Solo piano music was as important to Aaron Copland as his more widely known and recorded orchestral music. Copland’s first major work for the instrument, the Piano Variations, was Bernstein’s favourite piano work as a Harvard undergraduate. Variously described as “craggy” and “granitic”, it was considered by Copland himself to have a “rightness”, and he gave its première performance. The Piano Sonata (1939-41) is among Copland’s most personal and profound statements, the rhythms of its dynamic central movement inspired by jazz. The single-movement Piano Fantasy, one of Copland’s most evocative and virtuosic works in any genre, was likened by the composer himself to “a spontaneous and unpremeditated sequence of ‘events’ that would carry the listener irresistibly (if possible) from first note to last.”