Thank you very much.

It's a pleasure to be here.

It's my second time playing at this school and I had the most wonderful time.

I thought I would start with two very small pieces of Bartok that I love very much.

The first is Stars, Stars, Bright Shine.

Bartok was a folk music collector and this is an actual folk tune and it's my favorite out of two volumes of books on settings and part time.

It's very poetic, beautiful, miniature.

The second one is Swineherd Dance.

Bartok recorded this and heard it for the first time, played on flute, but his setting it is in bagpipe style.

And what he does is it's almost as if you're walking in the countryside and from a distance you hear bagpipes being played maybe in a village or something.

And as you walk closer, it becomes more apparent and you hear more, and then you keep walking and it fades into the distance.

It's sort of like a snapshot of life in the countryside.

The next set is from Mikrokosmos It's a six volume set of small town pieces, but I might mention that Bartok himself often programmed these pieces in recital like this.

He'd make little groups of them and in the later volumes of the pieces are perfectly fine concert pieces.

Interspersed between larger works of.

So I'm combining it with the Concerto for Orchestra and a pretty big set of variations that you're about to hear.

The first one is Peasant Dance.

This is not a folk tune, but it's in the style of the folk tune.

Bartok talked about, after a while, he assimilated so much folk music that it's almost as if he could speak the language of the folk music and then write something new.

So it's not an actual folk thing, but it could have been.

That is very much in the style of a folk thing.

It's a simple statement with one or two or a couple of variations.

Change of time is also not a folk tune, but it's in a folk style.

Its in the Romanian calendar style, which has changes of meter, very clever changes of meter.

And often at the end of the phrases, it's too strong.

It's Bartok said it was in Romanian style.

Voting is a strange piece.

You may of heard of Barca rules.

This is kind of like a Bach role but it's unlike any Bach or all you've ever heard.

It's in two different kind of poly tonal centers, right hand on black keys, left hand on white keys and chordal harmony.

It's very, very unusual.

Also left and has one meter six, eight left, right hand us three It's called in yet poly metric to and the bar girls style is slow and has a gentle rocking texture that you'll hear that.

But it was originally from Venice, Italy, where gondoliers would pull along the canals and they would go rather slowly and sing to each other as they passed.

And I this is so strange.

It's a fact.

I often imagine I'm pulling along a lake of liquid nitrogen on a moon of Saturn or something like that, and looking up at the 30 moons and I'm an alien and singing my heart out, something like that from the diary of a Fly is according to Bartok, A Day in the Life of a Flight.

It's perfectly nice the fly is going along, doing its thing and gets caught in a spiderweb, struggles to break free, then breaks free and then goes on having a perfectly nice day.

But one thing Ive noticed about flies and I think this is a universal thing all over the world, I've seen it flies when they land.

The first thing they do is I don't know why, but they wrote that little legs the front legs and the opening of this.

I think you got the idea from the so it's like the music of the flies, the world and the six dance and the Bulgarian rhythm really is in Bulgarian style, which is fast and it has asymmetric changes of meter.

This is three plus three plus two, it like that and it goes from beginning to end, very exciting.

And that's in this set.

The next is a piece I wrote when I was still in doctoral school.

I was 27 and it's sort of 25 variations on the Civil War tune “When Johnny Comes Marching Home, ” and I had heard my uncle when I was visiting, singing this in the shower and it stuck in my ears and I thought it would be a good for variation in terms of Marvin Gould wrote a seven orations on this same tune, but I didn't even know it at the I just wrote this set and as I looked into it, it turns out like so many American folk tunes it was actually from the British Isles.

It's the same tune, Johnny I hardly knew ya.

It was in my family.

On my father's side was largely English, Irish, Scottish.

So I felt connected to it and I started fooling around and I think I threw everything in but the kitchen sink for for the variations that I thought about the Civil War and some of the images that came to mind or tragic and terrible, but also out of that was born a New America.

And I think it's a more optimistic view of out of the ashes rises something something worthwhile.

So it's kind of a mad rush to the end, but I hope you enjoy.

Next piece on the program deserves a little explanation for the one thing the Concerto Orchestra actually is for orchestra.

It's not for solo piano.

Bartok wrote it late in life when he was living in the United States, and it was a great piece, a staple of the orchestral repertoire.

Well, it turns out that there was some interest in having the music used for a ballet, and they asked Bartok to make a solo version of the piece for rehearsal.

And he quickly took a stab at it.

And then about three weeks he came up with something.

But honestly, it's completely unplayable because half the time it's for performance, not for solo piano.

And he suggested that, you know, two pianists can play And there's one place he said it unplayable and it just sat there and it never materialized and never was set to a ballet.

And he never finished.

Well, his very finest to the audition or took it upon himself to make a solo version of the piece.

And he published it in 2001 and he touched it up and made it more or less playable.

That shot or was not a composer and it's unplayable.

His playable version is unplayable starting in middle six, I think Um, so I started working with it because I loved, I love the piece so much and I made my own version of it.

Looking at what Bartok did and changing what Sean did and looking at the orchestral score.

And pretty soon I was just deeply involved in it making my own version.

So it's kind of a combination of all three of those, I guess, and it's in five movements.

The first movement is this kind of introduction that sets the stage for something very profound.

It kind of alternates between instrumental styles and very sophisticated harmonies and more folk music like passages instrumental and then contrasted with vocal.

And then there's a development with all sorts of canons and things.

The second movement is the game of pairs, and what Bartok did in this was to have pairs of instruments two bassoons, two oboes, two flutes, and you would associate each pair of with an interval.

So bassoons and six and whatnot, seventh and trumpets and seconds and then it's a sort of series of self-contained melodies for those instruments.

And in the middle there is a brass chorale that's just gorgeous, beautiful and percussion.

And then the return of the material, little changes elaborated.

The third movement is the heart and soul of the piece.

It's a kind of an elegy, and it's a very dark and profound piece that comes out of a troubled life in Bartok's life and a troubled time for the world.

I always find it profoundly moving to hear this piece.

It has a kind of arch form, so it progresses to a central point and then kind of goes backwards and then like a mirror of itself.

And each thing you hear at the beginning occurs again, but transforms in a very different way.

The next movement is the interrupted intermezzo.

And this is it's almost like comic relief, I guess, from the seriousness of the slow movement.

It's a kind of Rondo meaning quirky main theme keeps coming back, interspersed with contrasting music and it's said that Bartok, when he was composing, somebody was playing the radio and it was irritating to him and he would get interrupted and distracted by the sound of the radio.

And so you can hear one of the episodes where there's this kind of goofy theme keeps interrupting and Bartok is irritating.

So it, um, that, who knows if there could be a apocryphal tale in the last movement is a perpetual mobilizer.

So it goes and grows and grows and grows and grows.

And it's so exciting.

Um, at a certain point there's a bagpipe episode that comes in and it's about as life affirming and as positive music as part I've ever wrote.

And I find it so moving to hear this coming from this time in the world, in the time in this life and the folk music aspects of it that have fewer and fewer and fewer, these theme keep coming back.

It's like the folk people coming back to life and everything he knew had been devastated.

But he retained this kind of faith in the survival of folk music and the survival of the people and that they would emerge.

And it's thrilling to see his artistic view of the state of the world at that time.

I think there's a good chance you'll live all of your lives and never hear anyone do this song on a piano.

I hope you enjoy.