Programming Recitals
It is the big day! It took you months or even years to prepare for this moment. You have a good recital programme lined up for your audience and you show it off in an hour’s worth of time. Sounds cool, doesn’t it? Before we go any further, I have to write about how the programme can be formed.
In college recitals, the programmes are usually formed by period and how substantial they can be for the year standing of the student. For the undergraduate pianist for example, it can be a Bach prelude and fugue, a classical sonata, an etude, a major Romantic work, and a 20th century work. When I did my undergraduate studies in the Philippines, a work by a Filipino composer and a full concerto was added. For strings, it can be a Bach violin sonata, a classical sonata, a Paganini caprice, a major Romantic work, and a 20th century work. Now usually these showcase a variety of styles and technique for a musician. For a career, doing this is not always seen. It can be dependent on an artist’s vision for the day/s for that matter, the commissioned works that are to be programmed etc. A pianist like Yunchan Lim can play all the Transcendental Etudes of Liszt for a recital whereas others can do say for example, an all-Spanish programme featuring Carlos Surinach, Xavier Montsalvatge, Joaquín Turina etc. These projects can be a solo show or even in collaboration with other musicians. For an example, soprano Barbara Hannigan with pianist Reinbert de Leeuw did an NPR Tiny Desk recital of lieder from the period of fin de siècle in Vienna, featuring lieder by Alexander von Zemlinsky, Alma Mahler, Hugo Wolf, and Arnold Schoenberg. Hannigan even provided context for those songs within the time period.
All of this can be really boiled down to preference. As an example of this, here is Vladimir Horowitz in a 1968 concert in Carnegie Hall performing works by Chopin, Schumann, Scarlatti, Scriabin, and Bizet: