The Page-Turner's Program Notes
Reprinted without permission from
Edmonton Centre newsletter, Canada, and Canadian RCCO newsletter.
The following program notes are from an
unidentified piano recital.
Tonight's page turner, Ruth Spelke,
studied under Ivan Schmertnick at the Boris Nitsky School of Page
Turning in
Philadelphia. She has been turning pages here and abroad for many years
for some of the world's leading pianists.
In 1988, Ms. Spelke won the Wilson
Page Turning Scholarship, which sent her to Israel to study page
turning from left to
right. She is winner of the 1984 Rimsky Korsakov Flight of the
Bumblebee Prestissimo Medal, having turned 47 pages in
an unprecedented 32 seconds. She was also a 1983 silver medalist at the
Klutz Musical Page Pickup Competition:
contestants retrieve and rearrange a musical score dropped from a
Yamaha. Ms. Spelke excelled in "grace, swiftness, and
especially poise."
For techniques, Ms. Spelke performs
both the finger-licking and the bent-page corner methods. She works
from a standard
left bench position, and is the originator of the dipped-elbow page
snatch, a style used to avoid obscuring the pianist's view
of the music. She is page turner in residence in Fairfield Iowa, where
she occupies the coveted Alfred Hitchcock Chair at
the Fairfield Page Turning Institute.
Ms. Spelke is married, and has a
nice house on a lake.
