
Bagatelles & Impromptus
December 3, 2017
@ 4 pm ET
Downtown United Presbyterian Church, 121 N. Fitzhugh Street, Rochester, NY
NEXT!!! David Breitman, fortepiano. Masterworks from the 1820’s by Beethoven and Schubert, performed on an instrument of the period. The program includes Beethoven’s Bagatelles, op. 126 as well as his Sonata in E major, op. 109; plus Schubert’s Impromptus op. 90.
David Breitman is equally at home with the fortepiano and the modern piano, and enjoys both solo and ensemble playing. His collaboration with baritone Sanford Sylvan spanned more than thirty years, with several hundred recitals and four CD’s, ranging from Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin, to the premiere recording of The Glass Hammer, a major song cycle by the Cuban-American composer Jorge Martin. He has recorded the Mozart piano-violin sonatas on historical instruments with Jean-François Rivest for Analekta, and, in a collaboration of a different sort, he is one of seven fortepianists on the 10-CD recording of the complete Beethoven piano sonata cycle on CLAVES. Beethoven has continued to be a major preoccupation, with recent recordings of the complete violin sonatas with Elizabeth Wallfisch (for the Nimbus label) and the cello sonatas and variations with Jaap ter Linden (not yet released).
David is the director of the Historical Performance Program at Oberlin Conservatory where he teaches fortepiano and clavichord as well as courses in performance practice, and is currently working on a book titled “Time-Travel for Pianists: How Today’s Players Can Learn from Yesterday’s Instruments.”