Fiddler in the Storm

I have posted here before about the musical soirées I put on in my home in the early 1980s, which eventually grew so large that I started alternating them with concert-hall recitals for the larger public.  This program is from one of those early soirées, probably somewhere around 1982-1984.  It is typewritten, except for the titles where a friend contributed his calligraphy. The music included a Bach toccata, Beethoven’s “Appassionata” sonata (op. 57), my own first piano sonata, and a section titled “Divertimenti.”

I played the “Appassionata” just before the intermission.  I remember that in practicing the sonata I had developed a little program in my head involving a storm.  In my imagination, the diminished-seventh chords in the transition from the second movement to the finale became thunder.  A quiet patter of raindrops followed, gradually growing in intensity into a tumultuous thunderstorm by the end of the piece.  On the evening of the soirée, in a remarkable instance of reality imitating imagination, a real-life thunderstorm came up as I was playing the sonata, culminating with the power going out (!) a few bars from the end.  (Fortunately, the power came back before the second half of the program.)

After the intermission, I played my Piano Sonata No. 1, which I had recorded not long before and released in cassette format.

The four movements from this recording can still be heard today on SoundCloud, where I arranged them into this playlist not long ago:

For the closing “Divertimenti” section, I enlisted the aid of several other musicians.  The last piece was a rendition of “If I were a Rich Man” from Fiddler on the Roof (always one of my favorite musicals), with a tenor friend realizing Tevye’s role to my piano accompaniment.  At the climax of the song, an assistant brought me my violin and I played a little cadenza I had written based on motives from the song and imbued with Jewish flavor and idiom.  Throughout the cadenza, as I remember, I was standing at the piano holding a dominant chord in the pedal with my right foot.  It was quite a surprise to the audience, most of whom had no idea I was a violinist.