Baritone George Spitzer performs two songs by Charles Ives (1874-1954), The Songs Our Fathers Loved and Memories Part I and II in a live performance video taken from a concert sponsored by the Richmond Public Library, Richmond VT on 7/8/12. Spitzer is a member of Melodeon, a chamber group founded by pianist Artis Wodehouse (who accompanies Spitzer at the piano) that presents 19th and early 20th century American music. Whitney Slaten is videographer and sound recordist.
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Pianist and harmoniumist ARTIS WODEHOUSE has devoted her careeer to preserving and disseminating neglected but valuable music and instruments from the past, with an emphasis on American music. Cited by the NYTimes as “savior of the old and neglected”, she received a National Endowment grant that propelled her into production of CDs and published transcriptions of recorded performances and piano rolls made by George Gershwin, Jelly Roll Morton and Zez Confrey. Her best-seller, “Gershwin Plays Gershwin”, on the Nonesuch label has sold over 500,000 copies. Beginning in 2000, Wodehouse began performing on a representative group of antique reed organs and harmoniums, toy pianos and an 1823 English square piano and an 1860 Steinway square piano that she had painstakingly restored and brought to concert condition. She founded the chamber group MELODEON in 2010 to present little known but valuable music from 19th and early 20th Century America, using her antique instrument collection as the basis for repertoire choice. Wodehouse has a BM from the Manhattan School of Music, an MM from Yale, and a DMA from Stanford.
