Music: Pianist Michael Stephen Brown at Alice Tully Hall

Performer-composer Michael Stephen Brown is a bit of a New York archetype: a fairly good-looking guy with nice eyeglasses and slightly messed up hair. He’s like someone you might see pondering produce at Whole Foods. But actually, there’s nothing typical about him.

Dressed in a stylishly cut velvet jacket and wearing very jazzy socks, Brown prefaced several of his pieces at Alice Tully Hall tonight with witty anecdotes about his travails during the pandemic, including one instance when the pianist damaged the pinky on his left hand. This caused him to seek out compositions for the right hand only. “I found about 10 in all of history,” he confessed. This led him to write his own composition, “Breakup Etude for the Right Hand Alone,” which he played tonight with his customary virtuosity. We didn’t miss the left hand one bit.

The program was a feast of delights—think of it as a meal including all your favorites: among them, Ravel’s “Mirroirs” and Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” suite, as arranged not only by Sergei Rachmaninoff but by Brown himself.

Charming and indefatigable, MSB had the audience in stitches—mind you, as many stitches as a stolid Chamber Music Society audience can find itself in. But really, how can you not at least smile at a joke about spending lonely Saturday nights during the pandemic emailing German libraries to find music by Delphine von Schauroth, an obscure German pianist from 1830. Hey…we’ve all been there, right?

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