I finally got around to finishing the upgrades on Yingwen’s piano teaching website last Sunday. Talk about taking one’s time…

Anyway it looks fabulous. Used the Piano Black theme by mono-lab, and hacked it up good at Open Web Camp for the mobile audience. Try it on iPhone or Android.

Yingwen has quite a growing studio. With her better students now winning competitions, she’s building up quite a demand for piano lessons. Most of her piano students come from Danville and San Ramon, particularly from the Blackhawk and Windemere areas, but some drive an hour or more for lessons now. Crazy… Check her out at yingwenlewis.com

Posted Yingwen’s performance of the Brahms Rhapsody Op.79 No.1 to YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9mctcYghN4

Recently I had been looking for a recording of the Fantasia for Gutar and Piano by Mario Casteluovo-Tedesco. I was able to find numerous references to the work, but every site I tried listed these CDs as being out of print, or at least out of stock. Not a popular item, I’ll admit. It was not listed on the iTunes Music Store either. But it was listed as available for download at a site that I had never heard before: eClassical.com.

I was impressed. They have an extensive collection of rarities that go far beyond what I’ve been finding at the iTMS. The download came to me as an MP3 compressed at the higher quality 160kbps rate, and I had my two movements of the work downloaded instantly for about a dollar and a half.

The Fantasia is a gorgeous work that seems to be not terribly popular — probably due to the somewhat odd paring of guitar and piano — but it’s one of these gems that shouldn’t be overlooked. Obviously the pianist is going to have to love playing pianissimo; that is the predominant dynamic in the work and definitley anything above a mezzo-forte is going to render the guitarist nothing more than a harmonic suppliment. But for a masterful guitar and piano duo, it has got to be the star chamber work for the very limited repertoire that this combination has available.

A redesigned website for Yingwen:

Yingwenlewis.com

For this one I used a CSS layout, XHTML, Unicode, and some fun effects in Fireworks. Safari visitors will get an extra treat with the text-shadow CSS property in one of the headings that creates a bit of a neon effect — or whatever noble gas that glows aqua…

Yingwen has a quote in Bay Area Living, which may or may not publish in the Oakland Tribune this weekend:

Yingwen Lewis, a piano teacher in the Danville and San Ramon areas, agrees.

“I think that when you have taken piano lessons your whole childhood,from Living 1

it leaves a lasting impression on you,” Lewis says. “Playing piano again can bring back many deep feelings, in the same way that a familiar place, a food or an activity can give you a feeling of nostalgia.”

Yingwen put out an ad yesterday to advertise piano lessons. In one day, her schedule is almost full. Amazing! She’s on the phone as I write this, setting up schedule details. The phone has been ringing off the hook.

Since suddenly we are getting very busy trying to keep track of appointments and taking care of the kids, we set up iCal to subscribe automatically to each others’ calendars. Pretty damn easy to set up, and effective. We can see each others’ schedules updated every hour on our iCal clients or over the web.

This is actually an older design but resurrected and updated with new copy and it’s own permanent domain: www.yingwenlewis.com. This is Yingwen’s site for her piano teaching activities. It includes a short bio, contact info, and a bookstore that orders direct through Barnes and Noble. Future plans include a student/teacher application that will allow her to input data about student progress and allow students and parents to log in and see information. It will be very cool.

For now, this is pretty much a static site with a cool design. It’s much more freeform than my corporate sites and I like the opportunity to do something that is more creative and artistic.