Quiet Place

"Quiet Wonder" is the eleventh full-length album and fifth solo piano album by multi-instrumentalist/composer Nathan Speir. More ambient than melodic with the expressive freedom of (some) improvisation, the fourteen original tracks also explore the natural “shifting timbres of the instrument through the year.” Anyone who has access to a piano knows that they can develop a wide array of clicks and squeaks as well as pedal noises and “alternate tunings” (quoting myself there!) that are not necessarily in complete agreement with other sounds from the piano. There has been a movement recently to record the piano in this more “natural state,” occasionally utilizing pianos that have been neglected for quite some time. That is definitely not the case with Speir’s baby grand. There are no jarring variances in the tuning and the sounds of the inner workings of the piano are kept to a minimum. A trained ear can probably detect the subtle changes in the piano, but they are just that - subtle.

Allison MacKenzie looks back on life in the New England town where she grew up around the time of Pearl Harbor. Beneath the town's placid god-fearing exterior lay any number of dark secrets involving sexual attraction and repression, illegitimacy, rape, gossip, intolerance, and class snobbery. No wonder Allison had moved to a quiet place like New York.

No figure in 20th century American classical music had as prominent or controversial a career – or did more to sell classical music to the general public as something genuinely exciting, and worth getting into a sweat over – than Leonard Bernstein. For more than 30 years, from his assumption of the post of Music Director of the New York Philharmonic in 1958 until the final concerts that he conducted in obviously failing health near the end of his life in 1990, he was the most prominent and widely recognized American-born conductor in the world, and the dominant personality in American classical music as both a conductor and, to a lesser degree, a composer. A flamboyant public figure, he burst three different times on the musical world – twice in classical with a rush of success on Broadway in between – in a blaze of glory, in the space of 15 years; and over a career lasting from the early '40s until the beginning of the '90s, he never lost an opportunity to advance his reputation as well as the cause of music.