Fantasies & Delusions: Music For Solo Piano

By TERRY TEACHOUT

So what's the Piano Man been up to lately? Writing classical music. Billy Joel's latest CD is a collection of 10 pretty solo-piano miniatures with such earnest titles as Invention in C Minor and Fantasy (Film Noir). Unlike Sir Paul McCartney's elephantine blunderings into the concert hall, these pieces are modest in scale, as well as unabashedly romantic, and pianist Richard Joo plays them as if they were spun gold. Alas, they sound like the work of a promising student so in love with Chopin and Liszt that he has yet to find his own voice. A for effort, though.

--T.T.