I’m heading back to the beautiful Conrad-Prebys Performing Arts Center in La Jolla! I’ll be giving the Prelude lecture for this recital by one of my favorite pianists: Igor Levit! Not only do I admired Levit’s tremendous talent, but also his ethics as an artist-citizen. This unusual recital program features piano arrangements of Brahms’s chorale preludes for organ and Wagner’s Prelude from Tristan und Isolde, together with Liszt’s canonic Sonata in B Minor and a variation set by jazz pianist, Fred Hersch.

My lecture will consider the hows and whys of musical transcription and variation how do creative minds reshape existing material into something new? The topic also connects with Liszt’s famous sonata, which (along with the astounding technical challenges) features wonderfully imaginative thematic transformations.

From Levit’s bio: “Described by The New York Times as one of the “most important artists of his generation,” Igor Levit places his art in the context of social events and understands it as inseparably linked to them. In 2020, Levit was named Musical America’s Recording Artist of the Year and nominated for a GRAMMY Award in the category “Best Classical Instrumental Solo.”