Raymond Warren was Professor of Music at Bristol University from 1972-1994. This performance of his Five Bagatelles for solo piano (composed in 1967) was given by me on 7 November 2008 in the Recital Room at the Music Department as part of a concert of his music celebrating his 80th birthday (the piano is a Yamaha), and the movements are entitled: Monody, Capriccio, Pastorale, Dialogue & Arioso.

Raymond Warren (born 1928) Five Bagatelles (1967)

Raymond Warren was Professor of Music at Bristol University from 1972-1994. This performance of his Piano Sonata No. 2 (composed in 1977) was given by me on 2 November 2018 in the Auditorium at the Music Department as part of a concert of his music celebrating his 90th birthday (the piano is a Steinway), and the movements are entitled: Monody, Caprice, Chaconne. It would have been nice if I could have avoided hitting a wrong note at the very end of the piece; the last note of the sonata in the treble is supposed to be just an octave D, nothing else :)

Raymond Warren (born 1928) Piano Sonata No. 2 (1977)

I gave the first performance of this sonata in London on 27 February 1986, and this is a transfer of an amateur cassette recording of the work's second performance, given in the Great Hall at Nottingham University on 8 May 1986. Unfortunately the Steinway is not in good condition, and it was even more out of tune by the end of the recital (this performance was preceded by Prokofiev Sonata No. 5 and Scriabin Sonata No. 9, and followed by Copland's Variations & Passacaglia and then Beethoven's Hammerklavier). There's a fine harmonic consistency about this work, and having just looked again through the score (skilfully and idiomatically written for the piano) I can well understand why I liked it when received the clear handwritten manuscript from the composer in 1985. I'd like to play the sonata again sometime.

Christopher Best (born 1958) Piano Sonata 'Reconciliations' (1985)

This is a live performance that I gave at Studio 1, BBC Pebble Mill, Birmingham on 22 November 1996 which was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 five days later. The idea was to present the second movement with a strict observance of Beethoven's L'istesso tempo marking for Variations 2 & 3, but unfortunately the tempo did not remain as consistent as I had hoped (for listeners who wonder why I appear to slow down at the start of Variation 2, the answer is that I don't slow down - the apparent change of tempo is actually a preservation of the underlying pulse, which is what Beethoven indicated, and his use of a 6/16 time signature at this point was merely a notational compromise). Despite the inconsistency of tempo, I'm reasonably pleased with this performance, but to hear an absolutely precise adherence to Beethoven's L'istesso tempo markings, check out Friedrich Gulda's 1984 digital recording for Philips, one of my favourite Beethoven recordings.

Beethoven Piano Sonata No. 32 in C minor, Op. 111 (1821-22)

This is a live performance that I gave at Studio 1, BBC Pebble Mill, Birmingham on 22 November 1996 which was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 five days later. It's not as good a performance as the one that I recorded in London for Hyperion Records in August 1995 (which of course had the benefit of editing and a vaster wider dynamic range than this off-air recording) but it's not bad.

Robert Simpson (1921-1997) Variations and Finale on a theme by Beethoven (1990)

This is a live performance that I gave on 17 June 1986 at the Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester, when I was a student. It was my second performance of the sonata that day, as I had played the work in a lunchtime recital at Kingston Upon Hull university six hours earlier. Oh dear, although most of the notes are correct, there is a lot of inaccuracy in this performance over tempi and dynamics(and there are mistakes even in my spoken introduction, which refers to 'seven sections' when there are only six, and doesn't even state the correct date of composition). But after hearing Boulez's own alarmingly approximate performance of the sonata I came to the conclusion that maybe my own wasn't so bad.

Pierre Boulez (1925-2016) Piano Sonata No. 3 (1955-57)

This was the encore that I gave at the end of a recital at Bristol University on 18 October 2006. I had finished the advertised programme with Balakirev's Islamey, a work that I had not played in public before, so I was a bit shaken up with the stress of having attempted that piece for the first time, and although I'd played this Rachmaninov piece many times since including it in my first-ever full-length recital in 1983, this performance is rather clumsy in places (starting with the wrong note at 0'25"). But despite the mistakes, musically it's what I wanted.

Rachmaninov Étude-Tableau in E flat minor, Op. 39 No. 5

This was my first attempt at playing Balakirev's Islamey, at the end of a recital at Bristol University on 18 October 2006. The playing is erratic, with far too much poor articulation (indeed, my professional colleagues may consider it to be a pianistic disaster that shouldn't have been uploaded). I had underestimated the stress that I would be under when giving my first performance of this work, which turned out to be far more difficult to perform in front of a large audience than to play privately at home. Despite the many inaccuracies, this recording nevertheless holds a certain nostalgia for me, as I remember being elated even just to get through the piece after having chickened out of playing it for decades.

My first attempt at playing Balakirev's Islamey in concert

This was my second public performance of Rachmaninov's First Sonata, given at Bristol University on 11 October 2019 (my first took place three days earlier at Cardiff University in a recital of both sonatas and the video is on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eghZ63cm3P4). There are inaccuracies here, but thankfully no serious memory lapses. Maybe it takes several performances before a pianist can feel fully secure with this piece. Incidentally, it irritates me when performers play an encore without telling the audience what it is, so I should mention that I did announce the encore (Rachmaninov's Prelude in C minor, Op. 23 No. 7) - it's just that for this upload the applause after the sonata has been abbreviated and the announcement removed.

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