Music on a Mission:

• Samuel Barber: Nocturne (Homage to John Field), 1959
• Samuel Barber: Interlude No. 1 (Adagio for Jeanne), 1931
• Paul Zeigler: Nocturne, 1989

The angst and expressiveness of the Romantic era was the reason I decided as a teenager that I simply must become a pianist. Barber brings stark lines and modern harmonies to his Nocturne and Interlude. Then we hear the stars twinkle in Zeigler’s Nocturne. A wonderful post-Romantic contemporary composer, Paul Zeigler was also my first piano teacher once I got serious. He taught choreography for my arms and hands at the instrument, making the piano a somatic study as well as a musical one, and inspiring my love of movement.

I. Fantasia
II. Fuga

While I always gravitated toward playing the Romantics, when push comes to shove I’m one of those people who can’t shake the feeling that the Baroque period's J.S. Bach is the greatest composer of all. There’s something about the way he combines intense harmonic expressiveness with perfect order and clarity that wires his music directly to my tear ducts, especially this piece.

Even though it was written almost 100 years earlier than the Beethoven sonata, it’s fun to compare these two works’ concluding fugues. They both start simply, then expand into grand finales.

I. Allegro inquieto
II. Andante caloroso
III. Precipitato

An enigma of lyrical, angry, jazzy, and mechanistic compositional styles, this dissonant piece is one of three "War Sonatas" Prokofiev composed in Russia between 1939 and 1942. It expresses the chaos of the time, and is one of the most well-known and performed of Prokofiev’s piano works. One biographer argues that after being forced to write Hail to Stalin to celebrate Stalin's 60th birthday, in these pieces Prokofiev was expressing his true feelings about living under the Soviet regime.

Sviatoslav Richter, the pianist who first performed it in Moscow in 1943, wrote "With this work, we are brutally plunged into the anxiously threatening atmosphere of a world that has lost its balance. Chaos and uncertainty reign. We see murderous forces unleashed. But this does not mean that what we lived by before thereby ceases to exist. We continue to feel and to love. Now the full range of human emotions bursts forth. In the tremendous struggle that this involves, we find the strength to affirm the irrepressible life-force." Learn more about this piece.

I suspect the wild toccata finale in 7/8 time was a culprit in the injury that drove me to begin Feldenkrais studies a year after this 1999 performance, which was one of my last. I can hear small signs that I was beginning to struggle with the music’s enormous technical challenges, and I remember trying to overcome them with effort and willpower. Feldenkrais students know where that path leads!

Nevertheless it’s an exciting performance of a remarkable piece. "A world that has lost its balance" feels accurate to today, too.

• Alexander Scriabin: Etude in C♯ Minor, Op. 2, No. 1
• Sergei Rachmaninoff: Prelude in G♯ Minor, Op. 32 No. 12
• Sergei Rachmaninoff: Prelude in C♯ Minor, Op. 3, No. 2

The turn of the 20th century late-Romantic Russian composers were an early pull toward classical music for me. Many of their pieces are epically moody, especially the famous Rachmaninoff C♯ Minor Prelude, which appealed to me so much as a 14 year old that I started down the road to piano performance. It was the first major piece of piano repertoire I learned to play, and I was happiest as a teenager when I was slashing away at the massive chords of its conclusion.

These three pieces were recorded in 1995 and 1996. This photo is from my 1996 concert. I was 19.