As the second of our Valentine’s Day collaborations with the young and celebrated Illustrator Xiao Hua Yang, Skylight Arts Productions is delighted to share the release of John McArthur’s recording of Stephen Prutsman’s stunning arrangement of Jerome Kern’s “All the Things You Are” for the left hand alone.
The only other recording of this we’ve found available for streaming is Leon Fleischer’s formative 2014 version, born of Fleisher’s unmatched voice in experience and rich musicality. We’re excited to also take this opportunity to invite you to listen to it on the streaming platform of your choice or on this CD, on BRIDGE records, if you can.
John’s recording of this piece is a quite different performance from a quite different pianist - not in argument, but in offering - and with a warm appreciation for what Leon Fleischer expressed through Stephen Prutsman’s rich and colorful arrangement.
John has taken interpretive license with that arrangement, in the tradition of some of the teaching studios he was mentored in and in resonance to his own, personal, relationship to inner voices and harmonies.
He was aided in this by the piano itself - a stunning Bösendorfer 280 VC Concert Grand provided by our friends at Cunningham Piano for this recording session. There is a resplendent clarity and colorful consonance to this piano that enchanted us all, from the moment we met it, and still brings a smile as we listen back today.
Across Skylight Arts Productions’ team of collaborators, we have a mutual goal of encouraging people to listen to the elasticity of possibilities in interpreting a piece of music and the many shapes a wonderful composition or arrangement of a composition can take.
It was a hallmark of the great pianists of the 19th and 20th centuries to express their range of interpretive thought in and through the music they played - and they often passed on those practices in their teaching studios.
…And, sure, there was both contention and admiration across their various ways of engaging the music - and that’s some of the fun of it.
But there was also a great deal of respect across many diverse voices, as one finds in Shakespearean actors, jazz artists, and chefs - and a great deal of range in the artistic interpretations they engendered, cultivated, and even advocated for.
The first time John briefly met Earl Wild was at an Alice Tully Hall concert given by his first major teacher Suzanne Shader…years before he would study with Wild at The Manhattan School of Music, during his Doctoral degree program. It stands out to him to this day that Wild was there that evening, supporting a friend and fellow artist in the presentation of her artistic voice.
At MSM and in Wild’s studio, John actively experienced the camaraderie and rivalries in various schools of piano interpretation and it, slowly, began the process of freeing his own voice at the keyboard. These days he finds himself progressively performing and recording from that voice - not as an assertion of what is best, but as an offering of what is his to share.
It is in that spirit that we invite you to enjoy All the Things You Are.
...on Spotify
... on Apple Music
... on Deezer
... on YouTube Music
...on Amazon Music
...on Pandora
By the way, if you aren’t also actively listening to the wonderful recordings of Stephen Prutsman’s performances on your favorite streaming service or from your CD collection, John and I would both like to take the opportunity to invite you to do that as well. It’s inspiring playing, full of color and power and wonderful intention realized in sound.
There is such an ocean of engaging music to explore these days...thank you for listening.
Peter Field
Skylight Arts