Lesson 86: Performance Preparation, Part 1 — Program Building

Build a 45-minute recital program from pieces you already know.
Order the program so the audience's attention curve matches the music's intensity curve.

A recital is not a list of pieces. It is one long piece made of smaller ones.

Program building is choosing which pieces, in which order, for which audience.

The 45-minute envelope

A standard recital first half is three or four pieces with planned silences, totalling 40–45 minutes. Stopwatch each candidate at performance tempo:

Loeillet D minor sonata — ~12 minutes.
Handel HWV 360 — ~13 minutes.
Van Eyck Doen Daphne (theme + three variations) — ~8 minutes.
Bach Brandenburg 4 movement — ~5 minutes.

Ordering the program

Minutes 0–5: alert, settling in.
Minutes 5–15: peak engagement — put the strongest piece here.
Minutes 15–25: attention fades unless the music holds it.
Minutes 25–40: recovery if the program varies; collapse if not.

Use the first piece to settle the room; use the last to send them home with a single memorable gesture.

Key relationships

Same key back to back sounds monochromatic; unrelated keys sound disjointed. The middle path:

Relative minor / major (G minor → B-flat major) — same signature, contrasting affects.
Dominant / tonic (D major → G major) — a sense of resolution.
Mediant (C major → A minor) — a colour shift without a tonal break.
Distant keys (C major → F-sharp minor) — deliberate ruptures, best between halves.

Period contrasts

One Renaissance work (van Eyck, Playford dance).
One canonical Baroque sonata (Handel, Telemann).
One late-Baroque or galant work (Loeillet, Bach).
Optional: one contemporary work (Linde, Hirose) to close.

Worked example — a 40-minute program

Van Eyck: Doen Daphne — 8 minutes; settles the room.
Handel: Sonata in G minor, HWV 360 — 13 minutes; the heart of the program, at peak attention.
Loeillet of Ghent: Sonata in D minor, Op. 1 No. 1 — 12 minutes; the French counterweight.
Bach: Brandenburg 4, second movement — 5 minutes; the closing showpiece.

Forty minutes of music plus ~five of between-piece time, with contrast across keys, national styles, and periods.

Practice

Build a program from your repertoire, time each piece at performance tempo, and adjust until the envelope and the attention curve align.

Now play these

The four worked-example pieces are the recommended candidates; otherwise treat any four from your repertoire as a draft.

When you have written a 40–45 minute recital program with timed pieces, ordering that respects the attention curve, and contrast across keys and periods, move on to Lesson 87.