Revisiting a piece I've played since I was 13.

Title: Fantaisie-Impromptu
Composer: Frédéric Chopin

This is a piece given to me by my high school piano teacher when I was 13 years old. For most of it the left hand has triplets while the right hand has sixteenth notes. It was a fun piece for me to play and may be the reason that I was chosen to be the accompanist for the Lake County Philharmonic when I was only 14 years old. However, the very best piano teacher I had, had been a Julliard piano professor but he got sick and was unable to play, so he transferred to DePauw University in Indiana. I was at Eastman School of Music then and a graduate of DePauw was getting her Master's degree at Eastman and told me about him. So I transferred there my junior year. He was super good! He made me count out loud when I played, and if I played louder than I counted he would yell at me - "Count louder! Count louder!" Consequently that loud counting enabled me to play much better. So not long ago I decided to go back to Fantaisie Impromptu and COUNT OUT LOUD. That really helped me play it even better than I had when I was young. So I've been playing it at Mayo and I played it on the new piano that we have at church and many people have appreciated it.

The claims are that it was Artur Rubinstein himself who put Chopin’s original on the map. Ernst Oster explained that the Fantaisie-Impromptu draws many of its harmonic and tonal elements from Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, which is also in C♯ minor, and from the third movement in particular. He continues that The Fantaisie-Impromptu is perhaps the only instance where one genius discloses to us—if only by means of a composition of his own—what he actually hears in the work of another genius.

I hope you enjoy it.