Opposites abound in George Rochberg’s music, never more so perhaps than in Carnival Music, his only piano work to employ popular musical idioms, where one encounters exuberance and introspection, great power and deep reflection. His Four Short Sonatas hark back to a time when ‘sonata’ referred to a single-movement composition, though Rochberg has cunningly grouped these brief pieces into a work that follows the Classical four-movement pattern. Unabashedly beautiful and shamelessly expressive, the Variations on an Original Theme is a virtuosic composition in the unsettling key of D flat major.