast Searching for: View this Podcast on a Google Map. Podcast iTunes Link Text Only listing of In the Hands Podcasts Methings.com listings of In the Hands Podcasts If you like this podcast, you might also like:

View the full archive of In the Hands Chopin Preludes 4 and 9 (remastered) Visiting the house of my composer friend Matthew Smith (who has an outstanding CD out now, by the way), I noticed the score to Chopin’s E minor prelude out on the piano. It turns out that his wife, children’s book illustrator and author Lauren Stringer, is taking piano lessons, and she has been working on it. I was delighted — the piece is a favorite of mine. I dug out my recording of it for her to hear, and decided it was high time that I release a remastered vers ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Nomade à Clef I don’t usually write jazz tunes, but my friend Todd asked me to write one for him. It sounded like fun, and he had written several great pieces for me, so I took up the challenge. Nomade à Clef is the result.Todd premiered it at this year’s Keys Please, with David Edminster on tenor sax, and I think they did just a marvelous job with it. They really made it fly. I only wrote a lead sheet (just melody and chords) with a bare-bones piano part underneath to suggest voicings in the ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Manic Dance (rough) Things may have been quiet on the blog, but I’ve been doing tons of music work lately. The recent round of Zo went well: I took a bit of a risk playing mostly pieces that were fresh out of the practice oven (or, in a couple of cases, still baking), but people seemed to enjoy it, and I was certainly satisfied. (If you want to know about future concerts, you should get on the mailing list.) Concerts done, I’m now composing day and night, quite productively. I now h ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Bach Sinfonia 5 and Schumann Bunte Blätter 6 (remastered) As regular readers of In the Hands know, I’ve been working through my older recordings and applying my up-to-date mastering process — making them sound better, in other words. As I went through the list, I found that these two recordings make a nice pair. Arranging nice little transitions like this is one of my favorite parts of doing a concert. It’s the same little pleasure as assembling a mix CD or playing DJ: even the simple act of ordering songs is a kind of co ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Todd Harper: Questions Perhaps it would have been better if I’d just admitted to myself (and the world) that I’d be taking the summer off from In the Hands. But where’s the fun without the suspense? Here’s what I currently have in the pipeline (not necessarily in this order): Some newly composed pieces of my own. A new recording of at least some part of The Broken Mirror of Memory, my cello work. A fine new recording from Don Betts. The remaining remasterings of my olde ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Northwoods Police Report After a cold (which left my voice in bad shape for podcasting) and MinneBar (which was a great pleasure), it’s back to In the Hands! I’m continuing from last time the series of recordings I made recently with soprano Kim Sueoka of songs by Todd Harper. For several years, Todd has been writing songs full of the sort of jazz changes that are his roots, but as much in the tradition of lieder as anything. He always makes them short, sweet, and very focused — hai ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website First Autumn Night Here, for the first time in a long time, is something I wrote — but it’s not the music! A couple of weeks ago, I recorded some of my friend Todd Harper’s songs with Kim Sueoka, a marvelous local soprano who sings with (among others) the Rose Ensemble and a first-rate voice/guitar duo called Voce y Cuerdas. She’s great, Todd’s great, and by golly, we had a wonderful time making the recordings! Todd mostly writes voice / piano duets — and th ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Carei Thomas: The Usual Topic Here is a second selection from this year’s Keys Please to follow Todd’s little musical rattlesnake adventure. This is an improvisation by Carei Thomas, the rattlesnake’s narrator, now on piano. I thought — and he said afterward — that there was a little nod to my own funny little improvs in this one, especially in the way it starts with a very low note and a very high one … but it’s definitely a Carei thing! Some improvs have a defin ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Outside and the Inside Last night in tango class, Florencia was trying to impress upon us leaders the importance of learning to follow as well, so we know what the dance feels like to the followers, and so we have a chance to feel what the really good leaders do. You can't just ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Brahms Intermezzo 117.1 (remastered) My mastering experiments are complete, at least for now, which means two things: First, I'm back to composing and practicing again, so new recordings are on the horizon. Second, I'm reposting all my old recordings using the new mastering process, starting today! This is the first recording I posted to ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Three Places (remastered) This piece is my old, trusted standby. I wrote it back in college, in the winter and spring of 1998, and since then it's been the one piece of my own that I've continually kept in my hands and head, always at the ready when somebody says, "Play something ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Return of the Paul It's been a while since I posted here --- but the time has not been wasted! The Paul Creative Efforts Fund (a.k.a. my bank account) was running low, and I spent June and much of July working on MPR's new online contribution system. Yes, jobs are rough --- getting up ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Brahms Ballade 10.4 (remastered) This is perhaps my favorite of the recordings I've made for In the Hands --- and the remastering really helps. The piece is very low throughout, and the low notes before had a murky, cottony quality. Now they're rich and clear, and all the subtle little motions in the depths ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Schumann Arabesque, played by Don Betts In the Hands is primarily for my own recordings, but today I have a special exception to make: over the summer, I recorded Don Betts, my piano teacher, playing in his home. Don has made a great many excellent recordings over the years --- including the Chopin album available on ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Chopin Nocturne 55.1 (remastered) Continuing with the work of remastering all my existing home recordings, here's a Chopin nocturne I posted almost exactly one year ago. It is a subtle, spare thing, and its spareness makes it much more difficult than it sounds. Listening to this recording again, I think I could play it ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Schubert D946.1, played by Don Betts I'm a fellow of diverse musical tastes, and there are a great many composers I love who don't appear in the meager list over on the right of this page. So it's a delight to post this recording, because I get to add a "Schubert" category. Yay for Schubert! This is ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website In a Perfectly Wounded Sky (remastered) Here's an older piece of mine, newly remastered. I've gone back and forth in the past on whether I like this one, but I like it very much today, so I'm publishing it! The title is based on my mishearing of a Tori Amos lyric (from Cruel). I generally go for ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Brahms Intermezzo 116.4 (remastered) This was the first Brahms I ever learned to play. It looked to me like a relatively easy piece, simply because it doesn't have all that many notes --- but I was wrong: never having played Brahms, I didn't recognize the difficulty that was there. Brahms doesn't always divide his ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Schubert Impromptu D899.4, played by Don Betts This is a very familiar piece (to piano aficionados, anyway) --- but you'll find Don's performance a little refreshingly unfamiliar. It's not a wild departure from custom, but there's just a subtle tip in the balance in his performance that makes the feeling of the piece quite different. In the last ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Chopin Nocturne 15.2 (remastered) I had a request for "MORE CHOPIN!" which made me realize that I've been neglecting the poor fellow --- and he's such a favorite of mine! I've been working on two new Chopin nocturnes, and I'll hopefully be ready to record them soon. In the meantime, however, here's one ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website