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Category Archives: Program Notes

PROGRAM NOTES: KIRILL GERSTEIN

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Johann Sebastian Bach
English Suite no. 6 in D minor, BWV 811

Bach’s Partitas, English Suites and French Suites – six of each – collectively rank among the glories of the keyboard literature. Each is a four-part sequence of dance movements, all in the same key but varied by rhythm, tempo and mood: Allemande, Courante, Sarabande, and Gigue. Each has a different national origin, respectively German, French, Spanish and English/Irish. To this basic framework additional movements, usually of French origin (Minuet, Gavotte, Bourrée, Passepied, etc.) are found between the Sarabande and Gigue. These dance movements are generally in two-part form, with each half repeated. An imposing Prelude introduces each of the Partitas and English Suites.

The moniker “English” Suites is a misnomer. Bach did not so designate them, and even if he had, they are stylistically more French than English in their orientation, taking as their point of departure the keyboard style of French harpsichord music.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, arranged by Ferruccio Busoni
Giga, Bolero e Variazione

Like Franz Liszt two generations before him, Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924) spent the earlier part of his career on the concert circuit as one of the most sensational piano virtuosos of his time. Also like Liszt, he arranged and transcribed numerous works for piano solo. In 1909, he published four “books” collectively called An die Jugend (each lasts only four or five minutes) of his freely adapted transcriptions of other composers’ music. The third of these was based on the music of Mozart. The three sections are played without pause. The gigue is derived from Mozart’s Gigue K. 574, the “bolero” is actually a free fantasia on the fandango (a courtly Spanish dance) in the third act of The Marriage of Figaro, while the virtuosic variation is developed from the gigue material.

Oliver Knussen
Ophelia’s Last Dance

Ophelia’s Last Dance is a nine-minute work commissioned for Kirill Gerstein by The Gilmore International Keyboard Festival in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The pianist gave the world premiere there on May 3, 2010. When he gave the New York premiere a few days later, Allan Kozinn wrote in the New York Times that “it begins with a dash of light-textured sparkle and a gently chromatic line, and as it grows more emotionally charged, its language veers toward neo-Romanticism rather than the harmonic density of Mr. Knussen’s earlier music.”

This piece is an expansion of an idea that dates back to 1974 and was initially intended to become part of Knussen’s Third Symphony, which occupied him throughout the 1970s. Fragments then went into his Ophelia Dances, Book I (1975) for chamber ensemble, and finally found their way into the present work for solo piano, thus “continuing the dance in various ways,” as the composer says.

Carl Maria von Weber
Invitation to the Dance, Op. 65

Weber composed his brilliant Aufforderung zum Tanze (Invitation to the Dance) as a solo piano piece in 1819. It may well have been the first concert waltz (one conceived specifically for listening rather than for dancing), but its popularity was ensured through choreographic interpretation, beginning with Berlioz’ orchestration for the Paris Opera in 1841. The “invitation” portion lasts only a small fraction of the entire work. According to Weber’s own explanation, the invitation by the gentleman is made to the lady in the opening passage, followed by her demure responses and eventual acceptance. The dance is a series of contrasting waltzes, during which the dancers declare their love. At the end he thanks her. They part. Silence.

Schubert-Liszt
Soirées de Vienne no. 6: Valse-Caprice d’après Schubert (Allegro con spirit)

Schubert wrote an enormous number of little dance pieces for piano – waltzes, galops, Ländler, Deutsche, écossaises and minuets – to the tune of nearly four hundred. From this vast treasure trove Liszt chose nine waltzes and filtered them through the alembic of his own musical personality, calling them Soirées de Vienne, or Valse-Caprices. Biographer Bryce Morrison notes that Liszt was attracted to Schubert’s waltzes because of “their mix of both subtle and direct qualities,” which resulted in Liszt “tinting their exuberance and melancholy with a stylized command peculiarly his own.” Liszt was obviously fond of these works, first published in 1852, as he performed them often. The sixth is by far the most popular of the Soirées, with its sturdy opening theme, its echt Viennese lilt and its numerous passages of scintillating filigree decorating Schubert’s charming melodic lines.

