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About Julius Schmidt
Julius Schmidt was born in 1975 and grew up in Mount Prospect,
Illinois, U.S.A, a suburb of Chicago.
Beginning lessons on the piano at age
three, Julius Schmidt's life has been a life of music. He played violin for many
years both as a solo instrument playing concertos of Bach, Vivaldi, Telemann,
and more, as well and as in chamber music, and also performing in many different
youth orchestras. For several years he also played viola, and for many years
played clarinet in an orchestra, in several school bands, and in chamber music
including the Brahms Clarinet Sonatas, as well as a solo instrument playing the
Mozart and Weber concertos.
Yet his main instrument and his greatest love was
always the piano. He was performing, under his first teacher, Haydn and Mozart
Sonatas by the age of nine, and Beethoven sonatas by twelve, followed quickly by
Bach, a Mozart Concerto, Chopin, and much more. His second teacher introduced
him to Mendelssohn and Scarlatti, and taught him how better to play the music
behind the notes, being greater and deeper than merely the notes themselves.
He has since put much effort into the study of piano, delving away from the Modern
School of playing. His in depth study of the book "The Great Pianists" by Harold
C Schonberg, and his subsequent search and study of older recordings led him
towards what has been described as a far superior style of playing than is to be
found amongst the pianistic norm.
His love of pianistic improvisation goes back
as far as his earliest memories. He has always been improvising, though for most
of his life only in the privacy of his home, or for his closest family. In the
summer of 2006, when he was by a piano with nearby recording media (a Fostex
mr-8 with internal mono microphone) he was enthused to try recording several
sittings of improvisations for his own listening, but after some exposure of
these recordings to some friends and acquaintances, he was smitten by the great
impression that they had, and so encouraged recorded a second set of
Improvisations at the same piano (This time using a much higher quality stereo
microphone) during the months of December 2007 and January 2008. These were much
more successful, and they have been greeted with great enthusiasm. His
recordings have spread from England and Scotland, to South Africa and the U.S.A.
and Canada and more. It was mainly the success and popularity of these
recordings that has encouraged him to start a web site.
His attempts at musical
composition began at the age of sixteen, and were very hard for him. He found it
very difficult to take his ability at improvisation and subjugate it to the
rigors and demands of regular composition. He persevered and slowly improved.
Then, at the age of twenty-six, while trying hard to solve several problems with
compositional form as he had been taught it, he came across the book “The
Classical Style” by Charles Rosen, which opened up his eyes to the very problems
he was then dealing with, and after much thought, study, and application,
completely rewrote his entire compositional style and form, and created
something altogether different and greater. Since then he has been busy refining
and using the results of his experimentations, and growing in his compositional
prowess, resulting in a Piano Sonata and Piano Trio, and he is currently working
on a Piano Quartet.
All of this work put into composition, plus myriad other
pursuits of necessity and interest, have seriously hampered his time and energy
for practice, plus the inexperience and nervousness in recording have combined
to make the recordings here of less than perfect execution technically. Though,
he has been oft told that his listeners would much prefer his playing, with
technical mistakes, to others playing without technical mistakes. It is the
encouragement and love of his interpretations received from many others that
have brought him to offer some of his recordings of the works of the masters
here in this site.
These recordings came from the desire to have access to his
interpretations, vastly differing from other accounts available, and thus he was
encouraged in a sitting during the summer of 2004 to record them. He was shown
much positive admiration and love of these recordings, and thus, in the same
sittings in 2006 that made the first set of improvisations mentioned above, also
made a second set of recordings of works by Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, and
Clementi. His time being short, and the recordings being unprepared, he was
forced to record only works that he had been familiar with for many years, and
that did not pose the necessary technical brilliance that required much
practice, of which he was sorely lacking. His apologies are extended for this
inconvenience, yet he is only submitting these works before the public’s ear
from that great positive response and desire of all those who have heard them.
He hopes the listener can hear through the lacks found in these recordings to
hear the uniqueness and depth found within them.
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