Daniel Adam Maltz tours with his own fortepiano, and this month he will perform in Spray, Baker City and Joseph.

Musician Daniel Adam Maltz specializes in playing the fortepiano, essentially an early version of the pianos familiar to us today.

The instrument Maltz plays has 61 keys, as opposed to the 88 on a modern piano. Maltz’s fortepiano is similar to the ones composers like Mozart and Beethoven played as they wrote their keyboard music. It has a lighter tone than a bigger piano, he said, and it’s better suited for the smaller venues where he likes to perform.

“They’re much more intimate instruments” than today’s pianos, he said, which have been built to produce enough sound to fill today’s 2,000-seat concert halls. But much of the music Mozart and Beethoven and their contemporaries wrote in the 17th and early 18th centuries was intended to be performed in smaller settings.

If you’re a fortepiano specialist like Maltz who likes to tour, however, you have a problem to solve: Many of the smaller venues where he likes to play — such as those in the three Eastern Oregon cities where he will perform this month — don’t have a ready supply of fortepianos.

So Maltz brings along his own fortepiano. It could be worse: His instrument weighs just 200 pounds, as compared to a grand piano, which can tip the scales at 1,400 pounds.

“This year, my tour is going to bring me into more than 70 cities, and I travel and bring my instrument to every one,” said Maltz, who’s based in Vienna. “Definitely a lot of work.”

But it pays off, he said, in his quest to bring the keyboard music he loves to audiences that likely haven’t heard the music performed in the way that the composers meant it to be played. Other musicians play the fortepiano, but Maltz said he may be the only one who tours extensively with the instrument.

People who know the Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven pieces he’s performing on the tour will have the chance to hear them in a different way, he said. And folks who may not be familiar with the works — but who may equate classical music with stuffy and formal concert halls — could be surprised by its accessibility.

Maltz said he wants the music he performs to be “as approachable as possible. And (that’s) actually much more in line with how music would have been historically experienced” — played in parlors or other cozy settings.

That’s also why Maltz loves to interact with audiences — explaining the fortepiano, talking about the music he’s performing during the concert and inviting attendees to take a closer look at the instrument afterward.

For his program in Eastern Oregon, Maltz is performing music by Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven, but, for the most part, he said, they’re “off-the-beaten-path works.” The first half is all Mozart, with the Rondo in A minor and a late Sonata in F major — selections that Maltz called “deeply philosophical works, deeply emotional and satisfying, definitely a side of Mozart that people haven’t heard before.”

After intermission, he’ll turn to a pair of Haydn sonatas, one in A major and one in D major; the A major sonata is infrequently performed, but not so the D major sonata, which Maltz called one of Haydn’s “most crowd-pleasing works.”

Maltz will wrap it up with a performance of Beethoven’s single-movement “Andante favori,” a work that showcases the pianist’s goal of blowing the dust off these famed composers to demonstrate the humanity that still lives in the music.

“You know, Beethoven lived and loved and had unrequited love quite famously,” Maltz said. “And he puts all of that into this piece of music, about this relationship with this woman; they loved each other, but they couldn’t be together.” (The woman, a countess, could not marry Beethoven, a commoner.)

In the piece, Maltz said, a listener can hear it all, “the longing, the loving, the despair, that transcendence and acceptance. It’s all such tangible, effective music.”

“These composers are more than just dusty old figures in a book,” he said. “They were flesh-and-blood human beings, with all of the same emotions that life throws at everyone, and they put this into their music to communicate with us today.”

Concerts

SPRAY

May 22, 6 p.m., The Spray General Store. Admission: free

BAKER CITY

May 24, 6 p.m., Churchill School, 3451 Broadway St.

Tickets: $18 in advance at churchillbaker.com or $25 at the door (free for ages 15 and younger who attend with a paid adult)

JOSEPH

May 26, 7 p.m., Josephy Center for Arts and Culture

Tickets: $20 at josephy.org