Robert Schumann
Carnaval, Op. 9

Preambule
Pierrot
Arlequin – Valse noble
Eusebius
Florestan
Coquette
Replique
Papillons
Lettres dansantes
Chiarina
Chopin
Estrella
Reconnaissance – Pantalon et Columbine –
Valse allemande
Paganini
Aveu
Promenade
Pause
March des Davidsbundler contre les Philistins

Carnaval consists of 22 musical vignettes all constructed from three tiny motifs whose notes are derived from the name of a little German town, Asch. (Today it is As, just over the border in the Czech Republic, near Bayreuth, Germany). This was where Schumann’s current flame, Ernestine von Fricken, came from. Schumann met Ernestine at the Leipzig home of the piano teacher, Friedrich Wieck, with whom she lodged and studied piano. Matters progressed to the point where Schumann and Ernestine became engaged in December of 1834. That month he began writing the music that became Carnaval.

As any student of music history knows, Schumann jilted Ernestine in favor of Wieck’s daughter Clara. But for the moment, the 24-year-old composer was infatuated with Ernestine. He discovered that the four letters of Ernestine’s birthplace, Asch, were also in his own. (In German terms, S=Es (E-flat), and H=B-natural.) The coincidence seemed to Schumann like fate knocking at the door. He loved puzzles, ciphers and numerical symbolism. This provided just the stimulus he needed to begin a new, large-scale composition. Schumann arranged the Asch motto into two additional variants – S-C-H-A and AS-C-H (As=A-flat) – and later inserted all three mottos into the score between the eighth and ninth numbers (between “Réplique” and “Papillons”) as double whole notes, calling them “Sphinxes,” meant only to be seen, not heard. Every piece in Carnaval except the “Préambule” is based on an ASCH motif, which usually appears at the opening and is then developed in ways both obvious and obscure.

 The autobiographical element of Carnaval goes further. Characters from Schumann’s life – both real and imagined – are portrayed, including his wife-to-be Clara (“Chiarina”), Estrella (“Ernestine”), Chopin and Paganini. Then there are the two aspects of Schumann’s musical personality: the quiet dreamer as reflected in Eusebius, and the passionate intensity of Florestan. Figures from the commedia dell’arte of Italian carnivals make appearances: Pierrot, Arlequin, Pantalon and Columbine. Other images of a masked ball at carnival time (the pre-Lenten season) make fleeting appearances. The final number portrays the rout of cultural philistines by the band of David, marching defiantly in 3/4 metre.

Program notes by Robert Markow, 2012.

PROGRAM NOTES: ANDREAS BRANTELID & SHAI WOSNER

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Claude Debussy: Sonata for Cello and Piano

Few works of Claude Debussy (1862-1918) bear generic titles like symphony, quartet, concerto or sonata. Most have descriptive or evocative titles like Printemps, Jeux, Claire de lune, La mer, Nocturnes or Ibéria. Since chamber music tends, more than any other, to rely on the traditional forms of classical structure, it is scarcely surprising to learn that Debussy composed so little in this category. Most of the exceptions are found either in works of his student years or from the end of his life, when he looked more to Classical models and absolute music for his inspiration. Hence we find him in 1915 embarking on a project to compose six sonatas, each for a different combination of instruments. Only three were actually written, as Debussy’s health was rapidly declining. The first of these was the Cello Sonata. The second was for flute, viola and harp; the third (his last composition) for violin and piano.

On the title page of the original published edition appear the words “Claude Debussy, Musicien français,” no doubt a pointed indication that his sonatas were not going to be cast in the time-honoured mold of the German masters, but would follow a different path, one not characterized by standard exposition, development and recapitulation sections. It is more the classical spirit Debussy is invoking, not its organizational procedures. “The proportions and form of the Sonata were almost classical in the true sense of the word,” he wrote.

Except for the first three measures, the cello plays nearly continuously throughout the Prologue. Debussy took care to advise that “the piano must not fight the cello, but accompany it.” The principal theme is heard as a lyrical, descending line in the cello. This theme returns at the end of the Prologue after a middle section in which the piano momentarily assumes the principal role. Although the sonata is nominally in D minor, the flavour is strongly modal, perhaps in keeping with Debussy’s presumed intent that the sonata evoke the character of old Italian commedia dell’arte.

