Arts & Life

Duos perform classical musical at The Beach

The sound of feverishly practiced classical music filled every gap of space at the Gerald R. Daniel Recital Hall on Monday night.

Pairs of students took the stage at the end-of-the-semester showcase, which was titled Piano Plus!.

As the semester steadily comes to a close, months of hard work and practice paid off for the students in Piano Accompanying, also known as Music 477, at Cal State Long Beach.

“We’ve worked with each other all semester as duo partners,” said senior piano performance major Barret Wilber. “So we rehearse a couple hours a week, and we have a coaching every week with our coaching teacher.”

Wilber’s partner Joseph Chung is a senior violin performance major, and he said he was happy to collaborate.

“Initially, my teacher decided to work on some kind of répétiteur and suggested pieces to us,” Chung said. “I was already enrolled in Piano Accompanying, and luckily, Barret was also planning to do some auditions with this piece as well, so everything just kind of fell together.”

With the exception of a twenty-minute intermission halfway through the event, the entire two hours were brimming with music composed by the likes of such famous composers as Mozart, Brahms, Schumann and Stravinsky.

The works spanned the course of the last 250 years, dating as far back as 1756 and as recently as 1992, with the focus time period remaining firmly in the mid to late 1800’s.

The style of music seemed to stretch equally as far. Although the majority of the pieces were solemn sounding sonatas, the mood of the night took an unexpected turn during the penultimate performance as a duo of pianist partners proceeded to pound away at the experimental dissonance and rhythm of “Rite of Spring” by Stravinsky.

Junior dance major Elana Goodman said she was required to go for class,and was surprised by the out come.

“I didn’t expect it to be so long,” Goodman said. “But it was cool.”

Students like sophomore cello performance major Debbie Lee was also impressed.

“I thought all of the musicians were listening to each other really well,” said Lee. “The sound was able to project on this stage, so over all I thought they were all really focused and it was just a lovely performa

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