GEORGE WINSTON
WHEN: Sunday, March 4, at 3:00 PM
WHERE: Enlow Recital Hall, 215 North Avenue, Hillside, NJ
TICKETS: $35 and can be purchased by calling Kean Stage Box Office at 908.737.SHOW (7469), online HERE or in person at Kean University’s Wilkins Theater Box Office.
Performing selections from his recently released solo piano recording, Love Will Come—The Music of Vince Guaraldi (Vol. 2), the concert is a rare opportunity to see the renowned musician in the intimate and acoustically pristine concert venue at Kean University. Guaraldi is the late jazz pianist, popularized by his now iconic underscoring of the Peanuts television specials.
George Winston himself is a noted composer and he will delight audiences with his original works at Enlow as well. Self-described as a "rural folk piano" player, he was among the earliest and most successful proponents of the genre of contemporary instrumental music later dubbed “New Age.” Although born in Michigan in 1949, he was raised primarily in Montana, where the extreme seasonal changes he experienced greatly influencing the pastoral feel of his music. Some of Winston’s most profoundly beautiful works—Autumn, Winter Into Spring, December, Summer—are based on the stunning magic of the changing seasons.
“My biggest inspiration is the seasons,” said Winston, “because the seasons are color, and they’re different every place; for example if it’s winter, it’s a different kind of winter in one place than the other. Growing up, there was one radio station, no television, so the seasons were the entertainment; you rake the leaves and jump in a pile, or go out and sled, or go swimming in the summer. The seasons were the movies and the TV and all of the entertainment, the seasons were it. That just stayed with me, that’s the main thing, I’m always thinking of it. I might be in a big city, or in the country, but it’s still you know, the same date everywhere.”
Grammy-winner Winston has released over a dozen albums of largely his own piano music that have sold in droves worldwide. His piercingly evocative and utterly special music, and the successful career he has created with his incredible talent, are extraordinary. Over the last thirty-plus years, Winston and his treasured Steinway have bridged the gap between startlingly gorgeous and emotional new age compositions and beautifully familiar traditional melodies to form one of music’s most unique and lasting legacies.
“Sometimes when you have a project inside you, it must be kind of like being pregnant or something,” mused Winston. “You have an idea, I mean, it’s growing, without you doing anything. And then something maybe fertilizes the idea, like an event or a scene, then it grows and it grows, and then you want to put it on canvas, or on a record. Things come to me pretty naturally, I don’t really write them down, and I don’t do too much repetition. I never want to compose a song, and I never try to compose a song, it’s just something that happens, occasionally.”
WQXR is a media sponsor of Gene & Shelley Enlow Recital Hall.
For complete Enlow Hall 2011-12 Season information, please visit the website or contact Ms. Cory Ransom, Director, Operations (908) 737-5932, ransomco@kean.edu
