March 2019

Spirio Spotlight

An Aretha Franklin Tribute
Transcendental Etudes, David Bowie re-arranged,
and a bit of Bollywood"

STEINWAY & SONS SPIRIO, the world’s finest high resolution player piano, features a musical tribute to Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Soul, from the Prince of New Orleans, Davell Crawford. Aretha Franklin’s special place in pop music as a pioneer and an influencer is undeniable. The emotion she brought to a diverse group of signature tunes is evoked by Davell Crawford in a set of arrangements produced exclusively for SPIRIO.

SPIRIOSYNC VIDEO

Crawford also appears in this month’s SPIRIOSYNC video, a performance of “Day Dreaming” live from Steinway Hall, New York.

what’s NEW

We also explore David Bowie’s music through arrangements by Meral Guneyman, scale the heights of virtuosic pianism with Konstantin Scherbakov, and get a taste of Bollywood music-making with Sunny Choi."

Classical pianists look to Liszt’s 12 Transcendental Etudes as a career achievement, but Konstantin Scherbakov brings his formidable virtuosity not just to these works, but also to a “companion” set of Etudes Sergei Lyapunov wrote to honor Liszt and to complete the cycle, both musically and in degree of difficulty. This monumental group of 24 Transcendental Etudes marks Scherbakov’s SPIRIO debut.

 Meral Guneyman’s new arrangements of classic David Bowie songs are presented on spirio for the first time. “Life on Mars,” “Let’s Dance,” “Space Oddity” and others take new shape when heard on solo piano — familiar yet different, for fans and as a discovery for the unenlightened. Similarly, the music of Bollywood will be entirely familiar to fans of the genre (of which there are millions), while for others, Sunny Choi’s arrangements of the most popular tunes provide yet another flavor to the SPIRIO experience.