The two main movements are played without pause. The Sérénade throws out bizarre whorls of sound much in the manner of a moonstruck, crazed harlequin careening about the stage. Sarcasm, banter, and an air of the fantastique are created through the use of special effects for the cello including pizzicato, glissando, sur la touche (bowing over the fingerboard) and flautando (delicate, flute-like sounds).

The Finale, like the previous movements, leaves the cellist scarcely a moment’s rest, but the piano writing is far denser than in the Sérénade. Cello and piano engage in exuberant dialogue and reckless antics, pausing only for a moment of quiet reflection before resuming their drive to the finish.

The first performance of the Cello Sonata was given in the fall of 1915 by Joseph Salmon with the composer at the piano.

Ludwig van Beethoven: Cello Sonata no. 5 in D major, Op. 102, no. 2

Beethoven wrote only five sonatas for cello and piano, but like the 32 sonatas for solo piano, they span most of his creative life. They were written in three spurts of activity: two (Op. 5) in 1796 at the very outset of his career; one (Op. 69) in 1808, squarely in the midst of his career; and two more (Op. 102) in 1815 when he was moving into what musicologists would call his Late Period. As with so many other works by Beethoven, his cello sonatas are of pioneering importance in form, content and the advancement of instrumental technique.

The two sonatas of Op. 102 were Beethoven’s principal works from the year 1815. They were written for Joseph Linke, cellist of the Schuppanzigh Quartet which had premiered many of Beethoven’s string quartets. These works are often regarded as the portals through which Beethoven entered his Late Period. The English scholar Martin Cooper notes that the sonatas of Op. 102 “show a combination of characteristics which do not appear in any earlier works of Beethoven’s with anything like the same consistency of concentration.” These characteristics include the prevalent interest in counterpoint, the use of trills and other ornamental devices as ends in themselves, syncopation, frequent and abrupt contrasts of pitch, bold harmonic progressions, and exploration into new realms of formal design.

The D-major sonata’s impulsive force and scope are announced in the opening bars, which feature a five-note figure that will pervade the entire first movement. Both principal themes reveal soaring lyricism, the first dramatic, the second more vocal in style. Only in the coda does the headlong rush of events subside.

The sublime, deeply introspective second movement is a long-breathed lamentation in D minor that exploits the cello’s most sonorous range. It is one of the most moving slow movements in all Beethoven, comparable to some of the utterances of the great final piano sonatas and string quartets. Its alternation of simple chordal writing and richly embroidered figuration also link it to the composer’s transcendental slow movements of his Late Period.

The Finale is no less astonishing. Here, for the first time, Beethoven incorporates a full-fledged, four-part fugue into an instrumental work, a practice he was to continue almost obsessively in his later works. It is announced in the cello, with the remaining three entries given to the piano. All the traditional fugal techniques are brought into play: statements and counterstatements, inversions, imitations, episodes and stretto. The fugue culminates in a flurry of scales and trills.

Zoltán Kodály: Cello Sonata, Op. 4

Kodály shares with Bartók the reputation for being one of the two greatest Hungarian composers of the twentieth century. Born just a year apart, they also shared during their lifetimes a deep common interest in music of their homeland, and conducted extensive scholarly research into music of the Hungarian gypsies and peasants in addition to that of surrounding countries. As such, they were among the first important ethnomusicologists. Into the sonata we hear today, Kodály poured the essence of his absorption with indigenous Hungarian folk music. To musicologist Harry Halbreich, “the cello seems to speak Hungarian.”

As Kodály had studied the cello as a youth, it is not surprising to learn that he wrote generously for this instrument. For cello and piano his catalogue includes, in addition to the work on this program, a Romance lyrique, a Sonatina and a Hungarian Rondo (originally with orchestra). For unaccompanied cello there is a capriccio and a sonata, and for violin and cello a Duo.

When Kodály began working on the sonata for cello and piano in 1909, he intended it to be a three-movement work in the classical tradition, but he never completed more than the two movements we have today. Many years later, shortly before the two movements were published in 1923, Kodály made a last attempt to write a first movement, but, as he stated near the end of his life, “By 1921 my style had changed so much that I was no longer capable of recapturing the spirit of 1909.” Cellist Jenö Kerpely and pianist Béla Bartók gave the first performance of the two movements on May 17, 1910.

