Arbiter Records 143

Bartók in the Desert: The Art of Irén Marik

  • 2 cd midprice set. First release of a legendary Bartók pupil's private recordings.
  • $23.99, free postage within the US
  • On iTunes
  • On Amazon

Disc 1

The discovery of Irén Marik (1905-1986) in California's Eastern Sierra Desert led to a remarkable musician who had been taught by Bartók and was closer to him in spirit than any other disciple. Marik's musical genius grasped and projected the content, style, structure and expression in every detail of all the works she played. Upon hearing a work in her hands, one understood it for life. Marik's art is documented on three Arbiter sets, prepared after a 100 hour tape archive was discovered and examined over time. She is among the finest musicians to have been recorded and illuminates a broad repertoire. cover photo: Irén Marik on stage at the Deepest Valley Theater, Lone Pine, California (1965).

Duration: 1:19:49

  1. Liszt Benediction de Dieu dans le solitude
  2. Liszt Apparitions, no. 1
  3. Liszt Vallée d' Obermann (first version)
  4. Liszt Berceuse
  5. Liszt Transcendental Etudes: Harmonies du soir
  6. Liszt Les jeux d' eau a la Villa d ' Este
  7. Kodaly Dances from Marosszék
  8. Bartók Rondo no. 1 on folk themes
  9. Bartók Suite: 1
  10. Bartók Suite: 2
  11. Bartók Suite: 3
  12. Bartók Suite: 4

Disc 2

Duration: 1:19:19

  1. Bartók Allegro barbaro
  2. Bartók Mikrokosmos 140
  3. Bartók Mikrokosmos 141
  4. Bartók Mikrokosmos 142
  5. Bartók Mikrokosmos 143
  6. Bartók Mikrokosmos 144
  7. Bartók Mikrokosmos 147
  8. Brahms Fantasia op. 116 no. 2
  9. Beethoven Piano Sonata in E op. 109: I
  10. Beethoven Piano Sonata in E op. 109: II
  11. Beethoven Piano Sonata in E op. 109: III
  12. J. S. Bach Sinfonia in D minor
  13. Debussy Images Book II: Cloches à travers les feuilles
  14. Debussy Images Book II: Et la lune descend dur le temple qui fut
  15. Debussy Images Book II: Poissons d' or
  16. Debussy Preludes Book II: Tierces alternées
  17. Ravel Miroirs: Vallée des cloches
  18. Chopin Etude in A flat, op. 25, no.1
  19. Schubert Impromptu op. 90 no. 2
  20. Haydn Piano Sonata no. 49: Allegro non troppo
  21. Lully Courante
  22. Bartók Rumanian Folk Dances
  23. Bartók Evening in Transylvania

If there exists an “inner circle” among musicians, whose artistry and probing interpretations set them apart for their profound musical insight, Irén Marik would be an integral member of this elect group. The discovery of such artistry reveals how history is a plastic entity which redefines itself by transforming one’s understanding of tradition and culture. Marik’s distinct voice brings us closer to Bartók, Liszt, and the other composers she devoted her life to. Serendipity played a major role in the retrieval of her obscured art.

A wooden cigar-store Indian once stood guard outside a dreary used record shop in New York on Eighth Avenue, a neighborhood then awash in Cuban-Chinese restaurants, dry cleaners, thrift stores, and one beacon of culture, a revival cinema, which ran a celebrated annual festival of Surrealist films; otherwise, Chelsea was dormant in 1978. The shop’s elderly owner perched behind a coffee-stained counter, tending a newspaper as time drifted along. Nearly all of his recordings were of little or of absolutely no interest, the store itself a superfluity, a stagnant enigma. Towards the back, in the most forlorn corner of this outpost for irrelevant music, a stack of discs lay on the linoleum floor beside some bins, hardly noticeable in the weak fluorescent rays dimmed by layers of accumulated grime. This mound of some 20 identical records lacked jackets, their sleeves of a waxed paper intended for wrapping sandwiches. A hand-stenciled dragon “Draco” proclaimed a Liszt recital. The pianist was Hungarian, unknown, yet her repertoire would startle anyone aware of Liszt’s music:

