George Perle's affection for the piano began in childhood, when he first heard the instrument: he speaks with precise recall of the very moment when he became entranced at age of six listening to the first of the Trois nouvelles etudes of Chopin. While he has created a rich and important list of works in nearly every medium except opera over the past half-century, he has composed more for the piano (in both its solo and chamber roles) than for any other instrument. His keyboard canon now includes a dozen etudes in two collections, one set of preludes, a suite, two brief sonatas and a sonatina, a variety of individual pieces, and two large chamber works which prominently feature the piano (the Concertino and Serenade No. 3). In 1986, Perle received the Pulitzer Prize in music and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship— honors confirming his belated emergence as one of today's most distinguished composers.

This disc features one of Perle's earliest surviving compositions Pantomime, Interlude and Fugue (1937). Also included are his 1971 Fantasy-Variations, which combine an improvisational (but precisely notated) musical rhetoric with a more tightly structured variation format; Six New Etudes (1984), a companion set to Perle's immensely successful Six Etudes of 1976 (recorded by Bradford Gowen on NW 304); Suite in C (1970), and the fiendishly difficult Short Sonata (1964).