Artis Wodehouse performs Anthony Philip Heinrich’s 1823 Toccatina capriciosa from his Op. 3 works entitled The Sylviad, or Minstrelsy of Nature in the Wilds of North America. Heinrich (1781 — 1861) was the first “full-time” American composer, and the most prominent before the American Civil War. He did not start composing until he was 36, after losing his business fortune in the Napoleonic Wars and emigrating to the young United States from Bohemia. Ensconcing himself in a cabin in the wilds of Kentucky, there he taught himself to compose. The scolling score shown in the video is the original 1823 publication. Editing of the video was done by Alvin Tsang, and the sound recording was made at Patrych Sound Studios in 2006.
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Pianist and harmoniumist ARTIS WODEHOUSE has devoted her careeer to preserving and disseminating neglected but valuable music and instruments from the past, with an emphasis on American music. Cited by the NYTimes as “savior of the old and neglected”, she received a National Endowment grant that propelled her into production of CDs and published transcriptions of recorded performances and piano rolls made by George Gershwin, Jelly Roll Morton and Zez Confrey. Her best-seller, “Gershwin Plays Gershwin”, on the Nonesuch label has sold over 500,000 copies. Beginning in 2000, Wodehouse began performing on a representative group of antique reed organs and harmoniums, toy pianos and an 1823 English square piano and an 1860 Steinway square piano that she had painstakingly restored and brought to concert condition. She founded the chamber group MELODEON in 2010 to present little known but valuable music from 19th and early 20th Century America, using her antique instrument collection as the basis for repertoire choice. Wodehouse has a BM from the Manhattan School of Music, an MM from Yale, and a DMA from Stanford.