A rhapsodic air prevails in the opening movement as it unfolds in a series of juxtaposed sectional divisions. The first sounds are for the cello alone, a rising motif that will prove to be a key structural element in both movements of the sonata. (Commentators like to note that it is the same motif that opens the slow movement of Brahms’s Double Concerto.) Its descending version is equally important.

In contrast to the darkly ruminative, moody Fantasia, the exuberant second movement is powerfully rhythmic and infused with the spirit of the dance. While most “unfinished” compositions lack endings (Schubert’s Eighth and Bruckner’s Ninth symphonies come to mind), Kodály’s Cello Sonata lacks a beginning. Yet, as in the case of the just-mentioned symphonies, the work seems complete despite its outward appearance as a torso. Kodály closes his sonata with a return to the opening of the Fantasia movement, now somewhat rewritten as if, with the passage of time, this material has now evolved into a new form. It makes for a most satisfying feeling of closure.

Johannes Brahms: Sonata for Cello and Piano no. 1 in E minor, Op. 38

Brahms’s choice of the cello as the piano’s partner for his first duo sonata is entirely appropriate in view of the composer’s predilection for warm, mellow, tenor-range instruments (clarinet and horn were also instruments he favored). Brahms wrote three movements in 1862, then put the work aside until 1865, when he wrote a finale. However, when the sonata was published in 1866, the composer suppressed the Adagio movement, leaving a sonata in three movements only.

Brahms dedicated the E-minor sonata to his friend Josef Gänsbacher, a cellist of modest talent. According to legend, on one occasion when Gänsbacher and Brahms were playing the sonata, Gänsbacher complained that the piano was drowning out the cello line, whereupon Brahms quipped “Lucky for you!”

Yet Gänsbacher was somewhat justified in his complaint, for there are unequivocally passages where the cello must struggle mightily to be heard above the thick textures and powerful sound of its partner. Balance problems aside, however, the opening movement is one of Brahms’s most impassioned statements, beginning with the gentle arch of the cello’s somber yet noble opening theme, passing to the robust second theme in B minor in which both instruments share equally, and to the radiant third theme in B major, heard first in the piano, then in the cello.

The second movement is entitled Allegretto quasi menuetto, but there is nothing “quasi” about this minuet. There is an almost antique charm to the courtly dance in Brahms’s treatment of it. Two pertinent observations about this movement are its absolute equality of cello and piano (Brahms even published the work as “Sonata for Piano with Cello,” not the other way around) and the delicate, introductory six-note motto that takes on an important role throughout the movement. It also becomes, in a different form, the basis of the flowing central Trio, where, in the words of Henry Cope Colles, Brahms “discards the primness [of the motto] and lets the little motif expand naturally into long, fluent phrases.”

The highly energetic finale takes its cue from Beethoven’s last cello sonata (heard earlier on this program) in its use of fugue in a duo sonata, but to an even greater extent, the movement is a tribute to Bach. The fugal subject strongly resembles that of Contrapunctus XIII from Bach’s Art of Fugue. To carry the Bach connection a step further, some listeners hear in the main theme of the first movement a resemblance to Contrapunctus III as well. But Brahms’s finale is not fugal throughout, for there are elements of sonata form as well, notably the use of a non-fugal second subject (yet derived from the fugue’s own countersubject!). Yet Brahms welds fugue and sonata form into a movement of structural integrity and sustained momentum. Even the concerto principle comes into play, with the two contending forces of cello and piano struggling mightily for supremacy as the sonata races to its tumultuous conclusion.

Program notes by Robert Markow

PROGRAM NOTES: ELIAS STRING QUARTET

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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: String Quartet no. 18 in A major, K. 464

This is the fifth of the six “Haydn” quartets – everyone a masterpiece – that Mozart wrote in the mid-1780s. The identification with Haydn derives from the older composer’s direct influence on his colleague in the matter of string quartet writing. Specific elements of this influence can be seen in the equal importance given to all four parts, and in the masterful contrapuntal, imitative, and rhythmic manipulation of motivic fragments throughout an entire movement. It was after a performance of this quartet, plus two others in the set, that Haydn made this oft-repeated remark to Mozart’s father: “Before God and as an honest man, I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name. He has taste and what is more, the most profound knowledge of composition.”

That “profound knowledge of composition” reveals itself everywhere in the quartet. In the first movement, both main subjects (the first of which contains no fewer than four motivic fragments) are developed contrapuntally almost immediately after being presented. In the Minuetto the opening subject consists of a rising lyrical element and a falling articulated one; these are immediately combined, superimposed on each other and developed accordingly. The movement is also remarkable for the expressive use of silences and for frequent and dramatic alternation of loud and soft. Characteristics like these pervade the quartet. But what gives this music its almost magical appeal is Mozart’s supreme ability to combine this high order of craftsmanship with artistic beauty, elegance of expression and a sense of a totally natural unfolding of musical events.

Leo Janáček: String Quartet no. 1 (Kreutzer Sonata)

Very few works of chamber music owe their inspiration to extramusical sources. Janáček’s String Quartet No. 1 is one of these. (Other well-known examples include Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, Smetana’s String Quartet No. 1 (From My Life) and Janáček’s String Quartet No. 2, entitled Intimate Pages.

Janáček, unlike most other composers, did not produce a string quartet until late in life (to be technically correct, he wrote a quartet during his student days in Vienna in 1880, but this has been lost). The First Quartet dates from 1923, when the composer was 69, the Second from 1928, the year of his death at age 74. The First Quartet’s subtitle refers to both a short novel by Tolstoy and a sonata for violin and piano by Beethoven. Both have relevance to Janáček’s quartet.

Tolstoy’s novella (1889) is the story of a married woman caught in the dilemma between remaining faithful to a man who treats her cruelly and having an affair with a violinist who adores her. The violinist, ironically, was introduced to the woman by her husband at a soirée during which Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata (No. 9, Op. 47) was performed. Tolstoy describes in detail the effect the music had on those present. Among other observations, the author believes music generally to be “one of the main intermediaries for encouraging adultery in our society.” At any rate, the husband returns unexpectedly early from a business trip several days later to find his wife and the violinist in passionate embrace. The “poor, exhausted, beaten, sorrow-worn woman” is thereupon murdered. Janáček’s compassion for this unfortunate woman found its way into artistic expression through his First String Quartet, which was given its premiere by the famed Bohemian Quartet on October 24, 1924 in Prague.

In preparing to write the quartet, Janáček annotated a copy of Tolstoy’s work with specific ideas about the relationship between the sonata and the novella. However, the composer made no effort to trace any kind of dramatic program in his quartet. Rather, it presents and expands emotional and psychological states to which various musico-dramatic touches have been added. To some listeners, the opening of the third movement of Janáček’s quartet is a veiled quote from the slow movement of Beethoven’s sonata.

One might assign specific themes to characters or moods, if one wishes, but it is the overall sense of theatre that makes the quartet such a compelling work. Not one of its four movements is in sonata form. Instead, motifs and rhythmic devices are presented, repeated, juxtaposed and combined in constantly changing tempos and metres. In a work lasting less than twenty minutes in performance, there are no fewer than 61 changes of tempo and 25 changes of metre. Over and above all this we find liberal use of such special effects as sul ponticello (playing on the bridge of the instrument, which produces an eerie, ghostly sound), harmonics and ostinatos in addition to more traditional effects like trills, pizzicatos and muted passages.

Robert Smetana, in his introduction to the score published by Hudebni Matice, recommends that we approach this music “as a passionate confession of the principle and power of emotional relations between man and woman in life and in art, to grasp the music not as decor, but as an integral part of life, a part that is often excessively painful, and to hear in it the intense personal participation of the composer.”

Felix Mendelssohn: String Quartet no. 2 in A minor, Op. 13

Three great composers wrote a great string quartet in A minor within just a few years of each other in the early nineteenth century: Beethoven (Op. 132), Schubert (No. 13, Op. 29; D 804) and Mendelssohn. But while Beethoven’s and Schubert’s quartets are among their last compositions, composed in 1824-1825, Mendelssohn’s is the work of a young man who has not even reached his maturity. He was eighteen when he wrote it. Although it is assigned No. 2, it was actually his first (not counting an even earlier, unnumbered composition), composed in 1827 but it was published second. The first performance was given in Paris on February 14, 1832.

