arts & entertainment

Song By Song

Pianist-composer Robin Spielberg shares the soundtrack to her life.

Suzanne Chessler
Contributing Writer

Ann Arbor

R

obin Spielberg will be playing her
original piano music in the city
where the University of Michigan is
based, but her audience will include many
fans with closer ties to the area surround-
ing Michigan State University.
Spielberg, who attended the East Lansing
school, has been posting news about her
upcoming Ann Arbor concert on the Web
and has heard from enthusiastic former
classmates about their planned attendance.
"Thanks to technology I've stayed
in touch with a number of friends in
Michigan, and fin hopeful we'll get a nice
group together and have a reunion',' says
Spielberg, 48, whose program begins 8 p.m.
Thursday, Oct. 27, at the Ark.
"As I perform my piano show, I'll share
the stories behind the songs. It will be a
glimpse into who I am as an artist. I've
been composing the soundtrack to my life
for a very long time, and that's what I pres-
ent in concert:'
Spielberg, who also brings standards
into her repertoire, makes her Ann Arbor
debut after recent Michigan programs near
Lexington and Douglas and in Roscommon
County. For those who want to linger with
the sounds, there are some 16 recordings,
each with a special focus — romance, sea-
sons, lullabies, Chanukah.

ews

"I grew up like all kids taking piano les-
sons and studying the classical repertoire,'
says Spielberg, in a phone interview from
her rural Pennsylvania home. "My parents
would take me to see my piano teacher in
musical theater, and I was mesmerized.
"My paternal grandfather played flute in
the NBC Symphony Orchestra, and that was
a hard life for his family. Although I had the
music and acting bug, my parents wanted
me to go into law or medicine.
"When I went to Michigan State, I audi-
tioned for The Diary of Anne Frank and
was cast. I loved doing that more than any-
thing else. The director encouraged me to
go back to New Jersey because everything I
wanted was in my backyard."
Although too late that semester for
music auditions at the Juilliard School,
Spielberg was in time for drama auditions
at New York University and was accepted.
After completing the academic program,
she was able to win roles on and off
Broadway.
"To support myself during those years,
I started playing piano in the hotel lobbies
and piano rooms in New York," she says. "I
played at the Plaza when it was owned by
the Trumps, and Ivana Trump was my boss.
"I brought my own compositions into
the sets and was getting compliments. That
encouraged me. If I played for 40 minutes,
I'd make sure that 10 minutes had my own
music.
"In 1993, I made my first recording of
original piano solos, Heal of the Hand,

Nate Bloom
Special to the Jewish News

On Nobel Prizes

r

The 2011 Nobel Prizes have been
awarded. Two out of three physics lau-
wise reates are Jewish (Saul Perlmutter, 51,
and Adam Riess, 41) as are two of the
three medicine winners (Bruce Beutler,
53, and Ralph Steinman, who died at
age 68 just a couple of
days before his award
was announced). Also
Jewish is the sole win-
ner of the 2011 chem-
istry Nobel, Israeli Dan
Schechtman, 70.
Nobel Prizes have
been awarded since
Saul
1901 in five fields:
Perlmutter
medicine, chemistry,
physics, literature and peace. An eco-
nomics prize was added in 1969. Most
prizes are given to individuals. However,
23 out of 121 Nobel Peace Prizes have
been given to organizations.
The number of Jewish winners this

44

October 20 • 2011

year is higher than in
most years. But it isn't
a shocking number.
Out of 815 Nobel
Prizes given individu-
als, 181 of those win-
ners have been Jewish
or "half-Jewish."
Bruce Beutler
(Persons with one
Jewish parent are
about 10 percent of the 181). In other
words, Jews, who represent less than
one-tenth of 1 percent of the world's
population, have won 22 percent of all
the Nobel prizes given individuals.
One can quibble about a handful of
the winners: A few of the "half-Jews"
were raised Christian, and four Jewish
winners converted away from Judaism
before World War II (three for career
reasons). By the way, one chemistry
winner was a Christian-born convert to
Orthodox Judaism.

Lucky Lerman

The Three Musketeers 3D, now in the-
aters, is based on a famous 19th-cen-

based on my own research of what people
liked best:'
Recordings led to a demand for concerts
in and out of the United States, and act-
ing was left behind. As she wrote music,
Spielberg also published the songbooks,
which brought more attention and invita-
tions to be included on 40 compilation
recordings.
"I wrote 'West Bank Serenade' after 9/11','
explains the composer-pianist. "The world
went so dark, and I learned about how
Israelis handle terrorism by just carrying on.
"The song starts with the motif of some-
one walking and then facing an eruption.
There's an Eastern European sounding waltz
in the middle to represent the freedom and
peace people always want. At the end, there's
a happy triumph of good over evil.
"I hope to play that song one day in Israel.
I'll be going there in December for my
daughter's bat mitzvah."
Spielberg, who also assists her husband
in running a talent agency, is active with
Temple Beth Israel in York, Penn. Her hobby
is gardening, and the yard becomes a calm
setting for mental music practice and corn-
posing.
Recently doing some work with other
musicians, she also has seen choreography
developed to go along with her original
pieces. Dances to her music have been done
by the West Florida Youth Ballet and for
Great American Ballroom Challenge, a PBS
program.
"I'm the spokesperson for the American

tury French novel. The oft-filmed story
takes place in 17th-century France.
This new film version's D'Artagnan
(Logan Lerman,19) goes to Paris to
join the famous guards of the king,
the Musketeers. He joins forces with
three of them to
stop the evil Cardinal
Richelieu (Oscar-
winner Christoph
Walz). The rest of the
action-filled plot is
very involved. Major
characters include
a roguish English
Logan Lerman
noble, the Duke of
Buckingham (Orlando
Bloom), and Milady, a beautiful but
treacherous woman (Milla Jovovich),
whom D'Artagnan fancies.
Lerman's Hollywood stock is so high
now that he didn't even have to audi-
tion for the lead in this big-budget
film. He has the tools to become the
biggest Jewish film heartthrob since
Tony Curtis.
He is very good-looking – if not

Robin Spielberg: "As I perform my piano

show, I'll share the stories behind the
songs."

Music Therapy Association',' reveals
Spielberg, whose family has geographic and
other reasons for believing that filmmaker
Steven Spielberg is a distant relative. "I think
there's a wonderful connection between
music and wellness.
"I got involved when our daughter was
born very prematurely. She had to stay in
an intensive care unit for over four months.
It was very noisy, and I got permission to
play my CDs by her incubator. The nurses
noticed that her vital signs improved when
my music was playing.
"I went on the Internet and found the
AMTA. I told them what I had experienced
and became interested in other work being
done by the organization. When I'm on tour,
I try to stop at nursing homes and other
facilities to do concerts:'

Robin Spielberg performs 8 p.m.
Thursday, Oct. 27, at the Ark, 316
S. Main, Ann Arbor. $20. (734) 761-
1451; theark.org .

shockingly beautiful like Brad Pitt. Plus,
he has shown he can act effectively in
smaller budget comedy-dramas (like
the underappreciated but quite good
2009 film My One and Only) and carry
an action picture (last year's box-office
hit Percy Jackson and the Olympians).
Lerman's background is almost a
cross-section of American Jewry.
His paternal great-grandfather, a
German Jew, along with his family,
fled the Nazis and settled in Shanghai,
China, just before World War II. There,
he and his son, Logan's grandfather,
founded an orthotics and prosthetics
manufacturing company. They moved
to the U.S. in 1948 and successfully re-
founded the company in Los Angeles.
It is still run by Logan's grandfather –
who married another European Jewish
refugee – and father.
Logan's mother's father is a post-war
Polish Jewish immigrant. His maternal
grandmother was born in California,
the daughter of Canadian-born Jews.
Logan grew up in Beverly Hills in what
he calls a "very stable family." [7 _1