Above: Pianist Sonya Belousova acts and improvises at the piano Player Piano's video "Ghost Waltz." Imagine this: a classical piano recital performed not in a concert hall, but in a fantasy music video. This isn't the future of music - it's happening now on the Player Piano YouTube channel. Russian pianist and composer Sonya Belousova is the star of Player Piano, the YouTube channel and "piano duo" where you can find videos of Belousova's improvised piano fantasies on musical themes drawn from popular digital games, movies, TV series and classical concert works. The duo's other member, director and producer Tom Grey, brings Belousova's improvisations to the Web in classical music videos with a fantasy feel. Before the launch of the Player Piano channel earlier this year, Belousova, a recipient of the prestigious Russian Ministry of Culture Award, appeared in 2013 in the award-winning Cosplay Piano Series on YouTube. Her improvisations in that series' four video episodes also explored music from the small screen and the big screen, including themes from HBO's Game of Thrones and AMC's The Walking Dead, along with music from the Batman and Superman films. Belousova and Grey took the Cosplay - "costume play" - concept and ran with it, launching the Player Piano channel on YouTube in July. The channel now has more than 19,000 subscribers and is home to videos of Belousova's fantasies on themes from the digital games Street Fighter and Tetris, and also well-known classical works. Here's Player Piano's take on Rimsky-Korsakov's Flight of the Bumblebee: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKNAFKEavSM Belousova and Grey have launched a funding campaign on Indiegogo to develop their "long-term vision" of Player Piano. Listen to Belousova and Grey talk about that vision and how Player Piano got off the ground in their interview on the Handsome Timmy D Express podcast. Learn more:
- Player Piano: An Interview with Tom Grey (HTDE)
