Coming Back

In past posts to this blog, I have described the musical soirées I started putting on in my home in the early 1980s, which grew in popularity and size until I was eventually obliged to move to the concert hall.  Later in my life, starting around the year 2000, I dropped out of public musical life for more than a decade.  In 2013, however, I presented this little program for a few friends in our apartment, which was then in Tallahassee, FL.  My performing skills had of course grown rusty, so I selected a much more modest program than in past years.

I opened with Bach’s Italian Concerto, a perennial favorite of mine ever since I learned it around the age of thirteen.  The centerpiece of the program was my fourth piano sonata, followed by the second of my nine preludes.  I concluded with two well-known and contrasting Chopin waltzes.

Afterward, two of my friends insisted that I should record one or both of the original works and upload them to YouTube.  I had never done anything like that, and the idea was intimidating.  But after thinking about it for a few days, I finally said to myself, “Why not?”  Of course, one thing led to another, and now I’m managing my own full-fledged YouTube channel , a SoundCloud site , a Facebook page , a music webpage, and this blog.

More recently, I have become more accustomed to performing solo again, and I am now seriously considering reviving my old tradition of musical soirées, possibly as early as this winter.  It has been a long journey back, and it all started with this little gathering in our living room on May 18th, 2013.

My Piano Sonata No. 4 and Prelude No. 2 can still be heard on YouTube, just as I recorded them in the weeks that followed that soirée.