First, an announcement: After 42 years and several hundred students, Jerri has decided to retire from teaching piano, so this is the final recital page on this site. I know that Jerri has enjoyed working with her students and getting to know their parents. She hopes that each of them will sit down once in a while to play a song some afternoon and think about how they had to practice for Mrs. Rang.

This year, on May 24, 2011, ten students performed pieces by F. Clark, R. Vandall, K. Olson, Beethoven, J. S. Bach and Debussy. Jerri and a fellow piano teacher, Nina DeKock, played two Gershwin songs from Porgy and Bess and Jerri ended the recitial with Capriccio, Op. 116, No. 3 by Brahms.

Click on the photo to open a new window with a larger image and student names. Close the window to return to this page

Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky (1839-1881), one of the Russian composers known as 'The Five', wrote music that celebrated Russian themes, folklore and history. His best known works include an opera, Boris Gudunov, an orchestral tone poem, Night on Bald Mountain, and the piano suite, Pictures at an Exhibition. Mussorgsky composed the suite in six weeks as a tribute to his friend, the architect and artist, Viktor Hartmann, who died of an aneurysm at the age of 39. The music suggests an imaginary tour of an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Hartman. The background music on this page is the 5th movement of that suite, Promenade - Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks. The Promenade is the theme that depicts a visitor wandering through the exhibition, and there are variations suggesting different moods. Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks was inspired by a Hartman design for a scene from the ballet Trilby.