Forestone Reeds

Thomas Piercy plays FORESTONE reeds

Thomas on FORESTONE reeds:

"As a reed maker, I was very happy and surprised to find the Forestone reeds to be so nice. I love the basic sound, the feel and the look. Other synthetic reeds, to me, feel and sound synthetic – they have almost a slippery feel. I feel that I can get a beautiful, ringing, singing sound when using the Forestone reeds. It is very important to me to be able to just pick up my clarinet or sax and know what the reed is going to sound like and what sort of response I will hear and feel (especially when playing in the pit for shows and needing to switch often between instruments). I find that I can get about 95% of what I am looking for in the Forestone reed. I still feel I lose about a 5% of the utmost subtleties using Forestone as compared to a hand-made cane reed. I can feel and hear this minimal loss, but I don’t believe listeners can. I don't mean to make such a small criticism about something so subtle. It is minor and as a player of my own hand-made reeds, I am highly susceptible to noticing the subtleties. The fact that I get almost everything I need in the Forestone is itself a great achievement in your continued production and design. I highly recommend them to my students and to other clarinet and sax players, especially those who double and play in the Broadway pits here in NYC. I also regularly use them in lessons where I need to be able to pick up my instrument at any time and be able to play and know what sound is going to come out. I don’t have the time in a student’s lesson to waste on working on or worrying about my own reeds. The doublers and the students love them for their ease of playing and the fact that they are so consistent. My students don’t want to “fight” the commercial cane reeds. They want something that is good and consistent right out of the box. That is also what I want from a reed, and that is what Forestone has delivered. Thank you."

Biography:

THOMAS PIERCY

CLARINET, BASS CLARINET, SAXOPHONE

Thomas Piercy is a critically acclaimed musician with orchestral, concerto, solo recital and chamber music appearances throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia. He has been described by The New York Times as “Brilliant,…playing with refinement and flair,…passionate,…evoking a panache in the contemporary works.” 

A versatile artist defying categorization – the clarinetist  on the Emmy Award-winning Juno Baby CDs and DVDs; playing Rhapsody in Blue with pianist Earl Wild; performing concert improvisations with jazz pianist Donal Fox; performing Mozart with Frederica von Stade; playing Broadway songs with Raoul Julia; working with the composer Leonard Bernstein; appearing in a KRS-ONE music video; recording with members of Maroon 5; - as an instrumentalist,  he has performed and recorded for Broadway and Off-Broadway, television, radio, video, movie soundtracks and commercial recordings.  One of his many all-Piazzolla programs was described by Lucid Culture magazine as “the best Piazzolla in NYC.”

Mr. Piercy has performed at many of the worlds acclaimed concerts halls including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, Centre Pompidou (Paris, France), Wigmore Hall (London, England), Accademia di Santa Cecilia (Rome, Italy) and Parthenon (Tokyo, Japan).

His many festival appearances have included a featured performance in memory of Leon Russianoff at the 1991 International ClarinetFest, a concert of contemporary American music at the 2005 ClarinetFest in Tokyo, Japan, and an all-Piazzolla concert at the 2007 International Clarinet Festival in Vancouver, Canada.

A recipient of numerous scholarships, prizes and awards, he studied clarinet, voice and conducting at the Juilliard School, Mannes College of Music, Virginia Commonwealth University and Shenandoah Conservatory. Piercy's earliest studies were in both voice and clarinet. He began his college education studying clarinet under Dr. Stephen Johnston at Shenandoah Conservatory and Gailyn Parks at Virginia Commonwealth University. He later moved to New York City to study with Gervase De Peyer under scholarship at Mannes College of Music; he continued to study extensively with De Peyer after leaving Mannes. Piercy later studied with and soon became an assistant to the renowned clarinet pedagogue Leon Russianoff; additional clarinet studies and reed-making studies were undertaken with clarinetist, reed, barrel and mouthpiece maker, and composer Kalmen Opperman. He has had arrangements and transcriptions published by Boosey & Hawkes, and as an assistant to Kalmen Opperman, he has contributed to clarinet study books and clarinet compositions published by Carl Fischer, Inc., and Baron Publishing. In demand as a clarinet, sax and voice teacher, many of Piercy's students have gone on to schools and careers in music.

A frequent performer of new music, Mr. Piercy has premiered numerous compositions, many of them written for him, by such composers as Milton Babbitt, Donal Fox, Benjamin Lees, Robert Xavier Rodriguez and Ned Rorem. Mr. Rorem, a Pulitzer Prize winner and Grammy Award-winning composer, wrote his only clarinet and piano piece, "Four Colors," for Mr. Piercy.  Mr. Rorem is currently working on a trio for clarinet, cello and piano for Mr. Piercy.

Recordings available on the Albany, Capstone, Changing Tones, DG, Juno and Tonada record labels.

Mr. Piercy performs on rosewood English-bore clarinets made for him by Luis Rossi of Santiago, Chile.

More info:  www.thomaspiercy.com

REVIEWS

Passionate. 
The New York Times

Piercy brought forth a sense of mood and appealing emotion helped by his consistently warm and beautiful sound. 
The Norway Times

Piercy came out swinging. People could imagine they were hearing the late, great Benny Goodman as Piercy wove to and fro. 
The Richmond Times Dispatch

Piercy played with expression and character. 
The New York Concert Review

Piercy has it all...extraordinary technique, a uniquely beautiful sound. He made the clarinet sing. 
Le Libre Paris

A classic performance. 
The Clarinet Magazine

Extraordinary performances by top players bring distinction to this recording... Piercy shows remarkable virtuosity in some deep emotional terrain. 
Times Union, NY

While Ned Rorem's music is certainly complex, it still possesses a romantic leaning that, especially with the Gotham Ensemble playing, is both thought-provoking and emotive. 
New Music Box

This was a most exciting evening of new music for clarinet and piano. 
Hour

Mr. Piercy is masterly on his clarinet. 
The New York Sun

...an intense and illuminating musical experience, Tom Piercy met the many technical demands asked for in the work, especially providing colors ranging from warm to astringent. 
New Music Connoisseur

The eight musicians include the composer at the piano and they play a score longer than many operas with as much easy energy at the end as at the beginning. 
The New York Times

The Best Piazzolla in New York. On Monday afternoon, there couldn’t have been anything better...an impressively inclusive overview of Piazzolla’s career. Piercy’s often mournful clarinet, brought out every bit of melody in the program. The crowd was spellbound. If Piercy’s planned upcoming recording of Piazzolla works is anything like this, it’ll be amazing. 
Lucid Culture

It didn’t matter that there was no bandoneon in the band: the trio of clarinetist/arranger Thomas Piercy, pianist Claudine Hickman and upright bassist Pablo Aslan managed to silence the sold-out room (no easy task!) with a practically telepathic, emotionally rich program of both familiar and more obscure compositions by the legendary Argentinian composer, along with meticulous yet spirited performances of two pieces by French jazz composer/pianist Claude Bolling....Piercy expertly worked the nooks and crannies of the songs’ innumerable permutations, only going full throttle when the piece demanded it. They wrapped up the program with an exquisite take of the classic Soledad, Piercy’s clarinet soaring to the heights with unaffectedly raw anguish right before the end, and closed with the vastly more optimistic, insistent Michelangelo ‘70. Piazzolla, ever the innovator, would no doubt have approved. 
Lucid Culture

The performers — played with refinement and flair throughout a concert spanning diverse styles and configurations. There was also more than a hint of the serpentine in Samuel Andreyev’s haunting “Passages,” a gelatinous clarinet soliloquy. 
The New York Times

An expressive performance of the virtuosic program. 
The New York Times