Below is the program for a concert I gave in Atlanta, GA on September 5, 1986. It was, by design, a very high-energy program, which was received with great enthusiasm.
I opened with Beethoven’s “Waldstein” Sonata in C Major (Op. 53) and closed with Prokofieff’s highly dynamic Suggestion Diabolique (Op. 4, No. 4). Between these were virtuosic works by Liszt (that year was the centennial of his death) and Chopin. As an encore, I played Chopin’s Étude in E Major, Op. 10, No. 3.
I also included three of my own compositions in the second half of the program. I started with my Meditation and Impromptu, which were were two of my earliest piano works. After that, guest oboist Darrell Harris joined me in a performance of my Romance for Oboe and Piano. (In the program it is identified as “Romance No. 2” because I had previously written another Romance for clarinet and piano.)
I still have a tape of that recital, representing some of the best performances of my career. The audio quality of the tape is reasonably good, and some of those performances have been converted to videos on my YouTube channel. Here is the famous Beethoven “Waldstein” sonata (Op. 53) with which I opened the program.
Next was Liszt’s beautiful concert étude Un Sospiro.
The first half of the program closed with Liszt’s delightful but notoriously difficult étude La Campanella (“the little bell”).
After the intermission, I presented Chopin’s Ballade No. 1 in G Minor.
After the stormy ending of the Ballade, I turned to a contrasting work, my own Meditation. The video below does not come from that 1986 recital, but from a new digital recording I made on my Bösendorfer on January 3, 2020. That video has proven extraordinarily popular with listeners.
The Meditation was followed by my Impromptu.
After the Impromptu, oboist Darrell Harris and I performed my Romance for Oboe and Piano. I have not published that performance, but in recent years oboist Jenny Wheeler and I made the following excellent recording of the same work.
The printed program concluded with Sergei Prokofiev’s Suggestion Diabolique, Op. 4, No. 4. The work has been aptly described as “ghoulishly demonic.” Prokofiev composed it in 1908, when he was only a teenager, and during my own teenage years (a couple of decades before this concert) it had been a showpiece in my own repertoire.
I followed the Prokofiev with a much quieter encore, Chopin’s Étude in E Major, Op. 10, No. 3.
