On Thursday, December 16^th, I’ll be playing a solo recital on Kaufmann Center’s Piano Dialogues series. Lots of concert series have clever names like this but this program truly is a dialogue. My close friends Sarah Gold­feather and Eric Shan­field have written new pieces for me which will both be heard in public for the first time. Eric’s piece, Timo Vari­a­tions, is a hefty set after a theme I composed for him in 2019. Here’s the theme—

—which Eric pleas­antly evis­cer­ates, in a series of sly and affec­tion­ate homages to other composers, among them: Schumann, Liszt, Brahms, Bach, Pärt, Webern, Ligeti, Nyman, and Glass.

Sarah’s new piece, called Fern Canyon, is a stunning pastorale, made up of tiny repeat­ing patterns progres­sively stacked on each other. As it becomes an increas­ingly-complex thicket, the forest suddenly gives way to a dramatic vista.

In between, one of my favorite pastoral/metaphysical trav­el­ogues: Robert Schu­man­n’s Wald­szenen (Forest Scenes); in the video above, I play the cryptic Vogel als Prophet (Bird as Prophet).