The 1984 Recital

Having recently come out with a new recording of my Piano Sonata No. 2, I naturally find myself reminiscing about a public recital I presented the same year that sonata was completed.  The recital was on a Friday evening in Atlanta (GA), on December 7, 1984, and the new sonata was the largest work and the centerpiece of the program, played just after the intermission.  The program, billed as “An Evening of Romantic Music,” was rather ambitious and exclusively dedicated to works in a Romantic style or from the Romantic period.

General-repertoire pieces included two Schubert impromptus, two contrasting Chopin etudes (popularly known as “La Tristesse” and “Winter Wind”), and the Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2.  In addition to my Piano Sonata No. 2, the program included two other original compositions.  My Nocturne No. 1 was an early composition (1983) which has been popular among followers of my YouTube channel (RobertCunninghamsMusic).  I was joined by a baritone singer and an alto recorder player for the closing number, my 1982 setting of Shakespeare’s Sonnet XVIII (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”).

As far as I know, the concert was not recorded, but you can re-enact much of it through other recordings that I made either around the same period or in much more recent years.  I worked up Schubert’s Impromptu in G-flat Major (Op. 90, No. 3) again in 2019 and made this recording:

I performed Chopin’s Etude in E Major (Op. 10, No. 3) as an encore in a recital in 1986.  That recital was recorded on tape, which became the basis for this score video:

 

In 1985 I recorded my Nocturne No. 1 and released it to the public in cassette format along with three other compositions.  That tape recording became the audio track for this video:

 

I worked up my Piano Sonata No. 2 again beginning just last year and made this recording in March 2022:

 

I revised my setting of Sonnet XVIII in 2019, making the recorder and piano parts more independent of each other.  In July 2019, Nathan Guc (baritone) and Tristän Clarence Rush (alto recorder) joined me in this recording: