WMV Music Web Log

I think I want to play a solo program. It's that swoony feeling I get when I look at my pasted up scores, in plastic drawers from the Container store piled six high in the back room. Tonight I read through the Stravinsky Sonata - I know it quite well, studied it in 1969-70 in Buffalo with Leo Smit (a Stravinsky and Copland student, and perhaps my favorite teacher). This is a cool piece, figuratively and literally; at least it masquerades as cool, or presents a cool exterior - it has a passionate core, which confused me at one time. The passion must be kept implicit and slightly distanced for the piece to balance properly. It would take very little to make it presentable; things which once looked like problems do not anymore - the satisfactions of late middle age. I will place it in an envelope next to the piano, a secret envelope of music for a solo program. What else is in it? I can't remember, but I put some other things in there - a C minor Chopin Nocturne that I puzzle over periodically, (what was he thinking with all those rolled C major chords), some other things. Things I have never performed to my complete satisfaction. Other things that I regretfully abandoned many years ago - the great Bartok Sonata, some Mozart, some late Beethoven. A Haydn Sonata. It seems like a forbidden luxury to practise these. But if not now, when? The Berg Sonata, the Brahms Intermezzi....

I could do it at the Ratner, on a reasonable piano, with minimal expense. It is so possible that it is scary.