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On February 7, 2020, Robin Spielberg released his 19th album, Love Story, and was preparing a 20-city tour.
I was excited about the tour. The album was a labor of love, a 15-track birthday party of her love for her husband and manager Larry Kosson, with her solo piano arrangements of songs by Elton John, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Crowded House and others. Her interpretations of many of the songs are moving and sometimes funny, as one reviewer said, “the total keyboard to convey her message. “
The first hurdle on the hike is Lake Charles, Louisiana, on Interstate 10, halfway between New Orleans and Houston, Texas.
It’s March 7, 2020.
Then COVID swept across the country and shut everything down.
The rest of the tour dropped out as quarantines and lockdowns spread across the country.
He returned home to New Freedom, a small town near the Maryland border in York County, and began waiting for the pandemic to end so he could hit the road again.
As I pondered what to do (no job, no source of income), I returned again and again to a concept that had been three decades in the making. He had thought about it, but he never had time to eliminate that artistic impulse.
Now I had time.
So, he sat down and began writing a symphonic piece, framing the melodies he heard in his head with the endless musical possibilities that an orchestra can offer.
“It’s anything I’ve sought to do,” Spielberg said. Now there was nothing stopping me from running there. “
Still, she was worried.
“It was anything that was out of my reach,” she said, sitting in front of her renovated Victorian piano in her living room/study.
Now it’s within their reach. I just had to find a way to do it.
Robin Spielberg came to music indirectly. It has a musical and orchestral heritage. His grandfather, whom he never met, a flutist in the NBC Symphony Orchestra, like his great-uncle, a violinist. He studied theatre in college and was a founding member of the Atlantic Theatre Company. Two other founders were playwright and filmmaker David Mamet and actor William H. Macy.
She had played the piano since she was a child (she learned to play an old wooden organ that she still owns) and was called upon to play witty one-liners for the company’s productions. Eventually, he devoted himself full-time to music. In fact, the canopy portrait of his first album is his photography as an actor.
She has become a foreign artist, known for her evocative solo piano paintings and for her paintings on the healing power of music. He toured the country and the world, adding 3 sold-out performances at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall and a field trip. with Hall of Fame songwriter Jimmy Webb, who wrote several hits recorded through Glen Campbell and others: “Wichita Lineman,” “By the Time I Get to Pheonix,” “MacArthur Park,” among others. (He intended to take a field trip with Webb when his last tour was canceled due to the pandemic. )
He has recorded more than 20 albums and has appeared on more than 50 compilations. He has sold more than a million records and his recordings are in the Top 10 of the Billboard charts.
But she had written an orchestral piece.
How she and her circle of relatives ended up in New Freedom, far from her hometown of Irvington in northern New Jersey, just west of Newark and New York City, is a long story.
Simply put, their daughter Valerie was born prematurely and the medical expenses were exorbitant. At the time, asset costs in North Jersey were skyrocketing, as it represented a less expensive option for others traveling to New York for work.
While searching for places, she and Larry discovered the New Freedom. Real estate costs were affordable and the city was close to Baltimore and Johns Hopkins, where his daughter’s doctor resided. The South York School District also had a good reputation for its youth with disabilities systems.
So, 18 years ago, they moved and moved to Nueva Libertad, building a house in a subdivision on the outskirts of the municipality. “We didn’t know anybody,” he says. But New Freedom gave me a new freedom. It turned out to be the most productive thing we could have done.
And when he came here to write one of his symphonic pieces, a three-part suite that evokes the sacrifices and resilience of those who fought for our freedom, he called it the “New Freedom Suite. “
After his excursion was canceled, he returned home and waited for the pandemic to subside. Days turned into weeks and then months.
“I didn’t have a job, I didn’t have cash, I didn’t have cash to record,” Robin said, sitting in front of the piano bench in her living room. “I had no income; they were simply reduced to zero. It’s scary. “
Robin and Larry, who works as a booking agent, had to come up with something different. They tuned in and streamed free concerts from their homes. At first, it was a modest operation. But then they were able to apply for a restart grant from York County, cash allocated to help businesses get through the pandemic. His first request was denied. But then the county earned more cash, and on Dec. 24, 2020, they were told they would receive a grant, on one condition: The cash had to be spent through the end of the year.
Larry did a lot of studies and commissioned microphones, got heirs, lights, video consoles and software. His experience as an advertising photographer, shooting commercials for New York agencies, helped him with lighting and landed him a job. But when it got here to high-quality video and audio streaming, it got lost. “I’ve seen a lot of videos on YouTube,” he said. They have what Robin likens to a “pre-flight checklist,” which covers everything from keeping cats away to the area of functionality to not having lipstick on your teeth.
