One of the things I love most about my career is that I get to expe­ri­ence a nev­er-end­ing stream of new repertory—between my work at UUCV, at Open Stage, at CASA, and else­where, I nev­er have time to get bored with the mate­r­i­al I’m work­ing on!  The down­side to this excite­ment is that I sel­dom have time to real­ly dig in and mas­ter a piece of music in a way that feels “com­plete.”  Or rather, I sel­dom take time to real­ly dig in.…

So today I spent a few hours pro­cras­ti­nat­ing all of the work I’m “sup­posed” to have got­ten done today, and instead put some time into brush­ing up on one of my all-time favorite piano solos, Chopin’s E Minor Noc­turne.  I first per­formed this piece at senior piano recital in high school, so it seemed appro­pri­ate to use this as my first exper­i­ment with dig­i­tal record­ing.  I played the piece on my Yama­ha P‑140 dig­i­tal key­board into Garage­Band on my Mac using Garritan’s amaz­ing Abbey Road Stu­dios CFX Con­cert Grand Vir­tu­al Piano, and pro­duced a record­ing that sounds almost dis­con­cert­ing­ly like the way the music sounds in my head when I think about play­ing it.  (Did that make any sense at all?)

Any­way.  Take a lis­ten, and let me know in the com­ments what you think.  There will, I hope, be many more of these “demo tracks” to come!  But for now, I’m going to take this Noc­turne as my cue to head off to bed.  In six min­utes it’ll be New Year’s Eve!