(upbeat music) - In this edition of WLIW Artsbeat, a dynamic piano duel.

- When you get into the space and you hear the sonorities and you see the other people who are sharing the experience, there's nothing like it.

(music) (applause) A local business that is building community.

- Harbor Gardens is a general store.

It's a demonstration kitchen and it's a meeting space.

And everything is revolved around local food and local products.

(music) Dedicating oneself to dance.

I tell you, they're amazing students.

They're just hungry to learn.

They're just very giving to other people and just great team players.

(music) It's all ahead in this edition of WLIW ArtsBeat.

Funding for WLIW ArtsBeat is made possible by viewers like you.

Welcome to WLIW ArtsBeat.

I'm Diane Masciale.

Kirk Whipple and Marilyn Morales are a husband and wife piano duo who have been playing together for over two decades.

In this segment, we travel to Florida to find out more about their latest projects.

I'm Kurt Whipple.

And I'm Marilyn Morales.

We are a husband and wife team of composers and pianists and educators.

And we make music, we teach, we write, we arrange, and one of our mottoes is From Bach to rock and everything in between."

We're always learning.

Yes, we are.

It's like the Cuban author said, "You're born learning and you die learning."

That's our lives, you know.

Well we met each other in 1988 at a piano competition in Portland, Maine.

I beat him.

Yeah, she did.

The poor guy.

But I won the prize.

And we got married in 1992.

We wrote a two-piano concerto.

And let me tell you, it was like we needed a marriage counselor before we got married, you know, because I compose and he composed.

And so we kind of like collide.

It's almost like having two people cooking at the same time.

You better like each other's spices.

Yeah.

Well, we had a really great referee, our composition teacher, our lovely Matthew.

And he was like, OK, you do this and you do that.

And he set us straight.

Well, and that was for two pianos and a 50 piece orchestra on our wedding.

And we got married in between the movements.

These are pieces that have been percolating for quite a while.

I mean, her musical always, remember about the Cuban American experience.

She had been working on that for over 25 years before we premiered it, one little piece at a time and after a while she got the 24 songs, all the incidental music and we were able to launch the world premiere production in 2022 in South Florida.

And similarly my piece Macabre Festo had been percolating and we did a workshop of it in for one piano, six hands and choir.

But I decided that the piece needed a little bit more of a fuller balance and it gave me the opportunity for us to bring our friends across from Europe.

We call ourselves the United Nations Piano Quartet.

And so now Macabrifesto is for two pianos, eight hands, bass and percussion.

[playing piano] And choir and soloists.

(laughing) - We don't do anything small, you know?

I don't know if you noticed, but everything we do is bang.

(laughing) I mean, even-- - We have small pieces, too.

- Yeah, no, we do.

One piano, four hands, or two piano things, you know?

But-- - And we've also written a lot of pieces for two pianos, four hands that we play, and one piano, four hands.

(piano music) With two pianos, four hands, you have one pianist on each piano.

We're in our space, it's nice and easy.

We have all the room we need.

We don't have to worry about bumping into each other.

Now, conversely, on one piano, four hands, one thing, it's a lot easier to find just one piano in a venue.

Also, there's an added challenge, and it's more immediate 'cause you're both right there, but there's a challenge because there's an intermediate step that we call traffic before you can interpret the piece.

You go, "Oh, there's your hand.

"Oh, I gotta get around."

- Well, I've seen the size of those hands.

I mean, they're huge.

He took my pinky one time.

We both missed the last chord.

It was like, "Eh."

- So traffic, that's an issue with one piano, four hands.

And the sound is different, of course, with one piano, four hands.

It's more intimate, you could say, because you have the, you just, I said just the one piano, but one piano.

With two pianos, you have an expanded range of sonorities.

It becomes more symphonic, perhaps.

- And then with two, yeah, the two pianos, eight hands is even harder.

- Harder.

- 'Cause you have to, now you have to not only work the traffic, each one of us in each piano, but also the traffic and also-- - The ensemble.

- The ensemble.

It's so hard, you know.

And we were very lucky.

I mean, it's like we really hit it on together.

Great with Mark and, you know.

And we should say too that this setting of the United Nations Piano Quartet, there's three founding members, Marilyn and I and Mark Sole-Leris.

