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Jed Plays Distler

This week marks the ASCAP Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award winning program Between the Keys 500th episode.

To mark this milestone, the program's creator, producer and host Jed Distler (who is The Classical Network's Artist-in Residence) showcases his own work as a pianist and composer with live archival recordings of Richard Rodney Bennett's Three Romantic Pieces (1988) in its New York premier, plus Distler's large-scale Calypso for Piano (1988).

"I've spent ten years largely showcasing a broad range of pianists and repertoire on this program," Distler says, so I thought that for Episode 500 I could afford to indulge myself!"

"I was delighted to discover that a recording of my Bennett premier performance existed. I hadn't known about it, or maybe I'd forgotten. But my late friend and former Between the Keys guest Joseph Patrych had actually recorded the 1991 concert from which this recording stems, and it recently turned up. And Calypso for Piano represents my ambitious youth, trying to stake out a place in the composer/pianist world. I was 31 when I composed it, and although my 68-year-old self would never write such a piece again, there's a lot in there that I don't disown. But could I possibly perform it today like the maniacal speed demon that I evidently was during this 1993 concert performance?"

Tune in to Between the Keys this Friday at 3:00 PM with the rebroadcast Saturday at 6:00 PM, exclusively on The Classical Network and WWFM.org.

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Jed Distler is Artist-in-Residence for The Classical Network and program host of Between the Keys, Tuesdays at 10 pm.