Dear Marc-André,

I begged and pleaded for Hyperion to keep this disc under wraps. But now that it’s released, all of us composer/pianists have no choice but to go out of business.

Isn’t it enough for you simply to be the world’s most proficient pianist? Do you also have to compose amazingly well for your instrument, and rewardingly so? Must you serve up some of the most witty, charming, entertaining and devastatingly effective piano music of your generation?

It’s a good thing Alkan isn’t alive, because he’d hate that your C minor Etude dispatches all of his stylistic fingerprints in four minutes, and with far more point and humour than that composer’s half-hour huffings and puffings manage. Not being satisfied with Godowsky rolling two Chopin etudes into one, you have the audacity to shoehorn all three A minor Chopin etudes into a two-minute-fifteen-second time-slot, with extraordinary sleight of hand and sleight of ear. How dare you transform Paganini’s sacrosanct La campanella into the keyboard equivalent of a Bugs Bunny cartoon, and wind up making a Gramophone critic laugh! What business do you have writing more peppy, scintillating fugues than truly serious, real composers these days?

That A flat minor one you wrote when you weren’t even 30, for instance? Even when you compose in a lighter vein, leaving out the hundreds of notes none but you can play to your effortless and refined specifications, why must your tunes and harmonies be so damn sophisticated yet accessible at the same time? After all, contemporary music is supposed to be angry and bleak. If your Theme and Variations supposedly represent a man in love, shouldn’t they foam at the mouth and self-indulge, rather than make their points with heartfelt lyricism and perfect proportions? Furthermore, what serious composer writes clear, easy-to-read and smile-inducing booklet annotations, rather than a theoretical tome with a million footnotes?

But since you seem to be a nice guy, and deserve all of your success, I hope your new disc sells millions. After all, no piano music lover can afford to miss it.

Yours truly,

Jed Distler