Our other founding member, Frederic Chauvel, he's had to bow out for health reasons.

But we're thrilled that Soraya's litany is stepping in for him.

So when Frederic said, "I can't come, Mark," I said, "Oh, how am I going to manage this one?"

You need somebody who has high-class piano playing, classical piano playing, but who can also play in different styles, because Kurt Whipple's writing is quite complex, especially rhythmically and also harmonically.

And I thought Soraya could do the job, and she's definitely doing a very good job.

Thanks.

So my name is Soraya, and I'm privileged to play Macabrifesto of Kirk Whipple, and honored to replace Frederic Chauvel.

The United Nations Piano Quartet is in here for the world premiere of Macabrifesto, and in fact we have an international cultural exchange program between Miami-Dade County and France, which helped us to raise the funds to bring them out here.

And next year we're going across to do the same piece with French vocalists and instrumentalists.

So it's very, very exciting for us that we can do something that's international.

(Singing) I mean, it's like, and you want to talk about "Always Remember" first and then Macabrifesto.

Sure, sure, sure.

You know, it's like, I love musicals, really love musicals, but I was searching, I was trying to do something that could stand the times, like West Side Story or Sound of Music, you know, something that really, really was strong and not just repetitive.

So I wrote, I have a salsa piece, I have a classical piece actually that I used.

It's a Chopin etude and then I wrote a trio on top of that.

I kept the Chopin etude exactly the same but I did a thing on the trio on top.

I have a mambo, I have a rumba.

So I mean... - Very accessible to audiences.

It's not something that we're trying to get past the audience.

- And at the same time it's challenging for the musicians.

So it's not something that anyone can... Well, they could sing it but they have to practice.

So I made it so... And it's tonal, I mean, there's nothing crazy, you know, wild.

And my piece, Macabre Festo, eight pieces, it's a smaller set, it's... Always remember, it was a three-hour production, including the intermission, and Macabrifesto is about a 50-minute set of eight pieces I set to American and British poems.

And so it was a little bit of a different process.

She wrote all the lyrics, the story, and everything for "Always Remember."

And I helped her by orchestrating.

And whereas with "Macabrifesto," the words were written for me by the greatest poets in history.

[MUSIC - "ALWAYS REMEMBER"] And then I scored it for the choir and two pianos, percussion, and bass.

[MUSIC - "ALWAYS REMEMBER"] It's even hard to play just alone with our metronome.

It's hard.

So when our partner, it's harder.

And with the other duo, complicated just to match-- Exponentially, it gets more and more difficult.

[MUSIC - "ALWAYS REMEMBER"] With Marilyn being a passionate and romantic, expressive pianist and Kirk is the wild, I don't know, he's just quite a phenomenon, this Kirk Whipple.

And he's the rhythmical, energetic guy.

So it's really a subtle mix of different kinds.

And Soraya in a way has some qualities also of Fred, because Fred, she has a very good rhythmical sense.

So that's part of the things why it works well.

And I'm more the, maybe the more expressive kind of guy.

So it's, you know, and it's also a story of, of friendship and of love between people.

And this is what we lived in together today.

There's an immediacy to being a live performance that you can't, I'm sorry, you cannot get from a screen, you can't get from an iPhone.

When you get into the space and you hear the sonorities and you see the other people who are sharing the experience, there's nothing like it.

Really what it is for us, the real excitement is being there in the flesh with real instruments and people.

Yeah, I actually had a student one time that the mother kept asking him, I said, "When was the last time you took her to a piano recital?"

And so then she took her, and the girl was practicing, practicing, practicing, so she comes in the next week and she says, "I don't know how to make her stop."

And I said, "That's not my problem."

[LAUGHTER] [APPLAUSE] Learn more about the duo at facebook.com/wmduo.

And now, the artist quote of the week.

Harbor Gardens is a food market and demonstration kitchen that is building community in Ashtabula, Ohio.

Up next, we learn more about the art of food from the store's co-owners and the importance of growing it locally.

I started looking at the data of Ashtabula County.

So Ashtabula County really has, sadly, some of the worst health outcomes, which, you know, when you look around and you think about all of this water, you think of all of this land, and we have this fresh air.

