Billy Joel 'Fantasies' will go symphonic at music festival

Paying his respect
Winston-Salem Journal (subscription) - Winston-Salem,NC,USA
By Ken Keuffel. Billy Joel is never movin' out of the pop-music world that inspired him to write hit after hit since the 1970s. But ...

Billy Joel 'Fantasies' will go symphonic at music festival

Sunday, June 18, 2006

By Ken Keuffel

JOURNAL ARTS REPORTER

Billy Joel is never movin' out of the pop-music world that inspired him to write hit after hit since the 1970s. But in 2001, he stepped out just long enough to write solo-piano fare that sure wasn't rock 'n' roll.

The music is derivative of the 19th-century sounds of Chopin and Schumann, with lush harmonies, extreme differences in dynamics and songlike melodies. It became a classical album of 10 short pieces called Fantasies and Delusions and was recorded by Richard Joo, a classical pianist.

Now, another classical-piano man, Jeffrey Biegel, has taken up the Fantasies cause, having reworked some of the album's material into a four-movement piano concerto, with orchestrations by Phillip Keveren. On Saturday, he'll solo in the premiere of the piece, called Symphonic Fantasies for Piano and Orchestra, when the Eastern Philharmonic Orchestra performs it in War Memorial Auditorium at the Greensboro Coliseum Complex.

Stuart Malina will conduct the performance, part of this year's Eastern Music Festival. He used to be music director of the Greensboro Symphony Orchestra. In 2003, he and Joel shared a Tony award for Movin' Out, which features Joel's songs.

Biegel said he took about three weeks to transcribe the music of Joel, who studied classical music in his youth.

"I literally took the solo pieces and treated them as architectural blueprints," Biegel said on the telephone from his home in New York. "When people who know the original Fantasies and Delusions listen to the concerto, they're just going to hear a much bigger version of those original melodies and harmonies."

That bigger version has meant something less "basic," and more appropriate for virtuosos, Biegel said.

"They (the original pieces) are playable," Biegel said. "Would I program them in a solo recital against Scriabin and Rachmaninov? If I doctored them up a little, yes."

In the end, what listeners will hear Saturday amounts to what Biegel called "a homage to all the great composers."

"I think that Billy's respect for Schubert and Debussy and Chopin and the like - it came out," he said. "He wanted to try and pay his respect to them. That was his intention; he didn't go out of his way to imitate them."

Biegel said that Fantasies and Delusions ultimately needed the "second step" of being transcribed for solo piano and orchestra.

Malina, who is now the music director of the Harrisburg Symphony Orchestra in Pennsylvania, seemed to agree.

"They're very nice pieces," he said. "I like them better as orchestra pieces."

• Under Stuart Malina's direction, the Eastern Philharmonic Orchestra will perform Symphonic Fantasies for Piano and Orchestra at 8 p.m. Saturday in War Memorial Auditorium at the Greensboro Coliseum Complex. Jeffrey Biegel will solo. The rest of the program will include Johann Strauss' Overture to Die Fledermaus and Mozart's Symphony No. 39. Tickets are $25 to $75; call 1-888-397-3100.