Listeners will easily note a number of special features of this quartet. First and foremost, it is an astonishingly mature work for an eighteen-year-old. A composer twice or three times Mendelssohn’s age would have been proud to offer it as his own. But then, Mendelssohn had been writing music on this level at an even earlier age – the Octet and the Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream come readily to mind.

Mendelssohn’s quartet opens and closes in A major, which normally would lead us to call it a quartet “in A major.” But those opening and closing passages are only a prologue and epilogue framing the main body of a work in A minor (the second movement alone is in a different key). It is difficult to think of another multi-movement work that behaves like this.

Then there is the powerful influence of Beethoven’s late quartets which Mendelssohn obviously knew, even though they had been written but a few years earlier. This influence can be seen in the advanced harmonic language, tightly knit counterpoint, recitative passages and use of motivic fragments for developmental purposes. Another Beethovenian device is the use of a three-word question as the source of inspiration. The last movement of Beethoven’s quartet Op.135 has as its motto “Muss es sein?” (Must it be?). For Mendelssohn it was “Ist es wahr?” (Is it true?). But while Beethoven’s impetus came from a trivial incident involving payment of a fee, for the youthful Mendelssohn it was something more serious. He was all aflame over a young lady (we’re not sure who), who inspired him to set a song to a short poem, possibly by himself, possibly by a friend named Gustav Droyson (pen name J. N. Voss). “Is it true that you’ll always be waiting for me beneath the leafy path?” runs the opening line.

The quartet begins with a warmly consoling, richly scored, chorale-like passage that gives no hint of the emotional turmoil and contrapuntal displays about to be unleashed. It is the perfect foil. Near the end of this short passage Mendelssohn twice presents the “Ist es wahr?” motif (long-short-long), exactly as it appeared at the beginning of the song. Then a rumble from the viola, a few bars of “scurrying” for all four strings, and we’re off on a deeply troubled journey through a long, sonata-form movement pervaded by the “Ist es wahr?” motif. Its rhythm is everywhere, even if its melodic profile is not. As a further measure of the emotional heat of this movement, the second theme, announced by the first violin, is in E minor, not major, as would be the case in most any other sonata-form movement of the period. Here, incidentally, is one of the few moments where the “Ist es wahr?” rhythm is absent. The development section consists of an intense, at times almost violent working out of the “scurrying” figure and, to no one’s surprise by now, the rhythmic pattern of “Ist es wahr?”.

The spirit of Beethoven is nowhere more pronounced than in the adagio movement, with its soulful, hymnlike opening subject and aura of Innigkeit (inwardness). More Beethovenian influence is seen in the use of fugato (a short passage in fugal style but not a fully developed fugue) and in the highly advanced harmony of the central episode. Perhaps nowhere else did Mendelssohn ascend to such levels of expressive dissonance as he did in this movement.

The main theme of the Intermezzo has a folk-like simplicity to it, gently wistful, as if “smiling through the tears.” The movement’s central episode has the characteristic feathery lightness of touch we associate with the Mendelssohn of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Octet, though even here imitative counterpoint holds sway, even to the point of two different ideas – one lightly tripping, the other lyrical – bounced about simultaneously at one point.

The finale begins with one of Mendelssohn’s most daring and dramatic gestures – the equivalent of a recitative delivered by an impassioned operatic character, sung by the first violin to throbbing accompaniment from the other strings. It is a gesture Mendelssohn may well have learned from the analogous passage in Beethoven’s Ninth or his A-minor quartet (Op. 132). In fact, the similarity in both rhythm and melodic outline is remarkably close to the corresponding passage in Op. 132. Thereafter it returns in varied form three more times interspersed with fresh melodic ideas. The incisive, five-note pattern (three short, two long) that constitute the recitative’s rhythmic hallmark turn up again and again throughout the movement like a kind of musical genetic code. Again, as in the first movement, the second theme is in E minor, not E major.

