Contains:
"En Face Du Miroir (Facing The Mirror)"
- taken from the Isadar solo piano complete collection, "Red" (also available on SMP)

Sounds like: Keith Jarrett, Bill Evans, Vince Guaraldi, Liz Story, George Winston, early Windham Hill solo piano artists

Transcribed by: David Shenton ( https://www.shentonmusic.com/ ) verbatim to the sound recording

Album & Songbook Review by: Kathy Parsons

Red is pianist/composer Isadar?s genre-defying tenth solo piano album and seventeenth independent release from the past twenty years. It is also the third installment in a trilogy of solo piano albums released in the past year - Reconstructed, a Will Ackerman-produced anthology of some of Isadar?s best piano pieces; O Christmas, Isadar?s second piano Christmas album; and now Red, a bittersweet love-themed album that took seven years to produce and that consists of the first new original solo piano material Isadar has released in more than ten years.

I have been reviewing and thoroughly enjoying Isadar?s releases since his second piano album, 1999?s Active Imagination, which still stands as one of my favorite recordings. Even though I have been a big fan for many years, I was still blown away by Isadar?s live performance in my house concert series in July 2010. The man has magic fingers and an extraordinary piano touch that are perfectly suited to express his imaginative, distinctive, and emotionally powerful music.

Isadar is also a singer/songwriter and an electronic musician who creates the music videos for much of his music, dramatizing the stories that inspired the songs. I will always be partial to Isadar?s piano albums because his voice and vision are unique, incorporating jazz, new age, pop, and classical stylings into a musical language all his own.

Red opens with ?Broken Valentine,? a free-flowing expression of heartbreak and the broad range of emotions that go with it, alternating between grief and confusion then shifting to perhaps anger and resignation - a great beginning. The title track conveys the freedom of an improvisation while weaving together a variety of upbeat themes. ?The Man Who Broke My Heart? is energetic and in constant swirling motion - also very free and from deep within. ?The Stairwell? is darker and much more mysterious, overflowing with Isadar?s intriguing accented rhythms and picturesque compositional style. My favorite track is the almost nine-minute ?Letting Go,? a piece that intertwines a series of musical vignettes into a powerful, colorful musical collage. I love the way Isadar seamlessly goes from flowing and smooth to a bouncy jazz style to high drama without missing a beat. Great stuff! ?En Face Du Miroir (Facing the Mirror)? is much lighter, with fingers dancing nimbly around the piano keyboard. The album closes with ?Blood ... Thicker Than Water,? again a combination of changing themes that could well be a musical family portrait - different personalities working separately and as a unit, bound together by the unseen ties that keep families together through thick and thin.

Isadar has created another piano masterpiece that should be more widely heard than his previous releases due to the success of Reconstructed. I hope so, anyway! Red is available from isadar.com, Amazon, iTunes, and CD Baby. Very highly recommended!

Isadar?s Red: Solo Piano Sheet Music Collection is a note-for-note transcription of all seven pieces from Isadar?s 2013 CD/download release by the same name. The music was transcribed by David Shenton (shentonmusic.com) with clear, concise notation that includes dynamics, pedaling and metronome settings.

Isadar is an amazing pianist with a style all his own, so this isn?t a book that most pianists will be able to just sit down and play. It will take some work and attention to detail to get this music right, but it will be well worth the effort. Having the recording for handy reference would be a big help.

Rhythms are often complex and syncopated, but are usually repeated within each piece, so once you have them, the rest will follow fairly easily. There are only a few chords with a reach of more than an octave and none of the key signatures are terribly difficult. The layout and spacing of the music is excellent, and the paper stock is a bright white 9?x12? format with a stapled binding.

If you enjoy listening to Isadar?s music, I?m sure you will enjoy playing it, too! This songbook is available from isadar.com. Recommended!

The songs with their key signatures and the number of pages is listed below:

Broken Valentine - C minor (3 flats) - 4 pages
Red - A minor (0 sharps or flats) - 5 pages
The Man Who Broke My Heart - A minor - 6 pages
The Stairwell - F# minor (3 sharps) - 7 pages
Letting Go - F minor (4 flats) / C minor (3 flats) - 8 pages
En Face Du Miroir (Facing the Mirror) - Ab (4 flats) / F minor/ Bb minor (5 flats) / Db (5 flats) - 7 pages
Blood ... Thicker Than Water - A Minor/ C (0) / F (1 flat) - 7 pages

Isadar is an artist on both Enlightened Piano Radio & Whisperings Solo Piano Radio, the latter featuring some of today's biggest names in solo piano music, including Ludovico Einaudi, David Nevue, Brian Crain, Kevin Kern, Robin Spielberg, Michele McLaughlin, Philip Wesley and over 300 more...

Also available as sheet music in physical songbooks, digital downloads, as well as software for Yamaha Disklavier player-pianos.

For more information, visit his website at: http://www.isadar.com

The pdf file contains the original score (in letter format) followed by the somewhat larger copy with dedication by the composer and fingerings by Valentin Bogolubov who premiered the 3 Chromicons.

The sound sample is the live performance.

The Three Chromicons were premiered by pianist Valentin Bogolubov at the Société de concerts de St-Bruno, Saint-Bruno, Quebec, Canada, on 27 January 2007. Bogolubov's adventurous, technically demanding program, which also featured the works of Alexander Scriabin and Jean Chatillon, was accompanied by video animation of numerous works of art, four of which were created by the composer (among them, the Chromicon No. 3).

Ford explains the significance of these unique scores:

"In both my earliest chromicons, which I had begun to create by the 1980s, and in those I continue to make today, color is the element that links what is seen to what is heard. Unlike composer Alexander Scriabin, who may have been a true synaesthete as the result of a rare neurological condition enabling him actually to hear colors, my approach to color music has been by way of analogy. Although the tones in a musical scale and the colors of a prism both result from specific vibratory frequencies, scales can be replicated in various octaves while there is no comparable transposition observable in the case of the spectrum. However, the analogy between pitch and hue is implicit in the term "chromatic scale" (the Greek chrôma signifies "color"), and on that basis it is possible to equate the twelve tones of Western music with the hues on a twelvefold color wheel: red, red-orange, orange, yellow-orange, yellow, yellow-green, green, blue-green, blue, blue-violet, violet, and red-violet."

"By placing the pitch names of the chromatic scale in a separate band around the periphery of a such color wheel, much like the numbers on the face of a clock, and by rotating the central color wheel, it is possible for any given pitch to be aligned and associated with any hue. Such an easily constructed device, which I have dubbed the "chromonomicon," is the key necessary to decipher the musical meaning of my chromicons. The chromicon can be thought of as a calligraphic text in which each discrete area of color is a separate letter."

"Although there are literally millions of possible colors, all of them can be categorized as one of the twelve hues shown on the chromonomicon. Instead of being written from left to right or from right to left, the color-letters in a chromicon are arranged concentrically. The shapes of the individual letters, usually painted in watercolor and "illuminated" with metallic paints, colored pencils, and other media, are the result of each artist's creative meditation. The personal meaning of the chromiconic text as a whole emerges during and after this meditation, and may be expressed by a conventional title or accompanying commentary."

"Now, anyone wishing to realize a chromicon is at liberty to follow any path?straight or curvilinear?from the centermost letter to the periphery, constructing a cantus (melody) by notating the musical pitches associated with each contiguous color-letter encountered along the way. The cantus thereafter serves as the structural basis of a new, freely composed work. The individual pitches in the cantus may be moved to any octave, and may be repeated any number of times before proceeding to the next pitch in the sequence. Customarily, once the final tone of the cantus is reached, the entire melody is heard in reverse (retrograde), resulting in a palindrome. That palindrome is itself subject to varied repetition, so that in formal terms, each realization of a chromicon amounts to a 'mirror' theme with variations."

"Chromicon No. 3 travels even further back in collective human memory to the eighteenth century. For all its contemporary melodic and harmonic inflections, the style is pervasively contrapuntal, summoning to mind the polyphonic keyboard textures of Bach and Handel. It eschews the worldly strife and diversions mirrored in the first two chromicons, maintaining a dignified, highly stylized manner throughout, but with its unexpected final cadence on D, there seems to be a fleeting intimation of transcendence."

Video of Chromicon III
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHMw-vzZlGE