Bénédiction de Dieu dans le Solitude 

Apparition no. 1  

Berceuse 

Vallée d’Obermann (first version)

“A dollar,” the owner grunted. I took a copy home and listened. After the first notes, a vision came to mind: a slender young woman sat, playing, as Bartók leaned over her side, pointing to the score. Who was Irén Marik? Her Liszt playing had a sense of proportion like Sauer’s, a tone which enlivened every note, a rhythm so solid that one sensed her pulse even in the silences, a clarity of musical form, magisterial phrasing which allowed less familiar works to be entirely grasped on one hearing. But who was Marik, was she alive?

In 1980, across the Hudson River in West New York, New Jersey, there lived an athletic septuagenarian, Nicholas Milroy. A Budapest-born retired U.S. diplomat, he seemingly knew everyone from prewar Hungary, and spoke a half-dozen languages with a deep sonorous voice familiar to listeners of Radio Free Europe, broadcasting out of Munich in the 1950’s. In his youth, Milroy had travelled throughout Germany and possessed a sensitive ear for regional accents, as familiar to him as his encyclopedic knowledge of ancient Greece and Rome, and the history he witnessed. As an intelligence officer during World War II, he would interrogate captured Nazi officers. To gain their confidence, he first learned of their rank and would dress one higher, as military superiority was deferred to, even amongst enemies. As soon as Milroy’s ear detected a local inflection he would delightedly reminisce of the city or province so familiar to both officer and prisoner. In this manner, the prey abandoned any guard and began to wax nostalgically of ‘their’ home as Milroy steered the conversation towards his inevitable question, “How did you get involved in all of this?” Grinning a Cheshire-cat smile, he posed his pipe and continued, “Within five to ten minutes, I had them crying like babies, telling me all that I needed to know.”

Milroy knew of Marik: “She came to America to give concerts around 1946, when mother arrived, and she had a brother, Paul, a diplomat in Canada. I haven’t any news of either since then.” (Milroy’s mother was the pianist Etelka Freund, a Brahms and Busoni pupil, an extraordinary musician. Only recently did Peter Bartók write [in “My Father,” Homosassa, 2002.] of the Baldwin Piano Company’s requisitioning his father’s instrument in 1945 when the composer became too ill to perform, leaving him without a piano at home for the first time in his life: “A kind friend, upon learning of my father’s predicament, promptly and without question shipped to us an upright, the only piano he had. It was like a bar-room honky-tonk, but my father could at least punch its keys . . .” Such was Nicholas Milroy, who never mentioned the episode. He passed on in 2002.)

The trail to Marik had grown cold. One day in 1982 the dragon reappeared in the record section of a music store behind Carnegie Hall, taking up an entire cardboard cover of a long-play disc, its back cover a photo of Marik at the keyboard, gazing downward, deeply listening. The repertoire indicated a refined, uncommon taste usually absent from most programs:

Couperin: Vingt-Sixième Ordre
Ravel: Rigaudon, from Le Tombeau de Couperin; Sonatine
Scriabin: Etude Op. 2, No. 1; Prelude Op. 14, No. 11
Debussy: Voiles, General Lavine- eccentric, ‘Les fées sont d’exquises danseuses’
Liszt: Legende: La prédication aux Oiseaux; Sonetto 123 del Petrarca; Sospiro.
Liner notes revealed that Marik was “born and educated in Budapest, Hungary [she was from Szölnök], she has played in most European capitals, in the United States and Canada. Now an American citizen, she makes her home in Independence, California, giving recitals in her studio.”

