First Microfunding House Concert

I've just returned from playing the first of my microfunding house concerts.  Many thanks to Doug and Eva who hosted a lovely evening in their beautiful home.  (If you're not up on this microfunding setup, you'll find the specifics elsewhere on this blog and also on my website.)

I really enjoy performing in this type of setting.  The intimate nature of a house concert allows for a much more direct experience of the energy exchange that occurs cyclically between performer and audience.  I do believe that the audience gets a lot from being in such close proximity to the performer, and the performer can really feel the responsiveness of the audience at every moment.

Tonight's program comprised music of Northern European composers.  Grieg was, of course, featured as well as Sibelius, Gade, Stenhammar, & Medins.  I enjoy the fact that all this music is Romantic in style; this really seems to suit the soiree type of event.

I look forward to more of these occasions!

Listening to Grieg himself

These recordings are quite well known by now, but are well worth hearing.  Grieg playing his own piano compositions - this really just gives me chills! "Butterfly" and "Wedding Day at Troldhaugen" are both pieces that will be on my Volume 2 CD. You can also hear "Spring" and part of his "Sonata in e minor" on Youtube.

Amazing...

Happy Birthday, Grieg!

Today, June 15, is Grieg's birthday!  Happy Birthday Edvard...sorry I didn't bake you a cake.

The title of this blog of mine is "Building a CD", but clearly during the last couple of months, a more apt title would be "Not Enough Time for Building a CD"!  This has been extremely frustrating for me.  I've been trying to get at the edits whenever possible, but as this type of work really needs decent stretches of time in one go, and I only seem to have at most an hour at a time available lately, I make very little progress.  

So rather than continually feeling frustrated about this, I have decided to change my timeline to a more realistic one.  During the next two months I will be playing at least a dozen concerts which means that most of my time will be spent practising new repertoire.  I'll hopefully also be playing several fund-raising house concerts to help "build the CD" during this time.   I have decided therefore to take the first three weeks of September to completely and diligently focus on finishing the editing process.  Once the kids are back at school I will keep my schedule free of just about every other commitment, which will allow for longer periods of time without the day being chopped up into smaller bits.  This means the recording release date will be mid-October.  

In the meantime, I'll be pursuing the microfunding with more focus.  I do still need to raise several thousands more before we can get this music coming out of peoples' speakers and headphones.   A blog-post on this aspect will appear soon.

There, that feels better now, and completely do-able.   And, by the way, this means that the recording will be ready just in time for Christmas shoppers.