So it's hard to believe that we can have such poor health outcomes when we have such abundance of natural resources.

Harbor Gardens is a general store.

It's a demonstration kitchen and it's a meeting space.

And everything is revolved around local food and local products.

Working with the shop, Sarah is the grower, and from a health care perspective, I just want people to eat local food so that we can improve health outcomes here in Ashtabula County.

The systems that we have in place now don't do as good of a job, I think, as we can with taking care of people, taking care of our ecosystems, and I think we can do all of those things and we don't have to sacrifice, you know, ecological quality.

I think we can actually make things more beautiful, more productive, more abundant, and people healthier.

All those things can happen simultaneously.

It doesn't have to be one or the other.

Sarah's part of the of the shop is growing so much gorgeous food.

So we have a little food forest about four blocks from here and we grow a lot of food.

We teach people how to grow food and we're also working on the food forest concept as a way to get food to people.

So when most people think about their garden you know they till it every year and they plant new crops but with the food forest you're taking advantage of something called ecological succession where essentially a plant community over time it builds and builds until it has this multi-layered structure with trees and shrubs and perennial plants and some annual plants and things like that so it looks a lot like a forest but you've selected each one of those plants to have a certain role in a certain function and to produce food or medicine or fiber or something that's useful for people.

It's doing all the things the wonderful things that an ecosystem does to make the earth healthier but it's also providing for humans.

Along with the classes we teach about cooking, canning, fermenting because it's not just growing your own food.

Not everybody has to grow their own food.

You can get your food from your local farmer's market or we have a resource here called the Astribula Local Food Guide.

It's got over a hundred farms who are producing food for local consumption.

So you get that food but then you need to preserve it.

So we teach so many classes.

I have requests every day for learning how to water bath can.

So you can do your own tomato sauce, you can make your own jams, jellies with water bath canning.

We also do a pressure canning class and then we also have fermentation classes.

So fermenting is one of the oldest ways to prepare food.

We try to have all of the resources where people can be quite self-sufficient once they learn how to do it.

For making the sauerkraut, everybody get a cutting board.

There's three or four back there and I brought a couple just in case.

I learned to can from my grandmother, so I've been canning for the last 50 years or more.

And what we want to do is slice it as thin as you can.

You take whatever vegetable or did sauerkraut, which is cabbage, and salt.

You put it under pressure so the liquid will come up.

Once the liquid comes up, you then put a weight on it.

If the liquid doesn't cover the full thing, you'll end up getting spoilage.

So you have to make sure your liquid comes above whatever your weight is.

And then you put a cover over it and let it ferment.

Most fermented foods, if you ferment it, will have probiotics in it and it's great for your stomach.

If you take fermented foods every single day that you know has not been killed by a processing, it'll help your stomach calm down, you'll do much better.

Most medications that people are on, blood pressure medications, diabetes, most of the regular meds that people are on do not fix problems.

They're symptom relievers.

Food is a problem solver.

That's powerful.

And I noticed Gallo had some classes.

I just came in here this afternoon.

I was curious.

I found out she had a class on fermenting tonight.

So I brought some friends with me and we had a wonderful evening.

I didn't realize it was this easy.

I could easily do this.

And I trust it more than going to the store and buy something in a plastic bag.

We're trying through local food to show people that it can be done regeneratively and that the way of the future as humans is to keep things local and take care of our local ecosystems and the people in them.

The way that's going to happen is by supporting people who are doing that, who are your neighbors, and kind of reestablishing these human communities, as well as the communities in the natural world.

Ashtabula County and all of the food that is grown here deserves to be celebrated.

Really this is about having some fun with food and that keeps me going every day.

Discover more at HarborGardens.org Now here's a look at this month's fun fact.

[MUSIC] Denise Wall's Dance Energy is an award winning studio in Virginia that has turned out a series of extraordinary dancers.

Two of them are John Chappell and Caden Hunter, who were accepted into the prestigious Juilliard School for Dance.

Here's their story.

I did apply to a couple of other dance colleges that I was interested in, but Juilliard was definitely the main one.

But it was obviously more kind of a dream because of the acceptance rate and the reality of getting in.

There's no way they're gonna pick two boys from the same studio.

Juilliard's dance program is tough to get into.

