Vingt Regards

Concert #5- Oberlin Conservatory of Music

2009-11-08T17:04:00.000-08:00

It is always good to come back to one's old stomping ground and Oberlin is where I really learned about what kind of potent force music could be. It is hard to put into words what Oberlin College has which is so special, but it seems to have something to do with the college's open-minded attitude towards music combined with the idea that anything is possible. One of the school's mottos is:
" Do you think someone can change the world? So do we."
Rock on Oberlin, Rock on.

Concert #4 Denison University

2009-11-08T16:48:00.000-08:00

Denison University is just about the prettiest campus in Ohio that I can think of with so many wonderful things going on all the time. It was great to be able to share this music with the students and faculty there. Before my concert I was able to check out this very cool art exhibit where this person created art with crayons organized in interesting ways in order to create a bigger picture of something. Sort of like Chuck Close, but with a sense of humor. It turns out that this artist showed up at my concert and someone introduced him as the "crayon artist dude". I told him that he was awesome and I threatened to post his art on my blog, which you can see below.

Concert #3- Toledo Museum of Art

2009-10-27T18:28:00.001-07:00

This venue turned out to be great to play this piece in. Partly because of the room's beautiful resonance and natural lighting but more so because of all the lush paintings that fill it. It just so happened that the painting that was put behind the piano had baby Jesus directly in the middle which seemed to loom over me during this performance. So I felt particularly bad when I played some wrong notes or took a passage too fast, as Jesus himself was looking down upon me! A strange and interesting coincidence!
Thanks to Ben Lohman for taking these photos.

Concert #2- Oakland University

2009-09-23T08:23:00.000-07:00

Thanks for Yin Zheng, Assistant Professor of Piano at Oakland for setting up this concert for me. Yin is an old college friend of mine from the Eastman days and it was great to catch up and it meet some of her students at Oakland.

It's funny to me because a piece like the Vingt Regards just feels like it belongs to certain places and not to others. With any place that has lots of cars and distress, Messiaen's Vingt Regards seems to comment on that environment in interesting ways and seems to fight against this mundane grime to show beautiful alternatives through creativity. The more time I dig into this music, the more I come to see this music as commentary on ideas of religious ecstasy and of spiritual matters. Grappling with one's faith in twenty different ways in order to find a solution perhaps..
Isn't this what music is supposed to do anyway? Taking us out of our current state of thinking to transport us to another place.

In the pre-concert talk I was telling the students of the Napalm bomb aspect of the "Theme of God" that comes in Mov. 6 in order to break with all of the previous contrapuntal music and systematic ordering that comes earlier. Perhaps the entire piece is like this in other ways, like pouring cold water over someone who has been sleeping for two days in order to wake them.

Concert #1- Pavia, Italy

2009-08-22T12:17:00.000-07:00

Date: July 22 2009

This concert was part of the soundSCAPE Festival in Pavia, Italy. Pavia is a very beautiful city with so much charm. However, during the summer months Pavia is also known for its mosquitoes. These little insects literally take over the city during the evenings and they seem to prefer Americans more than any other nationality. Luckily for this concert the mosquitoes stayed away (perhaps they prefer Beethoven instead of Messiaen!) and it turned out to be a good thing that I didn't have to fight them off in addition to fighting with the score. A student at the festival turned my pages for this concert and after every 6th movement or so he would hand me a towel because I was sweating bullets. I felt like Rocky Balboa yelling "Adrian!!!!!" when movement twenty was finished. I went home and took a much needed shower.

Video: A little Arab Improvisation for the encore

Introduction

2009-07-08T11:13:00.000-07:00

Hello my name is Thomas Rosenkranz. I decided to document the next series of concerts that I will be presenting throughout the U.S. and Europe in this blog. I normally don't like to document things like this but I thought it might be an interesting experiment. The piece that I am playing is Olivier Messiaen's Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant Jesus, which translates to "Twenty Visions of the Infant Jesus". It consists of twenty movements and is filled with some of the most evocative and emotionally charged music ever written for the piano. I dig this music and I hope you will too.

Concert #1- July 22nd
soundSCAPE Festival, Italy

Concert #2- September 18th
Oakland University

Concert #3- October 18th
Toledo Museum of Art

Concert #4-October 28th
Denison University

Concert #5- November 3rd
Oberlin Conservatory

Concert #6- November 18th
University of Kansas

Concert #7- November 19th
Missouri Western University

Concert #8- January 19th
Idyllwild Arts Academy

Concert #9- January 22nd 2010
University of California at Irvine

Concert # 10- January 29th 2010
Roosevelt University