If you were a musician and your death was imminent, what piece of music would you like to cover before you die? Maybe you'd want to play a Sex Pistols track on the guitar, or perhaps try mastering a trumpet solo by Dizzy Gillespie?
Pianist Etsko Tazaki asked herself this question and answered it. She'll be performing masterpieces by 19th-century composers — Frederic Chopin, Robert Schumann and Franz Liszt — at a recital this weekend in Tokyo.
It won't be an impossible feat for the 77-year-old musician. She has, after all, done something similar before. Tazaki completed a challenging three-part series of recitals titled "Legacy — The Last Piano Works of Brahms, Beethoven, Schubert," which she first performed in 1997, after recovering from an illness that temporarily paralyzed the left side of her body. After tackling "Legacy" again in 2015, she started to think about what it meant to leave a legacy of her own.