I always try to tell kids that cannot be the only one you want to audition for because throughout the whole world they take 12 girls and 12 guys so the odds of you getting in is like slim to none.

The hardest part was waiting.

That was the hardest part.

I was in the car I look at my phone and it says it's from New York and I don't usually answer like random calls or whatever but I was like is this like is this for real so I answer it and it's the Dean of Dance and I screamed immediately.

They probably thought it was crazy.

They were laughing at me the whole time.

I knew that a call could be coming I answered it and obviously I was so excited they were just laughing because it's we don't even know how to react it's so shocking.

So I actually started dance at what most would consider too late.

I was like 13.

I started out in gymnastics and I've always loved to dance.

I'm a pretty shy person so I was a little iffy about it but I ended up loving it.

I came here because I knew that Denise's training was advanced and could get me if I want to do this for a living where I need to be.

When I was like three I was watching "So You Think You Can Dance."

Obviously I was a little kid So then I forced my mother to put me in dance classes.

I've always looked up to Denise Wall's Dance Energy, like forever.

I came to a few of the intensives, so Denise knew who I was, like she knew my face, she knew how I danced.

So she'd seen me before, we'd talked to her, and she decided that she was going to let me in company, and I was so excited.

Now we are where we are.

I tell you, they're amazing students.

They're just hungry to learn.

They're just very giving to other people and just great team players.

What they bring into the space is very positive.

John is very quiet and it took him a while really to open up.

John has amazing facility.

He's got all this natural flexibility.

John had a lot of ballet.

He didn't have a lot of movement quality.

But he had trouble really getting grounded into the floor because he's so tall and moving out from himself.

John trusted me right from the get-go.

We had a good connection.

It was kind of intimidating coming in here for the first time because this little studio in Virginia Beach is like nationally ranked and pretty much every dancer all over the world knows about her so it was intimidating for sure but she's not scary at all she's one of the most friendly people I've met.

Denise prepares us for everything.

We're always learning new things every day and act as dancers.

She definitely keeps us stern and disciplined.

We're all good kids because of her.

It's a lot of hard work and it's definitely hard sometimes, but at the end of the day it's what we all love doing and our hard work definitely pays off.

Caden is amazing in class.

He will do well because he's engaged.

Right when you start teaching it, he's so connected to the teacher and he's got great musicality and he just gives 200%.

We're literally a huge family.

It's been a good experience, really good.

It's helped me, it's matured me and I think it's prepared me.

That's the big point.

It's prepared me for the future, and it's prepared me to move to the city.

It's prepared me to be a professional dancer.

It's 90% mental and 10% physical, which I didn't really comprehend at first.

But now, since I've grown into my body and my form and my physique, that I'm figuring out that being a smart dancer is better than being a physical dancer.

I've been teaching for over 40 years.

We try to train these kids mentally all the way.

I don't sugarcoat it for them.

I want to be honest with them, but I do it in a nurturing way.

Because it is very mental.

If you prepare them that way mentally, even if they don't do this for a living, we teach so much more than dance.

You've got to be a leader.

You can't be the one that's causing drama.

You've got to get along with people.

You've got to be able to motivate people.

And they make it in the corporate world because they know how to lead people.

The whole experience is really unbelievable.

Like, I don't even think it's really set in.

To go from a little southern town to New York City is definitely a lot to think about.

And there's a lot that I don't know.

But all I know is that I'm really excited and happy about the whole thing.

I think being here was a big, big factor in getting me to be able to do my dream.

I'm so excited and I'm excited to learn.

That's what I'm most excited about.

I'm excited to learn from the crazy faculty that's at Juilliard.

I'm nervous because there's a lot that could happen, but I'm more excited than nervous.

>> When they leave the nest, it's heartbreaking.

Dance teachers go through this every year.

Every time they leave, it's like my heart breaks.

Discover more about the studio at denisewall.com.

And here's a look at this week's art history.

That wraps it up for this edition of WLIW Artsbeat.

Visit our webpage to watch more episodes of the show.

We hope to see you next time.

I'm Diane Masciale.

Thank you for watching.

Funding for WLIW Artsbeat was made possible by viewers like you.

Thank you.

[MUSIC PLAYING]