Donald Isler made his debut in
Carnegie Recital Hall (now Joan and Sanford L. Weill Recital Hall) in 1980 performing
Handel's Chaconne in G major,
Mozart's Piano Sonata No. 10 in C major,
Beethoven's Bagatelles Op. 126,
Bártok's Romanian Folk Dances for piano, and
Chopin's Piano Sonata No. 3 in B minor, Op. 58. He has gone on to perform at
Alice Tully Hall at
Lincoln Center in New York, at the
Dame Myra Hess Memorial Concert Series in
Chicago, and many other concert halls in the
United States, as well as in
England. His concert appearances have been well received by critics, such as the April 22, 1986, concert of
Schnabel's works and piano sonatas by
Franz Schubert and Ludwig van Beethoven at
Symphony Space in New York, performed as a tribute to Artur Schnabel. His CDs have been featured several times on the prestigious radio program "Reflections from the Keyboard" of
NYPR's classical music station
WQXR-FM, as well as on "The Piano Matters" of
WWFM – The Classical Network. In 2017, he appeared on another WWFM program, "Between the Keys", where he was interviewed about his teacher,
Bruce Hungerford, who died in a car accident. He has lectured on the music of Artur Schnabel at the International Keyboard Institute and Festival and at
Mannes College of Music, wrote the foreword for a new edition of Schnabel's Dance Suite for Piano, and was interviewed about it on the blog "New York Pianist". Isler is the founder of the KASP Records label, which has produced fourteen CDs (as of 2021). Among them are his recordings of Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert,
Robert Schumann, and
Johannes Brahms, as well as lesser known but significant works by
Louis Spohr (1784–1859) and Artur Schnabel (1882–1951), such as the premiere recordings of Spohr's Piano Sonata in A-flat major Op. 125 and Schnabel's Dance Suite for Piano, as well as Schnabel's Seven Piano Pieces from 1947. Another CD with Donald Isler contains a recording of the important piano works of the American composer Louis Pelosi: 37 Canons, Inventions and Fugues. A
DVD released by KASP contains the only known videotaped performance by Bruce Hungerford (with Beethoven's
Piano Concerto No. 4). Isler writes concert reviews regularly, primarily in the "Classical Music Guide" He also writes a blog on
Facebook entitled "Isler's Insights" which features articles on music and musicians, the piano, and teaching. == Recordings ==