b Riding East: Old Castle, Bruyères, and Lander Pass

Friday, February 21, 2014

Old Castle, Bruyères, and Lander Pass

I sat down this morning before work and recorded a couple more pieces.  I'm posting them alongside one of my own works that I recorded years ago.

Most know the story of Modest Mussorgsky, a Russian composer of the 19th century, his music, the struggles with alcoholism.  His opera, Boris Godunov, to me proudly stands beside Bizet's Carmen and Mozart's Don Giovanni.  Pictures at an Exhibition, a piano composition, is mostly know through orchestral or even marching band arrangements.  I learned the first few movements of Pictures a year ago or so.  My brother Greg played it (and played it well) 30 years earlier at Stanford while studying with Mr. Baller.

Debussy's second book of Preludes includes some of my all time favorite pieces.  I performed Brouillards (Fog), Bruyères (Heather), Canope (Canopic jar?), and Les tierces alternées (alternating thirds -- really an etude as much as a prelude) years ago at Stanford.  I relearned Bruyères yesterday.

I wrote Lander Pass in October of 2007.  I performed it at the Daniel Pearl Memorial Concert at Stanford in 2008.    
Old Castle from Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition
Bruyères from Debussy's Preludes Book II
Lander Pass by me

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