Pianist Michael Arnowitt offers a program of Chopin's famous 24 Preludes, a classic collection of quintessential Romantic miniatures. The music spans the full range of human experience and emotions, at turns joyful, fleeting, energetic, eerie, vulnerable, melancholy, passionate, and humorous. No matter what the mood, Chopin offers music of great beauty. Listening to the 24 preludes as a whole is a true odyssey, a splendid journey into this unique, romantic, and evocative world unmistakably Chopin's. The composer wrote the preludes during a trip to the Mediterranean island of Majorca with his new lover, the French woman novelist known by her pen name George Sand. Perhaps the unusual island backdrop and Chopin's new love affair contributed to the creation of these remarkable piano pieces, recognized today as among the finest and most original compositions of romantic music ever written.
Michael Arnowitt is one of the most creative and imaginative musicians of today. His life and music is the subject of a documentary film, "Beyond 88 Keys" (2004). The documentary, filmed in both the United States and Europe, has been broadcast on public television in Vermont and Maine and has been shown at a variety of film festivals and venues including the Rode Pomp, an arts center in Gent, Belgium and the Anthology, a theater in New York City's East Village. He has toured Europe on seven different occasions, performing in France, Belgium, Germany, Holland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Russia. In June 2015 he went to Korea, where he gave ten performances in Seoul, Busan, and other cities. He plans to return to eastern Asia for a multi-country tour in 2018. He has performed twice as piano soloist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, playing piano concertos of Bach and Beethoven; he has also appeared as soloist with the Kiev Chamber Orchestra under Roman Kofman, the Savannah Symphony Orchestra, and others. He recently marked his 50th birthday with a well-received gala concert for piano and orchestra with music by Bach, Brahms, and the premiere of his new composition "Haiku Textures" for three cello soloists and orchestra.
In 1989 Michael Arnowitt began his novel, 26-year long presentation of the complete 32 Beethoven piano sonatas, matching up his age as he performed the various sonatas with Beethoven's age as Beethoven composed them. The eight concerts in the project, spaced out over 26 years, thereby became a study in the psychology of aging and development. The project culminated in 2015 with the final concert in the series, a program of Beethoven's last three piano sonatas. Other creative projects have included "If Music Be the Food of Love," a performance of classical and jazz music about food with the simultaneous serving to the audience of the food tastes that inspired the composers, and a new collaboration where he combines his piano improvisations with the live creation of paintings on stage by visual artists. He also performs with the photographer Marjorie Ryerson in a multi-media program "Water Music" where piano music about water is combined with the projection of water photographs and spoken readings on the subject of water written by leading musicians of today.
The Washington Post said of a special piano concert Michael Arnowitt performed at the National Gallery of Art, "A beautifully thought-out program ... He played with an exquisite sense of touch, color and musical imagination." Recent activities have included his composing a new piece for jazz quartet and Indonesian gamelan orchestra, and performances of his "Jazz Suite from West Side Story," a set of nine jazz arrangements based on music from Leonard Bernstein's famous musical. In January of this year, he made his first jazz studio recording at Sear Sound in Manhattan, New York City, a 2-CD set of 14 of his jazz compositions which will be released this spring. He has lived in Vermont since 1983 and has since 1997 maintained a web-site at <www.MApiano.com>, which contains a number of his essays on musical topics. He can be found on Facebook under his name and on Twitter at Piano_MA.