Summerville (2004) (3:00) for piano. Copyright © Mihai Popean, 2004. All Rights Reserved.
Popean Mihai. Summerville (2004) (3:00) for piano solo. Opus Morning Flowers.
Program notes
Summerville is part of a collection of love stories for solo piano written throughout more than two decades. Eventually, it became a tribute to the great salon music tradition of the 19th century which influenced composers such as Field, Chopin, Liszt and Satie. I started writing these pieces in 1988 as I became involved with theatre and was writing piano music as a soundtrack for plays. Prior to this time I composed a great many of pieces for piano that I never wrote down as I felt I will always remember them from memory and the effort of writing them down was too much of a rock stop to my creative energies at that time. Sometimes, I still remember them, but only in my dreams, and so they will never be committed to paper. Maybe the young people of today will question such choices, but at that time there was no internet, email, or even phones, you had to wait two weeks or more for the mail to arrive and everything was written down on paper. You made a mistake on page two of a letter, you started all over again as it was impolite to send a letter with corrections and ink leaks. As far as myself was concerned, I always felt that writing music is much more special than simply writing what everyone else was writing. As the time passed, these pieces became the repository of some of my life’s most intimate moments of emotional beauty.
Starting with Balade for Yolanda which was written while I was working with a student theatre group at Adi Sincai in Cluj-Napoca, I wrote some of them down purely out of the need to turn them into presents for those who inspired me. This happened usually in periods of separation when due to distance, music was the best way I could express how I felt. I continued to do so while I was writing music for the Thespis student theater in Timisoara in the early 90’s, then the later 90’s when I was working with acclaimed director Radu Teampău and late 2000’s while I worked with American director Angel Vasquez.
Most of the Morning Flowers will remain in manuscript form to protect the identity of those remarkable beings they were written for. However, some of them are ready to see the light of the world in order to preserve this tradition of piano solo salon music with romantic overtones.
Performances:
Many different venues.
