We had a very special guest at our house recently. His name is Jon Schmidt and he is a semi-famous pianist and composer. He is mostly known by L.D.S. piano players since his first work was showcased through E.F.Y and Deseret Book. He has an incredible enthusiasm for playing the piano and he write beautiful songs. He even plays with his toes and upside down. If you want to hear some of his music you can go to JonSchmidt.com. He's also incredible at arranging existing pop music and although you can watch/hear him on youtube, he can't reproduce the recordings for money yet as he doesn't have the rights to the music. Sean videotaped the whole thing, however, it's too long to figure out how to segment it for posting, so I'm going to link you to a youtube performance so you can see just how talented he is.
The reason he came to our house was because our piano teacher, Claire Westlake, was in charge of a huge piano event called Cavalcade and she invited him to be the guest composer. Hundreds of kids were planning on playing his music on Saturday night and he was staying at Claire's house. He offered to do a private recital just for her piano students and she asked me if they could use our house for it:). We moved our piano into the family room to make room for everyone since Claire has 88 piano students. She didn't even allow the parents or siblings to attend! I had never heard him in person before, however, Chelsea and Carly have played his music over the years. Steve and I were so impressed with his talent and enthusiam and couldn't believe how excited everyone was. They were acting like groupies and it was standing room only:).
We even had a balcony full of people:)
Carly was supposed to be in Tucson for a special choir festival but she lost her voice on the first day of practice so I had Sean go pick her up so she wouldn't miss the performance. She was so excited!
Good old Toro pride
You can check out one of our favorite arrangements, "Love Story meets Viva La Vida" here:
5 comments:
Wow! That is soooo amazing.
That is so awesome!! What a neat experience.
I'm glad you guys had fun! Wish I coulda been there! :)
hahaha holy schmidt thats funny mamma. looks pretty amazing
I have podcasted him. He is pretty amazing. I was so jealous to see your FB post when he was there!
Post a Comment