The campus at 5th Avenue and 66th Street North has come a long way since I attended as a freshman at St. Petersburg Junior College. I worked at a brand new McDonalds Restaurant, 17 blocks north of the campus. The workers were all male. The sign outside between the “golden arches” changed while I was there, from 5 to 6 million served. Almost 45 years have sped by since then.
My ‘Alma Mater’ Junior College has become a four-year institution, with multiple campuses throughout Pinellas. Specialties at the “Gibbs” Campus includes a planetarium; the West St. Petersburg Community Library; a fabulous art, music and performing arts program; and SPC’s only Music Center. I had the opportunity to experience the perfect acoustics of this cozy venue late in February for a Jazz performance by a Latin Jazz quartet and sextet Via Cal, as part of the Young St. Petersburg Jazz Festival.
It was a sextet tribute to Latin Jazz great Cal Tjader, led by Frankie Pineiro with Richard Drexler, Hector Mayoral, John Jenkins, Joe Porter & Cole Hazlitt,
with a number of excellent jazz standards for quartet thrown in. The music and performance was world class. The price of entry was $10. The room was 75 percent empty. I think the biggest problem was insufficient promotion. If you want to find out for yourself and you enjoy really good classical piano, you have a great chance to see and hear an awesome concert by Rebecca Penneys Friday, March 7, 7:30 to 9 pm, for $10.
Steinway Artist Rebecca Penneys is a recitalist, chamber musician, orchestral soloist, educator and adjudicator. For six decades she has been hailed as a pianist of prodigious talent. Rebecca has played throughout the US, East Asia, Australia, New Zealand, South America, Western and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Canada. She is a popular guest artist, keynote speaker and pedagogue nationally and internationally. Her current and former students include prize winners in international competitions, and hold important teaching posts on every continent. Combining a busy concert schedule with seminars and master classes worldwide, she teaches international students at Eastman School of Music and at the Rebecca Penneys Piano Festival that had a very successful inaugural season in 2013. Rebecca divides her time between New York and Florida. She is Professor of Piano at Eastman since 1980 and is Artist-in-Residence at St. Petersburg College. In New York she continues as founder-pianist in 1998 of the Salon Chamber Music Series, a five-concert series ,and she is also founder and artistic director in 2009 of a very popular young artist series called Eastman Piano Series at the Summit.
Tickets are also only $10 for this incredible performance on March 28th at the same location: Two-Piano Eight-Hand Extravaganza – “What Pianos & Pianists Do For Fun” -wth Pianists Eunmi Ko, Rebecca Penneys, Omri Shimron & Johnandew Slominski
Not to be missed! Piano friends and former Penneys’ students join forces for this light-hearted concert in a program of original and arranged fun music for 2-Pianos, 8-Hands. The Extravaganza is fast becoming an annual tradition in St Pete. Audiences love it because of its festive, informal and humorous nature. All have busy schedules as performers and educators; all hold academic teaching posts and all four pianists will be teaching at the 2nd annual Rebecca Penneys Piano festival at USF, Tampa, from July 16 – Augist 1. For more details visit rebeccapenneyspianofestival.org or call 727-341-7984.
To build a presence in her new home state of choice, she created the ‘Rebecca Penneys’ Tuition-Free Piano Festival at USF, which had a great first season in summer 2013. She is excited to welcome 92-year-old American-born piano icon Abbey Simon, Legacy Artist for 2014, one of the last living giants of the keyboard. Patrons, sponsors and memberships are being sought to help defray expenses such as the expense of bringing him to USF for the Festival. Small investments can pay off big for the future of music, with such talents involved. Rebecca Penneys Piano Friends of Piano, a non-profit 501c3 and the Rebecca Penneys Tuition-Free Piano Festival are the sequels to her long leadership of the Chautauqua Piano Festival & Competition. The University of South Florida in Tampa hosts the festival in its new all-Steinway facility. The festival is entirely donor-supported and many events are free and open to the public. Her latest CD recorded in 2011 is a solo bicentennial tribute to Chopin and Schumann. Rebecca has more than a dozen current CDs on Fleur De Son Classics and Centaur Records.
Visit rebeccapenneys.com & rebeccapenneyspianofestival.org to donate, or mail donations to: Rebecca Penneys Piano Festival & Friends of Piano; P.O. Box 66054, St Pete Beach, FL 33736.