STEPHEN FLAHERTY: IRONS IN THE FIRE

BUENA PARK, CA (July 25, 2003)—"It's been a busy year," understates Yamaha artist Stephen Flaherty, the award-winning composer of Broadway's Ragtime. With that hit opening a London production, the Gertrude Stein tribute A Long Gay Book raising the curtain in Chicago and a new show, Dessa Rose, on the drawing board in New York, Flaherty is one of the most active composers on Broadway.

Flaherty, a Yamaha artist since 2002, likes the sound of Yamaha pianos for performance, and values the power of the Clavinova when he's composing new music.

A Yamaha affiliated artist since 2002, Flaherty has used Yamaha pianos often for their sound and touch. "Everyone loves the sound of the Yamaha, because it tends to be brighter, which is good for musical theater," he notes. "It's a piano I always felt comfortable with." He is also drawn to Yamaha because of the company's technical edge, and is currently using a Disklavier® GranTouch™ DGT7 in his home studio.

Ragtime is a stage adaptation of the 1975 E. L. Doctorow novel, which many remember for James Cagney's final performance in a 1981 screen version. It won four Tony Awards in 1998, including one for best score for Flaherty and his writing partner Lynn Ahrens. More than three years after its Broadway run ended, the show has re-emerged at London's Piccadilly Theatre for an all-new production that Flaherty calls more "intimate" and "nuanced."

A Long Gay Book, which takes its title from Stein's own view of life, opened on the campus of Northwestern University near Chicago. The production, which reunited him with Ragtime collaborator Frank Galati, drew praise from Hedy Weiss in the Chicago Sun-Times as "a little jewel of a musical" with a "radiant score."

"Flaherty's tunes run the gamut from ragtime to jazz to quasi-operatic, with blissfully lovely harmonies," Weiss wrote. "The music, like the overall production, has a luminosity about it-an exhilaration and optimism and positivism, as well as a sense of yearning and expectation."

Ragtime, which won Flaherty and writing partner Lynn Ahrens a Tony Award in 1998, is embarking on a new production in London.

Flaherty is currently developing Dessa Rose in a workshop at New York's Lincoln Center with director and choreographer Graciella Danielle. The story, adapted from the 1986 novel by Sherley Anne Williams, brings slight fictional touches to the true stories of two women of the American south in the early 1800s—one black, one white—who actually never met. "Right now we're developing the piece," Flaherty says. "It's a musical that leans toward operatic gestures, a cross between a folk opera and a contemporary musical."

Lincoln Center was also the venue, last autumn, for the production of Flaherty's A Man of No Importance, set in 1960's Dublin and based on the 1994 Albert Finney movie of the same name. It was awarded the 2003 Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Off-Broadway Musical.

"I tend to write very intuitively," Flaherty says. "A lot of composers I know compose the traditional way, scoring out as they go along. I tend to work more in an improvisational manner; I record it and then I go back and fine tune. As a composer, you never know when inspiration strikes, and you have to grab it when it comes."

For more information about Yamaha pianos, write Yamaha Corporation of America, Piano Division, P.O. Box 6600, Buena Park, CA 90622-6600; telephone (714) 522-9011; email infostation@yamaha.com; or visit www.yamaha.com.