I never really studied music as a child, and frankly did not care much about it at all, although since my teenage years I happily participated in singing sessions at our family parties (so I always had a good musical ear and a decent voice, thanks, as the poet said, to my mother and father). In college years I discovered the rock music canon and with my usual enthusiasm have studied it fairly well. With this folk-and-rock musical baggage I happily lived on until I was 38 years old, when I was visited by the midlife crisis (perhaps the September 11 events also played a role), and I decided that I want to learn to play piano. I started working on that in November 2001.
Initially my ambitions were quite limited - I wanted to be able to accompany myself on the keyboard when I sing my folk and rock repertoire. This modest goal, by the way, I still have not achieved, but instead I got carried away in a different direction which had a major impact on my life - I started discovering classical music. My first interactions with the keyboard prompted me to explore what and how people play on it, and once I started listening to classics I never stopped, even after many years. This brave new world continues to amaze me, offers an escape from the drab daily reality of modernity, and gives meaning to a large part of my life.
I think the main reason why music has had such a huge effect on me is that I experience it not so much as a passive listener but rather like an apprentice learning an ancient craft. This gives you a completely different perspective and apparently involves different regions of the soul, perhaps because you see how much work and love for the subject is behind all those pearly sounds that appear completely effortless to a casual listener, like water flowing from the tap... Because of my late start and certain character traits my path to mastering this art was and continues to be highly non-standard. I was never able to force myself to play exercises of any kind, including the de rigeur scales and arpeggios, and instead from the very beginning I took real pieces of music and stubbornly, usually over many years, tried to play them. After ten years of that, I feel that I'm finally able to do something, however the price of this unusual approach is fairly high - for example I still can't sight-read and do many other things that a child going through a musical school would do in their third year. This lack of confidence in my musical foundation is seriously getting in my way, and this video recording project is meant to help me understand the scale of the problem and address what I can.
Unfortunately I have no natural audience for my musical efforts. My long-suffering family is forced to listen to each small bit of everything I play so many times that they cannot objectively judge the outcome. And playing for our guests at parties isn't working out either, partly because it's the wrong setup (nobody comes to our parties to listen to classical music...), but mostly because I have a terrible case of "performance anxiety" and I play much worse in public than I do for myself. So it is very important to me to be able to see my playing from the outside and figure what is working and what is not, and this video recording project is meant to do just that. I am hopeful that this will let me address some of the many technical issues I have and, most importantly, increase my confidence level.
But -- I also want to share this experience with you! I think you will enjoy my musical successes, and also knowing that you will see these videos allows me to think that I play not just for myself but also for you... So I decided to share some of these recordings on this site. I do not pursue perfection here, and you will see and hear many flaws, but again this is just as it would be if you were here with me. But I hope you'd feel at least some of that joy that I experience when I play.
And of course it will take me a while to record and share all of my repertoire, so I will maintain a "What's new" section where I will announce the new additions for you.
Finally, a purely technical remark. My skill in working with video (and audio) currently leaves very much to be desired. I use my plain old iPhone for video proper (later I also added an iPad to record from both sides), however the quality of its audio is so bad that I was forced to look for alternatives. I found this device and I place it in a different part of my room, farther away from the aquarium (which is the source of that humming sound you may hear in some of the recordings). This is what it looks like:
I hope for your understanding in that as a recording studio this setup is rather primitive. In particular, it does not get rid of various domestic hums and noises. But I do think that the actual piano sound in the recordings is surprisingly good (I would even suggest that you use good headphones or pass it through a good stereo system). I hope you will like it!