“beauty of tone....sensitivity and panache.... expressiveness.... strength...
Miss Farewell was amply rewarded by an audience won over by her charm and undemonstrative sincerity as well as her undoubted pianistic powers.”
Review of London Recitals
Critic William Hook
“The adagio [Beethoven Sonata Op. 110], that sad rhapsody, showed the pianist to be indeed the dreamer she was described as, but a dreamer with strength. The final fugue was stolen into with great sensibility but also built with a fine structural sense.”
[Moussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition]: “Particularly interesting was the way she emphasized the recurring Promenade, making as much of Mussorgsky’s imaginary observer as of the pictures themselves.”
“She is an honest, direct pianist, capable of force but more interested in poetry.”
The News-Times*
“That’s the kind of playing I love.” Lili Kraus
Jeanne Farewell
the “audience sat in rapt silence” The Redding Pilot
“lyrical and lovely” The News-Times*
“flash and fire”...”power and a sense of big design...sweeping and splashy in the virtuoso tradition of Liszt and Rachmaninoff” The News-Times*
“a musical affinity for the Beethoven” The Advocate
“highly musical” News-Times (Frank Merkling, former Musical America critic)
JEANNE FAREWELL PIANIST
“an artist of generous instincts, considerable technique...She brought to her tasks in the Wigmore Hall a refreshing spontaneity, an aura of affection...an exciting, full-blooded commitment. Few recitalists for instance offer Ginastera’s Danzas Argentinas to London audiences, and fewer still put them across with such panache, such rhythmic verve, and such a command of colour.....” Review of London Recitals
Critic Christopher Grier
*Music Critic Frank Merkling, former Musical America critic and Opera News Editor
“a grand romantic” Review of London Recitals
“Critic’s choice” D. Max Garrison
the pianist who plays “From the heart” The News-Times (Photo Caption)
Recent Coverage in The Southampton Press, Letters:
“THROW OUT THE TV” (Headline)
“You missed probably the most sophisticated, yet simple, lovely and elegant entertainer ever to gift us with a visit to Southampton - the multi-talented, Vassar-graduated, Manhattan School of Music-trained pianist, Jeanne Farewell.
The beautiful, poised and elegant Ms. Farewell presented a self-narrated, educational and historical lecture-piano recital based on art and literature at the Levitas Center for the Arts co-sponsored by the Rogers Memorial Library and the Southampton Cultural Center on Friday, January 18. To Lord Byron’s poem “The Dreamer,” Jeanne delightfully curated her totally rapt audience through the chronological period of classical romanticist piano composers of the 1800s, highlighting and exhibiting the differences in each musician’s styles and personas.... Jeanne charmingly interpreted their psyches sincerely with her indubitably pianistic powers....
Not only is Jeanne Farewell a prodigious pianist, she’s a renaissance wonder of our contemporary world: an artist of substantial renown, an illustrator, a multi-published author of stories and essays....
I asked Jeanne how she finds the time to devote to her incredible potpourri of interests. Her reply was a surprise: “I don’t have a cell phone and I don’t watch television.”
Well, just maybe we all should take a hint from Ms. Farewell and get off our phones and turn our televisions off and see how much more enrichment our lives can glean.”
-Milton C.Enstine Jr. Southampton January 24, 2008