Mendelssohn saves his greatest surprise for the end. The music seems to be hurtling toward a thrilling conclusion. The fourth recitative passage interrupts the proceedings, and we revert to the tranquil music that opened the quartet nearly half an hour ago. Here Mendelssohn expands that material into a postlude of 25 measures, exactly the length of the song that was the quartet’s raison d’être. It brings a satisfying sense of closure; “Ist es wahr?” has come full circle.

Programme notes by Robert Markow, 2012.

Program Notes: Murray Perahia

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J. S. Bach: French Suite no. 5 in G major, BWV 816

Bach’s Partitas, English Suites and French Suites – six of each – collectively rank among the glories of the keyboard literature. Each is a four-part sequence of dance movements, all in the same key but varied in rhythm, tempo and mood: Allemande, Courante, Sarabande, and Gigue. Each movement has a different national origin, respectively German, French, Spanish and English/Irish. To this basic framework additional movements, usually of French origin are found between the Sarabande and Gigue. These dance movements are generally in binary form, with each half repeated.

The French Suites were probably written sometime between 1717 and 1720 while Bach was serving as Kapellmeister and composer in the service of Duke Leopold of Anhalt at Cöthen. No reference to the moniker “French” is found in any of Bach’s surviving manuscripts. He called them simply Suites pour le clavecin; the designation is in French, but the “English” Suites (again, not Bach’s title) also bear French titles (Suites avec leurs préludes). The first reference to “French” Suites is found only in 1762, twelve years after Bach’s death, by the critic and theorist Friedrich W. Marpurg. Numerous musicologists and program annotators have attempted to determine just what is specifically “French” about these suites, but in the final analysis, the answer is “very little, if anything.”

The Fifth French Suite opens with an Allemande of uncommon graciousness and closes with a Gigue requiring great technical facility and a firm sense of rhythm. An Allemande characteristically consists of quietly flowing, continuous sixteenth-note motion, beginning with an upbeat, and moves in moderately slow quadruple (4/4) metre.

The lively Courante takes its name from the French courir (to run). This movement too is characterized by continuous motion, but is generally faster than the Allemande and is in triple metre.

The Sarabande, slowest of the movements, is stately, dignified, and full of elaborate embellishments to the simple melodic line. It is in triple metre, with the second beat of each measure heavily weighted.

The Gavotte in this suite is a bright and breezy piece, often found in collections for young pianists to play.

The Bourrée is a folk dance in quick duple metre and beginning with an upbeat. It originated in the Auvergne in the mid sixteenth century. Its name comes from bourrir, meaning to flap wings. Bourrées often come in pairs, with the second usually of contrasting character.

The rapid and brilliant Gigue, in lilting 6/8 metre, serves as the suite’s finale. Philipp Spitta, Bach’s first biographer, believed that “the hearer goes away with a sense of pleasant excitement.”

Ludwig van Beethoven: Sonata no. 27 in E minor, Op. 90

This sonata is one of the few in Beethoven’s canon of 32 in two movements only. In certain respects, it is a harbinger of the composer’s last work in the genre, the great Op. 111 in C minor (still eight years in the future), in that it contrasts a tempestuous, volatile movement in the minor tonality (E) with a calm, even serene one in the major. Even the first movement’s sonata form and peremptory opening gesture are analogous to those of Op. 111.

The strongly defined contrast between the two movements has an apocryphal biographical explanation. Beethoven dedicated the sonata to his aristocratic friend Count Moritz von Lichnowsky, who was engaged to be married. Presumably, the composer said that it depicted “a contest between head and heart,” which may have been Beethoven’s rough-humoured way of casting doubt on the suitability of the match. Some listeners like to hear the two movements as representing instead speech and song, or prose and poetry. Eric Blom suggests a more general scenario: “All that matters is that we have here two wonderfully contrasted movements which do suggest, in a way applicable to mankind at large, some sort of passionate quest attended by a satisfying discovery, some agitating problem followed by a calming solution.” Beethoven’s detailed performance directions for each movement indicate the care he took to ensure an emotionally committed execution: 1) “With animation, and with feeling and expression throughout”; 2) “Not too fast, and in a very singing manner.”

