Ithaca College faculty pianist Jonathan Sokasits will be performing a recital of solo piano works on Sunday, February 9, at 8:15 p.m. in Ford Hall Auditorium. The recital, which is free and open to the public, will include Beethoven's Sonata in F Minor, Op. 57 ("Appassionata"), Schubert Impromptus, Op. 90, and music by Poulenc, Debussy, Mompou, and Szymanowski, as well as transcriptions by Liszt.
Sokasits has included two transcriptions by Liszt of the music of Wagner and Schumann. "I have a great interest in playing transcriptions and believe it is a lost art form," he says. His doctoral dissertation was written on the music of Rachmaninoff, whom he considers to be "the greatest transcriptionist of all of them."
Assistant professor of piano at Ithaca College since 1991, Sokasits recently recorded, with the Ithaca College Wind Ensemble, Karel Husa's Concertino for Piano and Wind Ensemble. He was chosen to participate in the National Conference on Piano Pedagogy, and accompanies the Ithaca Children's Choir on their tours.