Leonard Bernstein - Selected Anniversaries for Piano

Most of Bernstein's compositions for solo piano took the form of the Anniversary. Bernstein is not the first composer to have written a short homage to commemorate a special date; he perhaps took his inspiration from Virgil Thompson (1896-1989) and that composer's Portraits. Bernstein wrote a total of 29 Anniversaries spanning virtually the entirety of his creative life, from the early 1940s until the late 1980s. Each of the Anniversaries were written in honor of someone in Bernstein's life: mentors, friends, students, teachers. Except for those cited as