Blog Type: Program Archive
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PROGRAM NOTES: PAUL LEWIS
Johann Sebastian Bach Partita No. 1 in B flat major BWV 825 The partita, in late Baroque parlance, was just another name for a dance suite, a multi-movement work made up of the four canonical dance forms—allemande, courante, sarabande & gigue—with the occasional addition of a prelude at the beginning and optional fancier dances called…
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PROGRAM NOTES: FLORIAN BOESCH AND MIAH PERSSON
The Songs of Robert Schumann Robert Schumann was a composer steeped in literature. His compositions bear the dual imprint of both German musical and literary Romanticism. Literature was the family business, one might say, as his father, August Schumann, was both a publisher and a bookseller in Zwickau, Saxony, where the composer grew up. He…
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PROGRAM NOTES: HARRIET KRIJGH & MAGDA AMARA
Felix Mendelssohn Cello Sonata No. 2 Op. 58 Mendelssohn’s second sonata for cello and piano reveals him as the Classical-Romantic hybrid that he was. An effortless practitioner of Classical etiquette in the construction of symmetrically balanced phrases, he eagerly took part in the Romantic age’s fascination with tonal colour and virtuoso keyboard writing. This sonata…
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PROGRAM NOTES: BENJAMIN BEILMAN & YEKWON SUNWOO
Franz Schubert Sonata in A major D574 The adolescent Schubert was a busy young man indeed. Fresh from single-handedly inventing the 19th-century German art song (the Lied) at the tender age of 17, he subsequently developed a teenage crush on the violin which in the space of 18 months moved him to compose no less…
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PROGRAM NOTES: DOVER QUARTET & AVI AVITAL
Sulkhan Tsintsadze Six Miniatures for String Quartet and Mandolin (arr. Ohan Ben-Ari) The Soviets promoted the ideal of music rooted in the traditions of their native soil and in this regard it would be hard to find a composer more congenial to Soviet ideals than Sulkhan Tsintsadze, one of the leading composers of the Soviet…
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PROGRAM NOTES: WINTERLUDE – SUPER SUNDAY WITH JEAN-GUIHEN QUEYRAS & ALEXANDER MELNIKOV
Robert Schumann Fünf Stücke im Volkston Op. 102 The late 1840s saw Schumann take up “house music” in a big way. This does not mean that he began to DJ at raves, playing dance music with repetitive drum tracks and synthesized basslines. Rather, he had a productive period composing music specifically designed for the home…
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PROGRAM NOTES: WINTERLUDE – SUPER SUNDAY WITH ALEXANDER MELNIKOV
Sergei Rachmaninoff Variations on a Theme of Chopin Op. 22 Chopin’s funereal, passacaglia-like Prelude in C minor from his collection of 24 Preludes Op. 28 provides the theme for Rachmaninoff’s first large-scale work for solo piano, his Variations on a Theme of Chopin, completed in 1903. Taking as his point of departure the prelude’s hymn-like…
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PROGRAM NOTES: WINTERLUDE – SUITE SATURDAY WITH JEAN-GUIHEN QUEYRAS
A Bit of History Few scholars doubt that Western music was better off for the release of a certain “Bach, Johann Sebastian” from the county jail in Weimar where he had languished, in unsuitable company, for the better part of a month in the autumn of 1717. Court organists can be a stroppy crew at…
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PROGRAM NOTES: JOYCE DIDONATO WITH IL POMO D’ORO CHAMBER ORCHESTRA
WAR, PEACE and BAROQUE OPERA The lust for war, the longing for peace: emotions such as these lie at the extremes of human experience. What better place to explore them than in the luridly violent, yet touchingly pathos- filled world of Baroque opera, where chaos reigns in the personal lives of kings and queens, stand-…
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PROGRAM NOTES: BEHZOD ABDURAIMOV
Antonio Vivaldi Siciliana in D minor (arr. J. S. Bach and Alfred Cortot) Nothing could be more Baroque than an arrangement of an arrangement. The Baroque was a period in music history in which music travelled freely between instruments and instrumental ensembles. Bach’s Organ Concerto No. 5 for solo organ BWV 596, composed sometime…
