FOR MOST musicians, there's only one way to get to the Academy of Music - practice.
And for sure, this weekend's special guest at the Academy of Music and Philadelphia Orchestra's 151st annual gala concert - piano man Billy Joel - did his share of woodshedding as a kid.
Goaded on by his Viennese, piano-playing father, Howard (born Helmut), and British-born, opera-singing mom, Rosalind (who first met at rehearsals for a Gilbert and Sullivan production in New York City), William Joseph Martin Joel studied keyboards for 12 years as a youth.
"But I knew I would never be [Vladimir] Horowitz," Joel joked in a recent reunion chat from his winter home in Miami. "I didn't have the commitment to practice 12 hours a day. And classical musicians always seemed to be a miserable lot. Truth is, I wanted to enjoy myself - meet girls, have fun. Eventually, I refused to read the dots on the sheet music pages anymore. I got sick of the old-dead-guy composers. I wanted to rock."
By almost any measure, Joel has done magnificently well as a pop composer and performer. He's scored literally dozens of signature songs, attained worldwide sales of more than 150 million albums and shown an unmatched penchant for filling stadiums and arenas - including 46 sold-out dates at our Wachovia Spectrum, Wachovia Center and Veterans Stadium.
Clearly, his knowledge and appreciation of classical music - co-mingled with a love of '50s rock, the Beatles, soul, jazz and more - helped Joel become one of our most versatile and memorable melodists.
Early on, he gleefully copped Americana, mod-classical licks from Aaron Copeland for "The Ballad of Billy the Kid." And it's easy to imagine a string quartet sawing away on "She's Always a Woman," "Just the Way You Are," "Goodnight Saigon" or his haunting "Lullabye (Goodnight My Angel)," dedicated to daughter, Alexa Ray Joel - now 22 and a burgeoning singer-songwriter in her own right, though Dad asserts he ain't pushing her into (or away from) that career.
Joel says his chameleon-like composing nature has always confounded (if not infuriated) the critics, "who want to put you in a box" and couldn't follow the stylistic leaps from doo-wop to protest rock to grand pop or cocktail-jazz balladry on his discs or stage shows.
And while he continues to derive great pleasure (and huge paychecks) from touring - "the best job there is" - Joel says his first dream "was and remains to be a composer."
He explained, "The performer thing was almost an afterthought, forced on me because in the period I was starting out [the 1970s], songwriters like James Taylor and Carole King and Elton John had to perform their material to get it heard."
Yet today, Joel has virtually abandoned pop songwriting.
"I just ran into a wall of what I considered my own mediocrity, a sense that my reach exceeded my grasp," he explained with typical candor and self-effacement.
Joel broke a self-imposed, 15-year silence this past year with two new songs. One was a heartfelt anniversary present to his young wife, Katie, called "All My Life." It was written and recorded in a swinging, big-band-ballad style with the hope that Tony Bennett would also be charmed by and run with it. But don't expect Billy to record a whole album of standards-style fare, originals or covers.
"That's been proposed to me. It's already been done by guys like Rod Stewart and Barry Manilow. And after cutting two songs in that vein, I'd be falling asleep," Joel allowed. "I need my variety."
His other 2007 contribution was a year-end, Iraq-war-themed charity single, the spitfire "Christmas in Fallujah," which Joel had a "more age appropriate" singer, Cass Dillon, record. "It's a song about a young solder, so it needed a youthful voice. I'm not buying me singing it . . . Plus, I can't hit those high notes anymore."
But Billy's not giving up on all music. Ironically, he's now most kindly disposed to the serious classical music of his youth. At times, he's even obsessed with it.
Helping matters along, he's bonded with and been inspired by his two-decades-younger half-brother, Alexander Joel, a well-regarded classical conductor and pianist working mostly with orchestras in Germany.
"He's arrogant, but I love the guy. He's a lot like our father. . . . As for all of us Joels becoming musicians, I definitely think there's some truth to genetic disposition - that apples-not-falling-far-from-the-tree thing," Billy mused.
He's also been taken in by Alexander's coterie of friends - Billy calls them "the classical mafia."
But he means no disrespect.
"I can't believe the dedication of these guys. They live, breathe, eat and screw classical music, even though it's a real struggle, and they can barely scrape two nickels together. It's not 'La Boheme,' but close."
For his part, Billy has been listening to and occasionally writing new instrumental pieces "basically for my own pleasure" in the vein of romantic era composers like "Schumann, Schubert, Brahms and Chopin" - though he believes "you can always hear me, my voice, in the melody."
In fact, one lure that got the Piano Man to participate in this Saturday's sold-out Academy of Music soiree was the chance finally to hear one of his neo-classical works - "Waltz No. 2 (Steinway Hall)" - performed by a symphony orchestra, our Fab Philadelphians. Newly re-arranged by Brad Ellis, the piece had previously been aired only in solo piano form, recorded by one of Alexander Joel's buds, Richard Joo, on the 2002 album, "Fantasies & Delusions," that introduced Billy Joel as a "serious" composer.
How serious? While top billed, B.J. refused to play on the album (a No. 1 hit on the Billboard classical chart) for fear of revealing his ragged pianistics to hyper-acute listeners.
"I write the music in increments but playing it straight-through would be a real challenge," he shared. "It would take many hours a day of practice to get my chops together."
In the next breath, though, Joel hopes out loud that piano students take to the stuff. "I could see teachers cagily pulling out these pieces for kids who request Billy Joel songs - hope the students don't hate me for that. The sheet music transcriptions of my pop stuff are really dull and easy, with piano lines trying to ape the vocal. But this stuff is medium hard."
Saturday's concert also will debut a fully orchestrated suite of Joel's popular songs, likewise arranged by Ellis, for joint performance by the Philadelphia Orchestra, guest vocalist Joel and his rock band.
"I was hoping it would come out more like the 'Baroque Beatles' album, which doesn't even sound like the Beatles, it sounds like Bach," said the composer, who's previewed a synthesizer-scored demo of the "Billy Joel Suite."
"But I'll be happy if we can all make it sound as good as, say, the concert album Procol Harum recorded with the Edmonton [Canada] Symphony. We've got three rehearsals scheduled between Wednesday and Saturday, and we're going to need them all." *