Dear Friends, I wish to invite you to the ninth consecutive Pandemic Productions Presents Premiere of Piano Pieces by James Domine. The piece entitled "Eulogy for Piano Solo" goes up this coming Sunday at 12 noon. Here is the link:
Program notes: In April of 2010, the composer gave a quasi-autobiographical account explaining of the origins of the "Eulogy for Piano Solo" “My father enjoyed the great jazz artists of the day. Art Tatum, Errol Garner and Oscar Peterson were among his favorites. I have fond memories of my childhood when his friends would come over to our house, one of whom was quite an accomplished improviser at the keyboard. I remember the pleasant evenings spent playing and listening to the sentimental music of my parents’ generation. Later on, when I had begun to study music in earnest, the prevailing winds of composition dictated a kind of academic atonalism, a style that dad neither understood nor appreciated. He would always ask “why don’t you write something that people want to hear, not that modern stuff!” Of course I took this admonishment as uninformed and slightly annoying veiled criticism that I did my best to ignore. As time has passed, and I am no longer embarrassed by the sound of triadic harmony, my father’s words haunt me with a kind of truth that I failed to recognize at the time. Dad passed away in 2008, and I like to think that this "Eulogy," a nostalgic remembrance of those days, is a piece that he might have liked to hear.” The "Eulogy" is clearly a generic example of a jazz ballad for piano solo, and is a tribute to the great pianists of that generation.
The "Eulogy" won first prize the Composers Today competition of the Music Teachers’ Association of California and was first performed in concert by pianist Joanna Ezrin with the San Fernando Valley Symphony Orchestra conducted by the composer in May, 2010.
It is included in this group of Sunday afternoon premieres because even though it has been performed as the second movement of Domine's Third Concerto, the "Eulogy" has never been publicly presented as a piano solo. As a character piece the "Eulogy" fits very nicely in the YouTube playlist as a companion to "On the Walls of the Wonderful White Wash Waltz," and the "Silent Movie Rag," each representing a stylistic genre: the waltz, the rag, and now the jazz ballad.