I just updated the perfor­mance section of the site, which hasn’t seen new content in… awhile. Specif­i­cally, I put up a bunch of audio clips from my May concert at Steinway Hall, selected mainly on the basis of number of Glaring Errors. So, you get to hear me play Beethoven, I get to hide my mistakes behind the curtain, and every­body’s happy. No, but really, I will send you the full audio if you want. It’s just too big to post on my server, which seems to be getting slower by the day. If anybody knows a good and cheap hosting company, then please challah at me.

I mentioned before that I’ve been writing a couple of new things this summer, and here is what they are: a solo piano piece and a nonet for The Hindemith Ensemble. The piano piece is for Richard Dyer, who has been about to retire for, as far as I can tell, the last two or three years. I was initially intim­i­dated by the prospect of writing music for a music critic. (Does anybody know any histor­i­cal examples of this?) The idea I ended up going with was pretty much the first thing that came to me, namely that a critic spends most of his time doing what most people do only on special occa­sions. It’s a pretty enviable position, on one hand, but actually I think it must take a whole lot of dedi­ca­tion to drag yourself to the orches­tra night after night, or even to eat at restau­rants all the time if you are a food critic. So what I thought I could provide is the “sorbet” between courses, some­thing of a light palette-cleanser that also would be a good prepa­ra­tion for listen­ing to other, heavier music. This piece will be premièred in Boston sometime this fall.

The nonet is a pretty single-minded piece which takes a long melody line and just jams, man. Seri­ously, after a year of writing exclu­sively piano music, I was hanker­ing for some sustainin’ action. So it ends up being clarinet-driven. It has a kind of autumnal feeling, which I know is mean­ing­less, but for me is a desir­able quality. New Haven is at its best in the fall. If you come over to my house, I will cook root vegetables.