Piano

If you are interested in the subject, check out my Piano Blog.

A bit of history on the subject… 🙂 I like playing the piano. I started as a kid at about 8, but didn’t like it at all. I even spent 4 years in a music school studying piano. I still didn’t like it, because i got bored of too much classical music. Instead, I learned math at music school… That’s the way it all began with math.

So, going on about piano things, at the music school “Sabin Dragoi” in Arad I was guided by my teacher Marinela Tudoran. I am thankful to all the things she taught me about the piano and piano playing, and I am sorry that my passion for the piano came only after I left the music school. When I left the music school, and entered a mathematics-informatics highschool I started playing the piano more than usual and I tried to learn all kinds of new things to be able to play by ear. I became pretty good, and developed playing by ear, which is still in progress, by the way. I started playing at the church, with the choir, and got my own models. I liked Anthony Burger very much, and I listened all his recordings and bought all its books. (it cost me some good money, but I can say it was not in vain, since my style and performance significantly improved). Here is a sample of his playing:

Unfortunately, he died on February 22nd 2006, which happened to be exactly my 18th birthday. I was very sad, but he remains one of the greatest pianists I’ve ever saw. Below is the first performance I heard him playing, and I couldn’t believe my ears how fast he was playing. I can say I got pretty close to that.

Below is one of my best recorded performances. It is an Anthony Burger arrangement, and I played it about 5 years ago, or something like that on my out of tune home piano. In my opinion, the performance is quite flawless, too bad the piano doesn’t sound that well.

I bought some jazz sheet music a few years ago. When I first saw them, I didn’t think I would be able to play any of them, but I succeeded. Below is “The Crave” by Jelly Roll Morton, the inventor of jazz.

Below is the well known “Joshua fit the battle of Jericho” in a jazz tune, arranged by Mark Hayes. It is a little far from perfect, but in progress. 🙂 My first “real” book of piano was “Majesty” written by Mark Hayes, which I received from my cousin Cristi Holhos-Vaida (himself being one of the greatest ear-playing pianists I’ve ever heard), when I was young. Recently I bought one of Mark’s jazz piano arrangements books, which helped me develop my jazz playing even more.

Below is one of my own “on the spot” arrangements of the well known hymn “Farther Along”. The recording was taken by my wife Cristina in my Church in my home-town Sofronea.

Recently I bought a real piano: a Clavinova CLP 320, and I hope to post soon some new recordings.

Here is one of them