I’m delighted to continue my collaboration with the La Jolla Music Society, offering the preconcert lectures for a stellar piano concert series. This season’s opening concert? The marvelous Hélène Grimaud in a program of classical music’s three Bs (with an assist from Busoni): the Bach/Busoni Chaconne in D Minor, Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 30, and Brahms’s Three Intermezzi and Fantasies.

In addition to exploring how Busoni adapted Bach’s tremendous violin work for the piano, I’ll consider the nature of late creativity, as the works by Beethoven and Brahms were written in the final years of the composers’ respective lives.