The studio occupies his living room and dining room, crossed by the foyer of his suburban-style home. A giant tripod sits at the back of the stairs, holding a camera pointed at the living room, where Robin’s piano is located. (Small pieces of blue painter’s tape mark the locations of the tripod legs so that the camera angle remains constant from scene to scene. )Robin’s functional space, with the grand piano taking up much of the room, is in the front saloon, complete with a microphone. with 4 studio-quality condenser microphones. The room is in the dining room.
It’s the site of Robin’s Piano Bar, an exhibit that presents at nine p. m. every Friday night and airs on five other platforms. The concerts are free, but she has a tip jar and asks for donations to pay for her piano tuner. (New piano strings are tuned frequently. )
This has created an online community. Larry, who operates the console during the hour-and-a-half shows, can see the audience speak and react to Robin’s performance.
The exhibits demonstrated her preference for staying connected with her audience.
But she had the idea of writing symphonic music.
All I had to do was compose it.
“It’s a daunting task,” he said.
Writing it is a feat of imagination. ” You have the music in your head and listen to what you need. You hear where the oboe comes in, where the strings come in, where the percussion comes in, the timpani come in.
He has worked with Louis Anthony deLise, a composer and arranger from South Jersey near Philadelphia, who has worked with artists as diverse as Patti LaBelle, Halestorm, Carlos Santana, Wynonna Judd, and Kanye West.
Once the arrangements were finished and the score was written, all that remained was to find an orchestra to record it. It was hard. Many orchestras don’t need to take any chances with a novice symphonic composer. “No orchestra will release a piece through an inexperienced user,” Robin said. “That’s a lot to ask. “
Robin and Larry did it themselves. They founded the Budapest Scoring Orchestra. If you’ve been to the movies, you’ve heard of his work. The orchestra has conducted music for dozens of films, adding “Parasite,” which won the Oscar for Most Productive Image in 2020, and Jordan Peele’s satirical horror film “Get Out” in 2017.
But once again, global events got in the way. While I was making plans to go to Hungary, Russia invaded Ukraine and Eastern Europe proved problematic.
He was unable to record with the orchestra via Zoom due to latency, the retention in sound that would cause the parts to be synchronized. So she recorded her piano parts at a studio in New Hampshire and sent them to Budapest, where the orchestra played with them while watching and listening to Zoom at New Freedom with DeLise joining her from her studio in Cherry Hill, New Jersey.
Watching session recordings is like hunting a machine. The conductor starts the piece and the musicians play their role perfectly. There’s a song that has a hiccup at the beginning, but the orchestra starts again and flows.
“It’s perfect,” Robin said.
Read more about Robin Spielberg: The pandemic forced traveling musician Robin Spielberg to reinvent the way he does his job.
Previously: “It Doesn’t Age”: Freedom Pianist and Songwriter’s New Album Releases
Highlights of the 11-track recording, packaged in a box with a hand-sewn booklet describing the tracks’ inspiration, are “A Song for Jennie” and “New Freedom Suite. “
“A Song for Jennie” is the soundtrack to her grandmother’s trip to the United States from Russia in 1929 aboard the RMS Olympic, the sister ship of the Titanic. He wrote the song in 1994, while preparing a pot of his grandmother’s bird soup. He heard the melody in his head, walked over to the piano, and picked out the notes. It is a melody that led her to compose a piece in tribute to her grandmother and her journey.
The “New Freedom Suite” began with a bugle call he composed for a production of Russian playwright Anton Chekhov’s “Three Sisters. “(Recall that William Macy, who directed the play, complained that the bugle sound was too loud. The musician ended up placing the piece in the ladies’ room on the mezzanine floor of the theater to give it a muffled and remote sound. ) This led to a three-part sequel about foot soldiers fighting in a war. The first part, “Memories of Utopia,” is about foot soldiers called up for war and hoping to fight for their homeland. The second piece, “The Soldier’s Journey,” is about warriors facing the unknown. The third movement, “One Step Closer,” speaks of victory and “one more step toward this utopia where we began. “
“We’re one step closer,” he said in describing the song, “but we may not live to see it. But we all hope we can take it one step further. “
The play will premiere in Lake Jackson, just outside Houston, Texas, on Nov. 11, Veterans Day.
The album “By the Way of the Wind,” which was born out of the COVID pandemic and recorded the war in Ukraine, was released on Oct. 20 and debuted at No. 8 on Billboard’s Classical Crossover chart.
“It’s about the resilience of the human spirit,” said Spielberg, a petite 60-year-old who looks much younger and speaks with a power that’s hard to follow. “It’s about how we’re influenced by invisible forces and the fact that we’re facing a headwind and it’s behind us. “
Columnist and reporter Mike Argento has worked at the York Daily Record since 1982. Contact him at mike@ydr. com.
This article was printed on the York Daily Record: COVID, Ukraine played a role in the composer’s first symphony from York County, Pennsylvania
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