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PROGRAM NOTES: ANNA FEDOROVA
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Fantasia in D minor K. 397 Mozart’s D minor Fantasia is a bundle of mysteries; an intriguing sound-puzzle for the listener but a labyrinthine minefield of interpretive choices for the pianist. Mere slavish attention to the details of the printed score—the motto and creed of historically informed pianism—risks missing the point entirely in a…
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PROGRAM NOTES: ISTVÁN VÁRDAI
Felix Mendelssohn Variations Concertantes Op. 17 Felix was not the only musician in the Mendelssohn family. His older sister Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel (1805-1847) was a prodigiously talented pianist and composer, although she chose marriage over a public career, and his younger brother Paul Mendelssohn (1812-1874) was no slouch as a cellist, to judge by the…
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PROGRAM NOTES: THE DANISH STRING QUARTET
Johann Sebastian Bach Well-Tempered Clavier II Fugue No. 7 in E-flat major BWV 876 (arr. Mozart) In 1782 Mozart’s patron, Baron Gottfried van Swieten, showed the composer a number of manuscripts of the works of Johann Sebastian Bach and encouraged him to make string arrangements for performance at the Baron’s regular series of Sunday afternoon…
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PROGRAM NOTES: KSENIJA SIDOROVA
The Concert Accordion Early Beginnings The accordion has for centuries been associated with music of a light or popular nature. Its portability, full harmonic texture and penetrating, reedy timbre have made it the ideal mini-orchestra for country dances and the perfect one-man house band for city cafés and music halls. The very sound of…
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PROGRAM NOTES: IAN BOSTRIDGE & WENWEN DU
Gustave Mahler Three Des Knaben Wunderhorn Songs The collection of German folk poetry published between 1805 and 1808 under the title Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth’s Magic Horn) had an enormous influence on the development of German lyric poetry and song in the 19th century, and the artless simplicity of these verses was particularly attractive…
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PROGRAM NOTES: BRYN TERFEL & NATALIA KATYUKOVA
Idris Lewis Cân yr arad goch (Ceiriog) The Welsh poet John Hughes (1832-1887), who took the bardic name Ceiriog, is known as the “Robert Burns of Wales.” Like the great Scottish poet, he sought to express his love for his homeland through poems written in the simple, sincere language of the common people, drawing upon…
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PROGRAM NOTES: SCHUBERTIADE PERFORMANCE 3
Sonata in A major D959 Schubert’s penultimate piano sonata was one of three written in the summer of 1828, just months before his death. This is a pianistically challenging work of unusually wide emotional range. Its moods run the gamut from the heroic to the playful, featuring outbursts of musical vehemence that alternate with moments…
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PROGRAM NOTES: SCHUBERTIADE PERFORMANCE 2
Fantasie in F minor for piano four hands D940 Schubert’s Fantasie in F minor for piano duet, composed in 1828, is similar in structure to the composer’s ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy of 1822. Both are laid out in one continuous movement of four sonata-like sections played without interruption, comprising an opening Allegro, a slow movement, a scherzo…
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PROGRAM NOTES: SCHUBERTIADE PERFORMANCE 1
Sonata in C minor D958 Of the three last sonatas Schubert wrote just before his death in 1828, it is the Sonata in C minor that most reveals him as Beethovenian, not just in his choice of key, synonymous with Beethoven’s most turbulent musical thoughts, but more tellingly in the restless energy and propulsive forward…
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PROGRAM NOTES: MARK PADMORE & PAUL LEWIS
The age of the German lied, an art-song for solo voice with piano accompaniment, extends from the first songs of Schubert (1814) to the last songs of Hugo Wolf (1897). Its emergence in the early part of the 19th century was strongly influenced by literary Romanticism, and it is not a coincidence that lyric poems…