Artis Wodehouse plays her restored 1887 Mason & Hamlin Liszt organ and piano in the Summer Solstice music taken from Ruth Schonthal’s 65 Celebrations for piano or organ. Wodehouse premiered the entire 65 Celebrations on May 17th, 2009 in a concert at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation at Montclair New Jersey. The piece comprises a series of 14 musical meditations on the major themes of the Christian liturgical calendar and lasts 1 hour and 10 minutes. Each meditation contains a prelude, postlude and 2 to 5 musical interludes that can be played either on the piano or on the organ. This video recorded 6/1 and 6/19, 2009 in the sanctuary of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation at Montclair, New Jersey.
SUMMER SOLSTICE
Prelude – piano
Interlude I – piano
Interlude II – piano
About admin
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.
