Steven Schoenberg is a dynamic, award-winning composer/pianist whose talents cross into musical theater, classical compositions, film scoring, children’s music, and solo improvisational piano performances. His acclaimed recordings, Pianoworks and Three Days in May, are now available on CD. He regularly performs improvisational piano
concerts and has appeared at concert halls throughout the United States. His recent scores include the documentaries
A Class Apart, for the PBS series American Experience; An Act of Conscience, for Showtime; and Farmingville, which opened the 2005 PBS series POV. Farmingville took home the Special Jury Award from the Sundance Film Festival. Schoenberg has scored numerous Emmy Award-winning films for other PBS series including NOVA and Smithsonian World. For children’s television, he has composed songs for Sesame Street and scored films for ZOOM and the Children’s
Television Workshop. He is currently executive producer and composer for Kid Quest, which garnered two New England Emmy Awards in 2008. Other children’s projects include composing music for the award-winning book and CD My Bodyworks, written by his wife Jane Schoenberg.
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REVIEWS OF THREE DAYS IN MAY and PIANOWORKS:
“Steven Schoenberg’s "Three Days in May" is an eloquent, lush, and flowing series of improvisations that are spliced together to form sequential states of mind. He claims that the performances are completely spontaneous, but if that’s so, they are within strict melodic and rhythmic frameworks. . .Schoenberg is not afraid to become rapturous, building up rippling crescendos and cascades of sound on “Keynote.” He can descend to emotionally manipulated pieces like “Lullaby,” but he can also be brooding and pensive on “Kyrie.”
~Downbeat Magazine
“Steven Schoenberg’s kaleidoscopic piano speaks with a uniquely American voice; it possesses a vocabulary that spans the decade. His flowing compositions, laced with stride, folk, modern jazz and impressionistic styles, burst open into full-scale musical dioramas.”
~ Tom Regan, Prairie Public Radio
“Schoenberg performs spontaneously improvised works and yet each one has the polish, sophistication and technical mastery of a complex piece of music.”
~ David Sokol, Music Editor, Valley Advocate
I think Steven’s music is some of the most incomparably beautiful music I’ve ever heard. When I listen, I am transported. . .to someplace very peaceful. If I were to be banished to an island and could take music, his would be among what I’d choose. . .and if there were only two choices, Schoenberg would be one!
~ Lee Thornton, Senior Host, Weekend Edition, All Things Considered, National Public Radio
“Schoenberg is a bright young composer, and his sparkling album “Pianoworks” is almost 45 minutes of Schoenberg’s solo improvisations, most of them from a concert he gave in Amherst College. He’s a lyrical player with a gift for delicate interlocking melodies and extended single not runs high up the keyboard. . .On “Gesture” Schoenberg develops a pretty but slight opening theme and works it up, thickening the textures a bit, varying the dynamics, dotting it with quick runs, making it more elaborate but not pretentious – at the beginning you’d hardly have thought the little theme could have endured all of the weight. Of course it’s standard business, the thematic elaboration, but only the gifted players are able to do it well. And following “Gesture,” Schoenberg diverges into a piece called “Blue Rag” which isn’t so much a rag as a dirty boogie-woogie with a rolling eight-to-the-bar rhythm and an uplifting bluesy after-hours feeling.”
~ Ray Murphy, Boston Globe
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