Remember when I was telling you about all the Olivier Messiaen we heard at the Aspen Music Festival last summer?……..specifically the full performance of Vingt Regards Sur L’Enfant-Jésus (20 contemplations on the infant Jesus)? Well, it’s coming right here to St. Louis this Wednesday, 12/17,  7:30pm at the Pulitzer Foundation, http://www.pulitzerarts.org/events/concerts/idealdisplacements-messiaen/, when Molly Morkoski will perform the 2 hour solo piano work!

If you have never heard this piece performed “live”, let me tell you that it’s quite an experience for both performer and audience: immensely dramatic contrast of dynamics and emotion between movements, with relentless demands of technique and endurance imposed upon the pianist. And most importantly…. Vingt Regards is considered (by me, too) to be one of the greatest compositional achievements of piano writing in the entire repertory.

I hope all St. Louisans will come out to this hear this concert (and people in other towns can just be jealous), but in the meantime, have some fun at this video site of various performers playing movements from the piece http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Qt_ZcdwAXo&feature=related One pianist featured here, Roger Muraro, the New Music Circle brought to St. Louis about 10 years ago to perform the work.

Hi Everybody, I wanted to let you know that my music has just been posted on a fun, new site, called Amie Street. (http://amiestreet.com)
(or direct to my page: http://amiestreet.com/music/fred-tompkins/?fms=YwyLH_EauEMx)
It’s different than other music networking sites, because anyone can listen and then DOWNLOAD FOR FREE any piece of music which has been recently added to the site (like mine, for example).
Then, as more and more people download the music (hopefully…. mine), the price of each song gradually goes up to 98 cents, and possibly 5 or 6 dollars for the whole album. Since you are all getting in on the ground level, I should be free….. or at least cheap! Also, it’s in mp3 format, so you can import the music to your iPods  and take it jogging with you.

Win/Win: The music is good for you and jogging is good for you!