Information on Lecture-Demonstrations
with Michael Arnowitt, pianist

Current Offerings - Lecture-Demonstrations

Pianist Michael Arnowitt takes a close look at Beethoven’s creative process through an exploration of Beethoven’s sketchbooks. As Beethoven would often go through a dozen different versions of a passage before settling on the “right” one (the one that seems so familiar to us today), these sketches offer a fascinating look into Beethoven’s transformative genius – how he took a simple, humble fragment that anybody could have written and ultimately molded it to form a final work of art both meaningful and moving. Michael Arnowitt in his talk will demonstrate and compare the original sketches with the final version of excerpts from the first and last movements of Beethoven’s famous “Tempest” piano sonata.

Music and Letters explores compositions that refer to various aspects of our literary experience as human beings. Michael Arnowitt will perform and discuss pieces of music that comment on the act of writing, speaking, and listening to words.

The human love of story-telling is touched upon in Frederic Chopin’s Ballade (ballad) in F minor, regarded as one of the finest pieces of piano music in the repertory, and in Robert Schumann’s humorous depiction of Aesop’s fable of the tortoise and the hare.

The act of writing itself is the theme of Johannes Brahms’ beautiful As If Melodies Were Moving Through My Mind, which muses on the pros and cons of trying to capture human emotions in poetry. The long-standing human tradition of diary writing is reflected in two contrasting pieces: Leos Janacek’s remarkable The Diary of One Who Vanished, a composition based on a set of anonymous confessional love poems published during World War I in the Czech newspaper Lidové Noviny, while a more humorous note is struck by Bela Bartok’s whimsical From The Diary Of A Fly.

Finally, Robert Schumann’s Variations on the Name “Abegg” demonstrates the fun we have with the very letters of our alphabet. Schumann takes the letters of his girlfriend’s last name and transforms them into a spirited waltz melody which becomes the subject for a set of frolicsome variations.

Ella Fitzgerald, Michael Arnowitt’s favorite jazz vocalist, is profiled in this talk featuring classic recordings Ella made from her debut on the music scene in the 1930’s to her prime in the 1950’s and 60’s. One of the most talented singers of all time, Ella Fitzgerald presented a warm, rich tone on romantic slow ballads, while up-tempo numbers inspired her to daredevil leaps and an exciting, almost athletic virtuosity. Her creativity with “scat” singing produced melodic lines as inventive as the top horn players of her day, while her approach to “swing” rhythm is universally acknowledged as the model for that indispensible jazz element. Michael Arnowitt takes a detailed look at her superlative recordings of The Midnight Sun, You’re My Thrill, Between The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea, Something’s Gotta Give, Mr. Paganini., and Lady Be Good.

Frederic Chopin’s 24 Preludes

Chopin's 24 Preludes is a comprehensive collection of quintessential Romantic miniatures, one in every major and minor key. The music spans the full range of human experience and emotions, at turns joyful, fleeting, energetic, eerie, vulnerable, melancholy, passionate, and humorous. No matter what the mood, Chopin offers music of great beauty, and the entire set of 24 preludes gives us a panoramic view of a unique, romantic and evocative world unmistakably Chopin’s.

This set of preludes contains some of the finest and most original compositions Chopin wrote in his entire life. The short length (one to two pages) of each individual prelude makes them perfect for a lecture-demonstration talk. As several of the 24 preludes are famous pieces frequently learned by beginning and intermediate piano students, hearing this music explained may have special significance to many members of the audience.

From its origins as an outgrowth of ragtime and blues to the present day, jazz has enchanted listeners of all ages around the world. Michael Arnowitt will explore the fine points of selected great jazz performances of the past by musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis, and some of the most creative musicians of recent decades. In addition to listening to jazz recordings, Michael Arnowitt will also perform improvisations on some of the 20th century's best jazz tunes.

Examples selected for these two talks:

Michael Arnowitt’s outstanding program “1911” features seven contrasting works by major composers, all written in the single year 1911, a true crossroads time in music and world history. With the Romantic era in its twilight years, new and original music was emerging everywhere – impressionism in France, various national styles in Hungary, Russia, and other countries, and the first atonal music from Schoenberg in Germany and America’s own Charles Ives.

The first decade of the twentieth century witnessed an unparalleled creative explosion in all the arts. The world situation was equally rich in change, with the end of aristocracy, the birth of new technologies such as the car, the airplane, and electricity, mass social unrest, and a series of diplomatic and military crises that led to World War I a few years later.

Pianist Michael Arnowitt has selected seven works that show the diverging paths – some forward-looking, some nostalgic – of 1911. Stravinsky’s Petrouchka, Scriabin’s “White Mass” Sonata, and Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales are featured, along with works by Ives, Bartok, Schoenberg, and Rachmaninoff. “1911” is a vibrant and rich program which brings you right into this extraordinary time.

Composer-specific Talks from previous years

What makes Beethoven’s music so powerful and so universally admired? Michael Arnowitt will examine and perform “Fur Elise,” the opening of the Fifth Symphony and the Moonlight Sonata, and perform the complete Sonata in E-flat major, op. 31 no. 3.

Mozart has been deemed the classic example of a genius. The presentation begins with some music Mozart composed at age 5, and continues with a late piano sonata (K. 570), his set of variations on “Twinkle, Twinkle,” and Michael Arnowitt’s own arrangement of the finale to Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony.

Michael Arnowitt will perform and comment on Copland’s “Four Piano Blues,” “El Salon Mexico,” and “Piano Variations,” revealing the many phases of this important American composer’s life.

The four movements of Ives’ “Sonata no. 2: Concord, Massachusetts, 1840-1860” are each a musical portrait of a famous writer who lived in Concord: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, and Henry David Thoreau. Michael Arnowitt discusses various aspects of Charles Ives’ life and plays portions of the sonata interspersed with literary readings from the four authors’ essays, short stories, and novels. These excerpts are chosen based on writings left by Ives indicating which particular pieces of literature influenced him in the composing of the sonata.

Lecture-demonstrations are generally available for most concert programs described anywhere on this web-site. Please feel free to inquire about lecture-demonstration availability for a particular program that interests you.

For some of these lecture-demonstrations, a unit capable of playing CDs and cassettes is needed.