The Blue Piano and Other Stories

Carol Montparker's thirty-one new stories are remarkable for their frankness and emotional honesty. Creative nonfiction from a life in music, they are in turn tender and intense, lyrical and riotously funny. There is a poignant friendship with the elderly, irresistible Rudi; the anguish of a marriage that needed to end; true love found later; a narrow escape from an outlandishly surreal piano; moving tales from her teaching studio, each story with its own satisfying shape and rhythm. Fans of Carol Montparker's previous books, A Pianist's Landscape and The Anatomy of a New York Debut Recital, and her columns for Clavier, will devour these new revelations. Carol articulates thoughts that most of us cannot articulate; she has an artist's eye, a musician's ear, and a gifted writer's knack for description, but it is her uncanny ability to evoke a response as she looks back over a real life from a vantage point of subsequent happiness that will prevent readers from putting down this collection until they have read every single piece. This is certainly the Carol Montparker we have come to know from her other writing, but she reveals more of herself and her past. Each challenge, encounter, and turning point rings true with joy, humor, hilarity, sorrow, rage, pain, bewilderment, satisfaction, awe, peace -- we trust the sensitive voice of a person who recounts aspects of her life in all fairness. Rare will be the reader who is not brought to tears and giggles by these human stories of an artist and woman of uncommon insight. Book jacket.

Carol Montparker is a pianist and writer. As an editor of Clavier magazine for over twenty years, Montparker has written over 200 feature articles and interviews of world-famous concert artists, along with her regular column, "Carillon," a personal view of music, and how it relates to the other arts, nature, and all of life. She has won four awards for Excellence in Journalism from EdPress of America. Carol Montparker is a Steinway Artist and continues to perform both solo and chamber music

Acknowledgments	p. 9
Preface	p. 11
The Great Pianist	p. 15
The Island	p. 21
Polly and the Piano	p. 36
Paris	p. 41
Mazurka in the Bronx	p. 52
The Special Charms of an Old Man	p. 58
My Birds	p. 77
Summer Fest	p. 83
Rubinstein, Michelangelo, and Ernest	p. 90
Greta's Melody	p. 94
Healing House	p. 97
CD Collection	p. 107
Mozart, the Starlings, and My Trigger Finger	p. 114
The Blue Piano	p. 123
Suffering Indignities	p. 128
Brooklyn	p. 136
The Best Journal	p. 146
Portrait at the Piano	p. 155
The Green Bowl	p. 161
The Lost Concert	p. 166
From the Porch	p. 171
Diverse and Controversial Uses of the Indispensable Black Marker	p. 177
An Evening with Beethoven	p. 185
Rondo in the Rubble	p. 189
My New York	p. 195
"Why Do You Keep Calling My Mother 'Dorothy'?"	p. 202
Ryan's Awakening	p. 211
Break a Leg!	p. 216
A Mother's Sacrifice	p. 220
Copying Calder	p. 231
Alife	p. 236
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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The Blue Piano and Other Stories

Summary

Author Biography

Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials