Music fanatics already spread the word that yet another piece of classical fame touched Santa Rosa Junior College in mid April.
No, it’s not Bennett Friedman this time; it’s the one and only Rudolph Budginas.
Piano extraordinaire and virtual rock star of classical collections, Budginas brought waves of musical history to SRJC April 19-21, with pieces ranging from Chopin and Bach to “Stairway to Heaven” by Led Zeppelin.
“Bach to Led Zeppelin” brought out the best of SRJC’s musical productions, summoning a surreal experience both in-tune with his precise notes and laughingly cheerful with his sense of humor.
Starting with Chopin, Budginas moved through a dramatic, full-bodied introduction and ran headlong into tunes by Beethoven, French impressionist music and even world-famous Dave Brubeck.
According to his biography, Budginas is a “brilliant, internationally-renowned concert pianist, whose deft fingers have delighted audiences from Denmark to Japan and a dozen countries in between,” so it’s no surprise that his audience called for an encore at the tail end of his Friday night showing in Ellis auditorium on the Petaluma campus.
Budginas’ music conjured mental vacations through Venice, down the canals on imagined gondolas where one found the presence of a nearby ball. Budginas painted audible canvases of lords and ladies making their way through large arched doorways to the dance floor to swirl about like daisies in the wind.
In no time Budginas turned Ellis Auditorium into a time machine travelling through space for the betterment of his listener’s enjoyment.
Along with his piano playing, Budginas also commented on his contemporaries’ work, their historical significance and their range of talents, just as one would see in a classroom lecture.
He pointed out that while Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” was full of “masterful harmonies” making one feel alive, Chopin’s music did the opposite.
“When you hear him,” Budginas said about the mastery of Chopin, “you feel lonely and depressed.”
Moving further into the Romantic Era, Budginas began playing “La Campanella” by Franz Liszt as an example of artists growing less modest over time. Budginas said the compositions of Liszt were “about throwing emotion out there, but also about skill.”
At one point in “La Campanella,” Budginas had his high notes teetering like mouse toes scurrying across a floor made of sound, coming in a series of rapid waves.
“I’ve never seen someone’s fingers move so fast,” said Tracy Whitaker, a member of the local community. “It was amazing.”
When asked about his opinion after the show, Dr. Scott Rosen, professor of computer studies at SRJC, said, “Well, ‘wow’ is the first thing that comes to mind.”
Rosen pointed out that Budginas is coming to SRJC to teach music. “He’s one of our newer faculty and I knew he was awesome, but I had no idea he was that awesome,” he said.
When it comes to music, Budginas makes it clear that it’s one thing to listen and quite another to play, that as beautiful as it sounds, music is so much more to those who can create it.
“It absolutely blew me away,” Rosen said. “The funny thing was, the whole time we were wondering where the little people inside the piano were that were playing all the other notes. I loved every second of it.”