by Mike Telin

“Choosing a recital program can be so selfish,” pianist Lura Johnson quipped during a recent telephone conversation. “Of course you want to play pieces that you love but you also need to find a way to present them from a point of view is useful and relevant to the audience.” This weekend Lura Johnson returns to her hometown of Oberlin for a performance on the Music at the Meetinghouse (First Church) series on Sunday, May 17 at 4:00 pm. Johnson’s program, titled “Opus One: Something to Prove,” will feature the first published works of Alexander Zemlinsky, Alban Berg, Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitri Shostakovich and Johannes Brahms.

Johnson, a Steinway Artist and principal pianist of the Delaware Symphony as well as the pianist of choice for the Baltimore Symphony since 2007, said that when selecting the works for her program she looked for pieces that were well-written, and didn’t have any serious weaknesses even though they might lack some maturity. [Read more…]