It was a year ago that Benjamin and I spoke about his fine piano artistry on my album, The Gilded Age.  With a strange year for so many of us, I wanted to reach back to him to catch up. In this episode he shares an up-close look at the challenge of learning a really challenging piano masterpiece (Franz Liszt's b-minor Piano Sonata), and shares his thoughts about it. We get a glimpse of the technical and emotional challenges such a works presents.  I divided our discussion into two parts.  In part 1, we discuss a little bit about how life has changed for performers in the last year, and we dive into the piece.

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