Click to Watch this Salonline
Sunday May 17, 2020
(our linchpin salonline performer!)
Alex Hassan
presents
“A Syncopated Romance”
Glorious Melodies Between the World Wars
Alex Hassan returns for a third streamed solo piano concert–an hour of romantic to toe-tapping to jazzy melodies of Golden Age Broadway and Hollywood (and Stalinist Russia–OY!). Songwriting greats Jerome Kern, Vernon Duke, Harry Warren, Isaak Dunaevsky (Vot’s dis???!!!) dot the confectionery musical menu, along with a few of their lesser known colleagues (Alex as archaeologist). For an hour, forget all that’s gone screwy the last couple of months, and tune in to Emerson Avenue Salons, Sunday night, May 17th, 7:30PM, eastern time. You’ll enter an alternate musical universe, in which the phrase “They just don’t write ’em like that anymore.” might be the first to spring to mind!
——–
BIO
Alex Hassan has been in total immersion 1920s/30s Tin Pan Alley Popular Piano Styles therapy for over 40 years. A pupil of a pupil of a pupil of a pupil of Franz Liszt (well…it SOUNDS impressive?!), he has been a torchbearer for the melodies of between-the-wars Broadway and Hollywood (and European equivalents), devoting himself more specifically to collecting and resurrecting the great “late Romantic with a beat” popular songs that really never had a chance.
His archival collection of [mostly] popular piano solo and vocal sheet music numbers around 45,000 titles, entirely 1920s/30s. It is a tribute to those heady musical times that there is still so much left to find.
Alex has performed internationally at such venues as England’s Aldeburgh Festival, Husum (2007 & 2015–“Piano Rarities Festival”), Washington DC’s Kennedy Center, the Coolidge Auditorium (Library of Congress), various Manhattan/Baltimore/Washington night spots, and national ragtime festivals. He has recorded prolifically for England’s SHELLWOOD PRODUCTIONS, Los Angeleno label OPERETTA ARCHIVES, and Pennsylvania’s STOMP OFF, and has produced/annotated several reissues of the virtuoso popular pianists of the 78RPM period, for both Shellwood and the Pittsburgh company, RIVERMONT (for which he has also recorded, along with two brilliant singing friends).
HOW TO WATCH
To watch the broadcast, click the following link: