HELLO AMERICA!─Even though last year’s half time game show was a total bore with Maroon 5, this year’s Super Bowl Halftime Show was not only brilliant, but dazzling especially with headliners Jennifer Lopez and Shakira. The entire company of, dancers wore the stage out with their electrifying musical rhythms that exploded through the entire audience. I raved about the Grammys this year of note, but it would be quite insulting to this group of young performs not to make note of their brilliant performance that totally made one forget about the Janet Jackson JACKSON boob tease or even the boring Marron 5 band that gave a light-weight performance the previous year.
Applause must be given to concert pianist Fredric Chiu who was the main performer on my symphony “Flight of Columbia 7 and Dances of Remembrance” not long ago. He is currently performing throughout Europe and is scheduled to return to the states near the end of this year. After his London debut, the Evening Standard declared him “more than a mere concert pianist.” “A Pianistic Genius,” wrote Montreal’s La Press. “A mind behind those fast fingers” reported the Los Angeles Times For Le Monde de la Musique, “Chiu has reinvented a form of virtuosity, a phenomenon that must be heard,” reported the Los Angeles Times.
In addition to his activities as a soloist, Frederic co-founded, with the violinist Philippe Graffin the 1993 amber music festival “Consonance” in Saint Nazaire, France, which traveled in its entirety to Wigmore Hall in London, an unprecedented event. At the festival, with major international artists among them including Pierre Amoyal and Joshua Bell. His activities also include the art of transcription. In particular, it has met with rousing success in concert and on record, and are being prepared for publication. A rare foray into the competition circuit took Chiu to Fort Worth, Texas, where his elimination before the final round of the Van Cliburn Competition brought him international attention and many of the press referred to him as the “Maverick American musician.”
Chiu graduated with honors from Indiana University and from The Julliard School; he studied with Karen Shaw and Abbey Simon, respectively. Frederic Chiu was an honored recipient of the 1995 Avery Fisher Career Grant. The Avery Fisher Prize is awarded to artists for future recordings. When searching for the perfect pianist for the recording of the “Columbia” at Dominican University of California, even though he was on a European tour, we managed to convince him to fly overnight to record the symphony that won a Grammy award, San Francisco musician, and conductor Florin Parvulescu who was also with the San Francisco Symphony. It was recorded at the Skywalker Sound Studio.
