phenomeNEWS - This Month's Music Review

This Month's Music Review
by Greg Ozimek
music@wwnet.net

Possible Dreams
Elise Lebec
Lebec Entertainment

It is what we all want, isn’t it – to dream the possible dreams. The dreams that follow our hearts and surface in the splendid diversity of all that we want, of more than we knew we wanted.

Elise Lebec does more than play her heart out, she’s found a way to sweetly conform the vaporous hopes of humankind and deliver them to us. She speaks a language which still has no language but using her piano she translates that language of emotions for us... from the silence.

Elise is a daughter of the 60’s love-power revolution who found herself sitting at a piano at the tender age of four and finding her self, literally, in the following years from sitting behind a piano.

More precisely, she is the daughter of 60’s hippies whose lives and turbulent times gave her the opportunities to find peace, solace and that deep inner stillness playing tunes on the piano she’d hear on the radio and around her. This process, for her, also gave way to being able to express the deep, inner, sweet emotions she found and held close inside.

Self-taught, for a long time as a young girl she played notes and chords by ear instead of reading sheet music. Later, piano teachers would tell her that her technique was very good.

“I used the piano to learn about myself,” Elise Lebec told me in August. “Notes were my friends.”

Interviewing Elise was like talking to a time-lapse motion picture of a flower blooming or of the nighttime lights of a cityscape giving way to the wonders of a morning dawn over a mountain range: she spoke of traveling and piano performances, but there was something waiting to be told.

She told of recently spending a couple of years in New Zealand and then a few more in Australia before coming back home to roost in the USA enriched with musical and life experiences and two albums under her belt but her tale kept spinning and stirring something deeper from within.

So, I had to ask, “Where does your creativity come from? How is it you are able to invoke such feelings in your audience by your piano compositions and performances?” I just had to hear her response. Would she even know herself? How could anyone play such expressive piano and not know?

I paused before I asked. She paused before she answered.

Her words were so simple and rang clear as a bell, “It’s the Silence. The (spirit of the music) is there and as it begins to coalesce I feel like I’m a vessel or a tool.” And her piano compositions are the result, with power, like water rushing down Niagra Falls but with the tenderness of the finest emotions.

What a clear experience of the personal creative process.

“I like silence. The silence is filled with... it’s so full!” Elise continued.

Very many artists hope for what Elise is able to do. She told me unabashedly, “It’s a gift and I understand that.” She’s very lucky to have the gift and to know it and to be able to eloquently use it. “Playing piano is my meditation.”

Some good people just think of creating good energies to help bring about change in our world, some talk about it, some do more than talk. “I hope to inspire....”

Yes. Keep sitting at your piano and open all of our hearts and spirits to our own true Possible Dreams. Show us and immerse us in the sweet textures you know as life. Please! we are as thirsty as a dry sponge.

Brava!!! Ms. Elise!

See her on the web at www.eliselebec.com

That’s Amore
Beth Donnelly and Douglas Feller
Jeremiah Productions

This soprano and baritone duo have hit the popular romantic notes in their CD of 12 romantic, operatic selections.

Today, centuries old songs sung in Italian are suddenly hot with audiences of all ages – the classics are reaching out to lovers in 2006 from within the wake of time.

Beth Donnelly and Douglas Feller, husband and wife vocal sensations, are fortunate to travel in the tremendous swell created by artists like Josh Groban and Andrea Bocelli who bring their classical repertoire to the larger pop music audiences.

However, one listen to That’s Amore and you will agree that it is time for Bocelli and Groban to move over and share the romantic, classical spotlights.

That’s Amore was recorded in and around Portland, Oregon with the Sinfonia Concertante Orchestra, conducted by Stefan Minde who was the director of the Portland Opera Association for many years. Its heart is in Italy where Donnelly and Feller spent time in early 2005 for their 2006 performances in Florence, Trevi, Rome and The Vatican with their ensemble, The Glory Singers.

“Some wonder whether the larger popular appreciation for opera and classical music is just a passing trend,” says Donnelly, “but I’ve always believed that people ultimately will respond to honest, heartfelt music.”

The CD That’s Amore also includes a bonus DVD which chronicles the making of the album, the couple’s trip to Italy, musings and vocal master sessions. This DVD adds visual and textural spice to help locate each listener in romantic Italy.

Listen to the sound of two-way conversation – it sounds like great music!