Los Angeles-based composer Dan Redfeld announces the recent release of Across the Stars: The Music of John Williams for Solo Piano from BSX Records.
"The music can translate to pretty much anything and it will still communicate an incredibly emotional, powerful idea," said Redfeld of John Williams' work. "We hope the public hears that John isn't just a one-note, blockbuster composer. His skills are much more multi-faceted and he has a created a body of work which is complex but always memorable and melodic. He's definitely the greatest American composer since Bernstein or Copland and in a class all by himself."
Distilling the orchestrations down for solo piano allows the listener to hear the purist form of Williams' melodies. "Williams's music tends to have a dense texture, both harmonically and contrapuntally," Redfeld explained. "It's difficult to translate the counterpoint on the piano and also captured all that color on one instrument. So it's distilling it down to the basic melody we hear as an audience, and then filling in to get some approximation of the counter-line or harmonies."