Except for a slit on the upper corner, the disc was sealed in plastic. Opening it up at home, a letter fell out onto my lap, addressed to the chief music critic of the New York Times, Harold Schonberg, dated 1974:
“Several years ago, 1958, to be exact, you wrote of the Hungarian-born pianist Iren Marik, in the New York Times:
‘Miss Marik . . . seldom makes an appearance in concert halls. If this disc is an adequate representation of her abilities, we have been missing much. She plays these interesting Liszt pieces with grand sweep, a very big technique and all the color they need. This kind of singing line, with such an accurate mechanism to boot is not too common nowadays. It is to be hoped that Miss Marik is heard in more Liszt – or indeed anything she feels like playing.’ [Schonberg refers to the Zodiac disc.]
“Now, after all these years comes the next record of what Irén Marik does feel like playing, released by Draco Records, a small company, described on the enclosed folder. We are sending this record to you because we hope that it is an ‘adequate representation of her abilities,’ and we also hope that it will give you as much pleasure as you once, in a moment of great discouragement gave to her. Irén Marik is a brave woman who has faced and surmounted almost incredible hardships, and triumphantly continues to give the world music of this quality.
“This emboldens me to say that, notwithstanding the pressures and tensions upon you as the foremost critic in the United States (and perhaps in the world), if you do like the disc, and if you can snatch a moment to say so on a postcard to her, at this address, you would be doing a greater service than you know of, to encourage an artist of this calibre to continue her work.
“Miss Marik does not know that I am writing this personal letter to you. She would forbid it, knowing as I do that such ‘démarches’ ne se font pas. I ask you to forgive me for overstepping the conventional procedure of this occasion.
– Very sincerely yours, Evelyn Eaton”

Schonberg had received the disc eight years earlier, and sold it off unheard, to save shelf space, unaware of any enclosure.

Before cyberspace, one needed months, even years to track someone. The California telephone company had a listing for Marik in the town of Independence, population of one thousand, lying in the valley between the Sierra Nevadas and the Inyo Mountains west of Death Valley.

Marik answered the phone. Yes, she had studied with Bartók, for six months. Yes, she was playing, teaching, performing locally. Yes, I was welcome to visit the following week.

A daily bus left Los Angeles for Reno, early in the morning. The sprawling city faded as we stopped in the grid town of Lancaster, skirting the edges of Mojave, the terrain dotted with Joshua trees, cacti alongside hundred-car freight trains destined for points unknown, their whistles a melancholy definition of boundless dry spaces. Passing an Air Force base at Ridgecrest, we headed north of Inyokern, where tilted red rock formations erupted out of the earth, resembling the ornate carved façades of South Indian temples, passing reservoirs and near-dry lakes. Lone Pine gave the first hint of local American Indian communities with cabins secluded amidst the firs offering their fried bread. Twenty-five miles north, we stopped by a cement bench, the town’s bus station, seven hours after having left Los Angeles. A pickup truck awaited, and I squeezed in. Miss Marik was being driven about on errands, the last being to retrieve this curious visitor.

At the northernmost edge of town her three room dark red wood house lay behind an elaborate rose garden she tended every morning, followed by three hours at the piano before lunch. Afternoons were spent at the piano, again three hours; only then were visitors permitted, perhaps a game or two of solitaire. When dinner ended, she picked up a mystery novel, indicating the door to any guests, warning “There is going to be a tarrible murder tonight.” An expanse of miles spread from her yard across the valley, up to the edge of the Inyo Mountains, behind which lay Death Valley, where she once performed Mozart’s Concerto in A (K. 488). Her living room was dominated by a nine-foot Steinway concert grand, serving as a concert hall where for many years she held monthly recitals, with some one hundred listeners spilling out onto the covered porch. The western exposure opened up to the jagged snowcapped Sierra Nevadas. Independence’s desert air was redolent of a wild sage used by local Indian communities for smudging, a lighting of the bundled dried herb whose smoke purifies a dwelling or a person.

What did she learn from Bartók? “Little. I studied Mozart, Bach and Beethoven with him.” His own compositions? “I played something of his once, and he said it was fine, so there was no need to spend more time on his music.” Marik had studied earlier with Imre Stefaniai, a Busoni pupil, and in London with Leschetizky’s pupil George Woodhouse. Dohnanyi failed her once for having written parallel fifths in a theory exercise: she was also taught by Kodaly. But her Liszt? She described an affinity for his music, that it came to her unaided. Others noticed this too:
“Sauer heard me playing in Budapest and was very excited. He asked me to go to Vienna and study with him.” Why didn’t she take up his offer? “What, and leave Budapest!?”

Marik had concertized throughout Europe, making her London debut on May 30, 1927. A document in the library of the Liszt Academy, Budapest, finds her performing Schumann’s Carnaval in 1934. In Budapest, Marik taught at a music college during the economic depression. Once she hinted at her family’s status, originally from Szölnök, mentioning that her father had been a member of parliament: British recital programs from the 1920s list her as ‘Irene de Marik.’ A privileged background did not spare Marik from privations during World War II. Invited to perform in the United States in 1946 or 1947, Marik defected while on tour, accepting a teaching position at Sweet Briar College in Virginia to support her elderly parents, and an older brother Miklos, a surgeon with a family of seven sons, all in sovietized Budapest. Sweet Briar was a noted liberal arts college which assisted writers through a retreat similar to the MacDowell colony, yet the administration was unaware of the musician in their midst: Marik was penalized whenever taking leave to play concerts, such as an appearance with the National Symphony in Washington, playing Beethoven’s Fourth Concerto. Her New York debut took place on April 8, 1950 at Town Hall:

Bach-Busoni: Chaconne
Beethoven: Sonata Op. 53 “Waldstein”
Bartók: Mikrokosmos (five pieces); Six Rumanian Folk Dances
Liszt: Consolation in D flat; Vallée d’Obermann (first version)
Chopin: Nocturne in B flat minor, Op. 9/1 (first of several encores)

In New York she met John Ranck, then a pupil of Carl Friedberg’s. Ranck succeeded in persuading his elderly teacher to record works by Brahms and Schumann in 1953. A living historic treasure, Friedberg had been coached by Brahms and taught by Clara Schumann in Frankfurt; he died not long after the recordings were completed. Ranck also recorded for Zodiac Records, a label created by the late cinema organist Lee Erwin, whose refined ear captured Friedberg, André Marchal (his teacher), a mysterious pianist Jean Verd playing Fauré, and Ranck in remarkably vivid sound. Marik overheard Ranck recording Poulenc’s Soirées de Nazelles: “Even though I was next to record, I was so charmed by the Poulenc that I forgot to be nervous.” Erwin and Ranck chose the dining room of the Kosciuszko Foundation in New York for its acoustics and atmosphere, which overcame Friedberg’s reluctance to play before the microphone, as his pupil and colleagues were part of the comfortable ambiance. Marik’s recording of Liszt appeared and disappeared with the rest of the Zodiac catalog as there was scant interest in such artists despite laudatory reviews. Erwin experimented with stereo recording in 1956, capturing Marik in Liszt and Bartók programs, published on reel-to-reel tapes.

Ranck and Marik formed a piano duo, giving an early performance of Messiaen’s Visions de l’ Amen at the Guggenheim Museum, Bartók’s Sonata and works they commissioned. Erwin made a gripping recording of their Messiaen, which remains unpublished.

At Sweet Briar, Marik became a lifelong friend of Evelyn Eaton, a Canadian whose background included British aristocrats and American Indians. Eaton, a prolific author, contributed essays on prewar France to the New Yorker and published a dozen novels, of which Quietly My Captain Waits (1940) achieved success. Eaton, who heard Marik perform in London before the War, wrote Marik’s biography for Sweet Briar’s catalog:

“One of the most distinguished, beloved and colorful members of our faculty from foreign countries, Iren Marik came to this country in 1946, exhausted from the hardships and privations of long years of all-out war, bombardment and the enemy occupation of her country. The war had interrupted her unusually brilliant career. She had graduated from one of the finest musical academies in Europe, the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, she was a pupil of Imre Stefaniai, and studied with the late Bela Bartók; she had opened her musical career giving recitals in Budapest, Berlin, Munich, Vienna and Rome. Later she spent five years in London, giving frequent recitals and appearing as soloist with some of the finest orchestras in Europe. She played regularly over the London B.B.C. Critics regarded her as a fine musician on her way to becoming one of the great pianists of our time. The London press praised her unusually beautiful ‘singing legato tone’ and her deep sensitive interpretations.

“Then came the interruptions of the war. Miss Marik gave up her profession and went home, where her duty lay, to her country and her family. There followed a time of fear, suffering, lack of food, complete cessation of the exercise of her profession as a pianist, constant helpless anxiety for the lives of people around her, to whom the presence of the enemy meant danger, humiliation, among horrible sights and sounds. I heard her once say ruefully, looking at her hands, that scrubbing laundry for the Russian soldiers ‘did not do much to help the fingers to play Bach.’

“Once when a piano was needed for one of her recitals, Miss Marik went to choose one from Steinway. She had to go through a room where Myra Hess was practicing for her concert at Carnegie Hall next day. Miss Hess stopped playing, greeted Miss Marik cheerfully and called out, “One needs more than one life to learn anything about this, doesn’t one?’ ‘Yes,’ said Miss Marik, ‘I would like to have three.’ She is a perfectionist, like Miss Hess, a stern self-critic who is never satisfied with the quality of her playing. She practices on average five hours a day and considers herself ‘lazy,’ but in an unguarded moment she admitted recently that she is in better hand now than ever before.”

Creative minds discovered Marik. Eaton, wrote of her new life in America:
“One summer in New Hampshire, in the studio May Swenson visited [Swenson dedicated a poem to Marik ­ “To Her Images”, published in the New Yorker], which friends had built for Iren, on the edge of woods overlooking a hillside and a pool, there had been three years of desolate silence. All the birds were gone, after an orgy of misdirected spraying. Iren came there ‘on vacation,’ to practice, her usual five hours a day, more often seven, since she was free of teaching. The Beethoven Sonatas, Liszt’s Bénédiction de Dieu dans la Solitude, his Saint Francis and the Birds, Debussy, Ravel, Bartók could be heard two miles away. Presently the woods filled with birds, madly answering. They sang so loud for certain pieces that she could hardly hear herself play. Nature responds, how gratefully, to beauty, to truth.

“Humans answer too. Poets write poems, painters paint, dancers dance, gardeners garden, with renewed zest. Notes and letters and flowers and wine arrive. Iren responds. She gives parties. People look forward to her parties, avidly. They come to her home for comfort and never leave forlorn. She feeds them with gourmet Hungarian food, relaxation and laughter, then shoos them out with ‘Moost you stay? Can’t you go? I have to get opp early.'”

Retiring from teaching English Literature, Eaton explored her American Indian background, settling in Lone Pine, California, where she experienced sweat lodges, becoming a pipe and medicine woman, discovering that she had the gift of healing. In 1963 Eaton rented a miner’s hut, without electricity, water, or telephone line and happened upon “a natural bowl, a rugged amphitheater tucked away at the foot of three towering rocks” amidst the finger-like geological formations known as the Alabama Hills, below Mount Whitney: Eaton created there the Deepest Valley Theater by mounting a stage and inviting Marik, Ranck, actors, dancers, classical musicians from India, to take part in a festival which lasted for ten seasons. When her days at Sweet Briar ended, Marik moved next door to Eaton, who now lived in Independence. Sweet Briar’s life continued as writers and musicians arrived for the festival or to visit the writer and pianist who transformed their small town setting amidst natural wonders into a cultural orb. Retirement gave Marik unlimited time for music: “I work every day and feel growth and understanding of composers and of myself, each day.”

With a group of like-minded friends, Eaton created the Draco Foundation to preserve Marik’s art on a series of long-play records, in editions of two hundred copies, resulting in eight discs of varied repertoire. One cassette was published of Eaton evoking the literary zeitgeist surrounding works played by Marik, reading from Shakespeare, a song composed by Elisabeth I, and a poem by Henry VIII as Marik would interpret a Galliard by William Byrd, works by Lully, Rameau, Chambonnières and others.

The recording Schonberg discarded was Marik’s first Draco project. When we arrived at her home, she sat at the piano to demonstrate legato, produced through raised arched fingers, similar to the hand position seen on a film of Alfred Cortot playing a Chopin Valse, creating the illusion of connected notes through a slow, nearly-imperceptible overlapping of tones. A piano lesson ensued, as she illustrated this principal as the base for touch and tone. It was possible to visit Marik several times over the next three years: once she reluctantly consented to be filmed.

To have heard her play was one of life’s wonders. Her Bartók revealed an interpretation attuned to the composer’s own, far beyond self-aggrandizing pupils who claim for themselves the mantle of his tradition while contorting his music into a caricature of Prokofiev. Here dwelled the breath, the shape of his world, its elegance, an authentic projection of his rhythmic style and proportion, possibly surpassing his own recording of the Suite’s fourth movement [CD I: track 12]: one work from Mikrokosmos attained unimagined depths ­ Book VI: Minor Seconds and Major Sevenths [CD II: track 6]. Marik’s Kodaly also reveals familiarity with the Transylvanian folk idioms depicted.

Eaton, who knew Marik for nearly forty years, provides an insight to her taciturn character in “I Saw My Mortal Sight,” a novel from 1959 whose Giro Deborgo, a Corsican pianist, is modeled after Marik:
“She began to play. She had chosen the right piece to open with, better on the piano that the organ it was written for, the Prelude in G minor [Bach, arranged by Siloti] with its controlled beginning, quiet, compelling, authoritative, to the sudden change of pace, rushing upward, leaping, rocketing . . . how superbly she played it . . . each note sat where it should. ‘Sat’ was her word . . .”
The fictionalized Marik described the path to music sought by her students:
“Most of them wanted three things, to be praised for the way they already played ‘their pieces,’ to be let in on secrets of short cuts in technique, and to nose out ‘useful contacts.’
“Giro gave them brutal resumés of the no-good way they sat and the no-good way they moved their muscles, too taut or too slack, depriving them of all ‘their pieces’ and set them to practicing scales, slowly, very slowly, for weeks, sometimes for months, until they acquired what she called ‘a bottom of control.’
“Once their bottoms were established, she taught them, not ‘pieces’ but the art of playing music as the composers wrote it to be played. She was impatient of ‘renderings,’ personal interpretations, alterations, arrangements, by the brash, and of condescension toward the great.” Were her labors being wasted on unappreciative audiences, snobs, the tone-deaf? Deborgo replied “It would be the same for me if no one heard . . . It’s music, music that matters, not being heard.” Eaton captures Marik’s ethos: “The piano might fail them, if it were poor or out of tune, but not the performer. The piano was their concern, the performance hers. She played for the composers, should they be listening, living or dead, and the unseen audience of THERE. She played as Religious chant, ‘to our fair Choirmaster, God.’ She would play no otherwise in Paris, or in Paradise, or Pino . . . She spent her life . . . in the concentrated discipline of hour after hour of practice, to play a few works of a few composers more and more perfectly.”

Eaton’s cancer worsened in 1984. One day she drew me aside into her studio, variotinted by antique stained-glass windows preserved from her family’s home. “Iren often taped her own playing, practicing, and usually threw the tapes away. I quietly rescued them from the bin. Here they are for you. Use them.” Months later, Eaton was no longer alive, and Irén’s health worsened, her practicing diminished through arthritis and osteoporosis. On the morning of a concert, fire broke out in her room, injuring the pianist. Marik never performed again, her health deteriorated. She passed away in 1986, but all was not over.

Marik had bequeathed her archive to me: tapes quietly stored for decades in a garage emerged, over one hundred hours ­ her Draco masters, Zodiac master tapes, concert recordings. The performance of Messiaen with John Ranck had survived with surprises, such as an illuminated reading of the Liszt Sonata, gripping from the start as she attacked the bass with a touch that only Liszt could have conceived, unfolding an understanding of the music reaching beyond all others. Some day these too shall be heard again. -Allan Evans © 2004

Works recorded and known to have been performed by Marik:

Anonymous: Allemande

J. S. Bach: Chromatic Fantasy & Fugue; English Suite No. 5: Musette; French Suite No. 6; Two and Three Part inventions; Italian Concerto; Partita No. 1; Toccata in E minor; Well Tempered Clavier (selections); arr. Bauer: Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring; arr. Busoni: Chaconne, Ich Ruf zu Dir, Toccata & Fugue in D minor; arr. Siloti: Prelude in G minor; arr. Tausig: Toccata & Fugue in D minor

Bartók: Bagatelles; For Children; Hungarian Peasant Songs; Mikrokosmos; Romanian Dances; Rondo No. 1; Sketches; Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion; Suite; Ten Easy Pieces

Beethoven: Bagatelles Op. 33/1, 2, 4; Concertos Nos. 4, 5; Sonatas, Opp. 2/1, 10/1, 13, 14/2, 26, 27/2, 28, 31/2, 53, 57, 78, 81a, 109, 110, 111; Eroica Variations; 32 Variations in C minor

Brahms: Capriccio Op. 76/1; Fantasia Op. 116/2; Handel Variations; Intermezzi, Opp. 76/3, 117/1 & 2, 118/6, 119/3; Piano Quintet; Rhapsody Op. 79/2; Scherzo Op. 4

Byrd: Pavan & Galliard

Chambonnières: Gigue

Chopin: Ballades; Barcarolle; Etudes, (Opp. 10/3, 5, 12; 25/1, 3, 5, 7); Fantasie Impromptu; Impromptu Op. 29; Mazurkas, Opp. 6/1, 7/2, 33/4, 63/2 & 3; Nocturnes, Opp. 9/1 & 2, 15/2, 27/1 & 2, 72/1; Prelude Op. 45; Preludes Op. 28; Scherzi, Opp. 31, 39, Sonata Op. 35; Valses, Opp. 18, 34/1&2

Copland: Scherzo humoristique

F. Couperin: Ordre XXVI

L. Couperin: Sarabande

Debussy: Arabesques; En blanc et noir; Golliwog’s Cakewalk; Images; L’ Isle Joyeuse; Estampes; La plus que lent; Preludes; Suite Bergamasque

Paul Earls: Divisions in Twelve for two pianos and tape; E. E. [Evelyn Eaton]

Haydn: Sonata No. 52; Variations in F minor

Kodaly: Dances from Marosszék

Liszt: Apparition, Ballade No. 2; Bénédiction de Dieu; Berceuse; Consolation No. 3; Dante Sonata; Harmonies du Soir; Hungarian Rhapsody No. 12; Les jeux d’eau à la Villa d’Este; Liebestraume No. 3; Mephisto Valse; S. Françoise d’ Assise (Legende No. 1); Sonata; Sonetti del Petrarca; Sospiro; Sposalizio; Vallée d’Obermann, (first version); Valse Impromptu, Waldesrauschen

Lully: Courante

MacDowell: Concerto; Woodland Sketches, Op. 51/1

Harl[sic?] McDonald: Monkeyshines; Prelude

Mendelssohn: Rondo Capriccioso

Messiaen: Visions de l’ Amen

Mozart: Concerto K. 488; Fantasias, K. 396, 397; Rondos, K. 485, 511; Sonatas, K. 310, 331

Poulenc: Soirées de Nazelles

Prokofiev: Visions Fugitives, Op. 22/1, 3, 6, 10

Rachmaninoff: Preludes, Op. 32/10 & 12

Rameau: Minuet

Ravel: Jeux d’eau; Oiseaux tristes; Ondine; Pavane; Rigaudon (Tombeau de Couperin); Sonatine; Vallée des Cloches

Scarlatti: Sonatas (more than 12); arr. Tausig: Pastorale

Schubert: Impromptus, Opp. 90/2 & 4, 142/2 & 3; Moments Musical; Sonatas, Opp. 120, 164

Schumann: Carnaval; Vienna Carnival, Op. 26; Etudes Symphoniques; Fantasia; Fantasiestücke Op. 12 (selections); Kinderszenen; Papillons; Sonata No. 2

Scriabin: Etudes, Opp. 2/1, 8/5, 11; Preludes, Op. 11/4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 13, 14

Halsey Stevens: Sonatina No. 2

Tcherepnin: Bagatelles, Op. 5

Vivaldi-Bach: Adagio in D minor