The Homecoming

This program is from a recital I gave at Meredith College in Raleigh, NC in October 1992.  The event was a homecoming of sorts for me.  I had spent much of my childhood in Raleigh, and in 1992 my parents were still living there in their last years.  While I was in high school, I had taken private lessons in both piano and violin from faculty members at Meredith.

At the time of the recital, I had just completed my Piano Sonata No. 4.  The recital was preceded by a lecture/performance — it was either the same day or the previous day — where I explained the structure and technical requirements of the new sonata to Meredith’s piano majors.  The sonata was of course the centerpiece of the program.  I also played my two Poems and my Impromptu.  From the general repertoire I chose several rather demanding works: Beethoven’s Thirty-Two Variations on an Original Theme, Chopin’s Ballade No. 1 in G minor and “Revolutionary” Etude (op. 10/12), and Liszt’s La Campanella.  The “Revolutionary” Etude was intended as a tribute to my former teacher, James Clyburn, with whom I had first studied the work decades before and who was in the audience that evening.

A good recording of the recital was made.  The opening work in the recording was used many years later to create this video of the Beethoven Thirty-Two Variations:

 

As you can hear, the Clara Carswell Concert Hall was a little too reverberant for ideal recordings, so for most of the rest of the program I have videos based on other performances.  Here is the Chopin Ballade No. 1, as I performed it not in Raleigh but in an Atlanta recital a few years earlier:

 

The videos of my two Poems For Piano are not drawn from recitals, but rather were recorded specifically for YouTube:

 

This video of my Impromptu comes from an Atlanta recital in 1986:

 

My video of the “Revolutionary” Etude, however, is based directly on my performance that evening in Raleigh:

 

This video of my Piano Sonata No. 4, which was the largest piece on the Raleigh program, was recorded specifically for YouTube:

 

The closing work on the Raleigh program was Liszt’s virtuosic concert etude, La Campanella.  Here is that piece as I performed it in Atlanta a few years earlier: