The 2019 Musical Soirée
Musical soirées were an important part of my musical life for about a dozen years beginning in the early 1980s. After a long break, we decided to produce another one in our home in 2013, as described in an earlier blog post. In early 2015 we moved to the Phoenix area, but it was not until the evening of March 30, 2019 that we held our first musical soirée since coming here.
In some of the early soirées, I included some collaborations with other performers, which I may do again in the future. But for this soirée I played a piano solo program, a little under an hour in length. The event was well attended, the atmosphere was very enthusiastic, and we were gratified to have several other fine pianists in attendance, several of whom tried out our new Bösendorfer (acquired about seven months earlier) at the conclusion of the program.
The music was passionately Romantic, including selections from Brahms, Chopin, and Rachmaninoff alongside my own compositions. The largest work on the program was my Piano Sonata No. 3, as revised in 2016. By coincidence, I had uploaded the video of a new recording of that composition to YouTube that very morning. In fact, you can now hear all the works of the program in order from YouTube, thus re-creating the entire event for your own enjoyment. 🙂
Brahms, Intermezzo, Op. 118, No. 2:
