One of our North Star motivations in making and sharing music is to lower the barriers people perceive between themselves and the art...to do our small part to help more people connect with more music, more easily.

Grief & Hope is a short film we made in that spirit.

It's the 3rd short film we've made as part of The HIDDEN Project with John McArthur - and it is a guided tour through Rachmaninoff’s Vocalise by someone who has lived with this music, in many forms, for decades.

In Grief & Hope, John McArthur explains the universal narrative he finds in Rachmaninoff's Vocalise, what he draws from the music as he plays it, and what it's helped him joyfully realize as he's journeyed with it over so many years.

Throughout the film, as he guides us through the piece, we hear him play it on his own piano, in his home practice space - the setting where he has most deeply engaged this music.

The particular arrangement (a word that’s interchangeable with “Transcription”) of Vocalise, which plays throughout the film, was written by John’s musical mentor Earl Wild — a giant in 20th century piano history, with an extraordinary renaissance ability to perform, compose, arrange, and teach that was reminiscent of his musical mentors, stretching all the way back to Franz Liszt.

Earl Wild's Transcription of Rachmaninoff's Vocalise is, in itself, a revelation of the emotional and harmonic range of the piece, expressed through the rich language of the virtuoso piano tradition that Wild embodied so completely.

We invite you to explore this beautiful music alongside John McArthur in the film Grief & Hope.

Thank you for sharing time with us,
Peter Field
Skylight Arts