A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

© ℗ 1992 Intersound Records In 1992, the now-defunct Intersound record company of Roswell, Georgia released Piano Masterpieces, a four-CD box set devoted to - you guessed it - some of the best-known compositions for piano and orchestra. Featuring works by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Johannes Brahms, Frederic Schumann, Franz Liszt, George Gershwin and performances by Marian Pivka, Garrison Kent, Arthur Lima, Dubravka Tomsic, Sylvia Capova, and Svetlana Stanceva, it presents compositions from various musical periods, including the Classical, Romantic, Impressionistic, and Jazz eras. Owned and managed by a music industry veteran named Don Johnson (not related to the eponymous actor) Intersound was 10 years old when it released Piano Masterpieces; starting in 1982 as a direct-to-retailers purveyor of licensed classical recordings. As a result, classical music aficionados could find good recordings by solo performers and orchestras from the Old and New World, tho

(C) 2013 Signum Classics Records One of the (many) benefits of being an Amazon Prime member is that, in addition to getting free shipping on most of my Amazon orders, I also have access to Amazon Prime Video and Amazon Prime Music, two streaming services that allow me to watch or listen to many movies, Amazon Original Television shows (such as Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan ), and a wide selection of music albums, free of charge. Obviously, not everything on Amazon's video or music catalog is offered gratis, but I've been lucky enough to add some really cool albums to my Amazon Music queue thanks to my $119-a-year Prime membership. One of my more recent musical discoveries is Signum Classics' 2013 2-disc set The King's Singers: Great American Songbook, a 2-disc, 25-track collection of songs written between the 1920s and early 1960s by songwriters such as Cole Porter, George & Ira Gershwin, Harold Arlen & Ted Koehler, Mack Gordon & Harry Warren, Richard Rod

Once upon a time in America, player pianos -- which were modified pianos with internal mechanisms that read "piano rolls" very much like computers today read, say, CD-ROM discs -- were "the" big thing in popular American music. I first saw one at the Miami Museum of Science many years ago, and I was enthralled by what (to a 12-year-old boy) was a pretty neat sight -- a piano that played by itself! At the time, Scott Joplin's "The Entertainer" rag was in vogue ( The Sting  was a big hit movie at the time), and I stayed at that part of the museum, listening to the melody from a long-gone era and watching the keyboard move as if a ghost had decided the museum was too darned quiet and wanted to hear some happy tunes of the past. George Gershwin grew up in the early part of the 20th Century and thus had first-hand experience with player pianos, as the liner notes by Artis Woodhouse explain in "Gershwin Plays Gershwin," a 12-track collection