Johannes Brahms: Four Piano Pieces, Op. 119

The Four Piano Pieces Op. 119 are the last Brahms wrote for solo piano, and among his very last compositions. Each piece except the third is in ternary form, with a contrasting central section and with a return of the opening material now considerably modified and/or abridged. Within these general outlines Brahms lets his poetic imagination roam freely as he develops short, epigrammatic or enigmatic musical cells in some of his most personal and intimate compositions. Simplicity and concentration are the keynotes. Lionel Salter stated the case perfectly when he wrote: “Their brevity only serves to heighten the intensity of their feeling. It is as if the composer, at the end of his life, had compressed the essence of his musical and emotional thoughts into these miniatures.”

The choice of titles is largely capricious on Brahms’s part; there is little to distinguish the single “Rhapsody” from its companions entitled “Intermezzo.”

The delicate yet restlessly meandering first Intermezzo in B minor, with its muted, veiled colours, is followed by another featuring a contrasting central section tenderly evocative of a Viennese waltz. In the surprisingly lighthearted Intermezzo, the melody is found in an inner voice. The final piece also brings surprise, this time for the almost heroic quality it projects. Yet this is heroism thwarted, the Rhapsody ending not in triumph but in tragedy as the music takes a sudden shift into the minor mode during its dramatic final moments.

Franz Schubert: Sonata in A major, D. 664 (Op. 120)

Scholars lack definite evidence of its date and place of composition, but most are willing to grant that most likely Schubert wrote this sonata during the summer of 1819 while vacationing in Steyr in Upper Austria. He wrote to his brother Ferdinand that the surrounding countryside was “unimaginably lovely.” In similar terms he referred to the daughter of one of his hosts, Josefine von Koller, as being “very pretty [and] plays the piano well.” We know Schubert presented her with a sonata, and as biographer Brian Newbould notes, “the A-major is music of such wide-eyed youthful contentment that one could imagine it being a response to both the mountain scenery of Upper Austria and ‘a very pretty’ dedicatee.”

The work opens with one of Schubert’s most gracious melodies, one in which he takes obvious delight in spinning out to almost heavenly length. The second subject, hardly less enchanting, arrives soon and without preamble. Music theorists will note gleefully that it begins not in a contrasting key (one of the cardinal tenets of sonata form), but in the same key as the first (A major) before modulating to its “proper” key of the dominant (E major). Of course Schubert manages all this so naturally that hardly one listener in a thousand notices, let alone cares.

The central slow movement focuses insistently on a rhythmic pattern, one Schubert used often (a long followed by four short notes). This dreamy idyll is derived from a single theme Schubert expands into a perfectly proportioned structure.

The insouciant finale is again in sonata form, unremarkable aside from one glaring irregularity: the recapitulation begins not in the home key of A major but in the subdominant of D major. (Mozart too had done this in his “easy” Piano Sonata in C that every student learns.) The lyricism, blithe spirit and overall sense of contentment have led annotator Konrad Wolff to call this music “a Viennese waltz danced in heaven.”

Some years ago, when he was music critic for The Ottawa Citizen, the late Jacob Siskind wrote that “the difficulty with most of the music of Schubert, and this is especially true of his piano sonatas, is to reconcile the seeming simplicity of the structure and the endless flow of melody with the emotional tension generated by the provocative key relationships of the various sections. In lesser hands, the music can sound merely pretty, or puzzlingly disjointed. In the hands of one who has the emotional depths to identify completely with the mysteries of the music, these scores have the capacity to heal the deepest emotional wounds.”

Frederic Chopin: four works

Nowhere in Chopin’s output do the national pride, dignified grandeur and defiant power of Poland find greater expression than in the polonaises. The polonaise originated in the late sixteenth century as a stately processional dance in triple metre. But “when Chopin composed his Two Polonaises, Op. 26,” writes scholar Jim Samson, “he effectively created a new genre.” True, Chopin had written nearly a dozen while still living in Warsaw, but he did not see fit to publish any of them during his lifetime. After moving to Paris, “he redefined it in such a way,” continues Samson, “that any lingering association with the ceremonial dance piece would be dispelled. Instead, the polonaise became a powerful symbol of Poland, a proud evocation of past splendor transparently designed to draw attention to present oppression.”  Massive sonorities are conjured from the instrument, dynamic markings of ff and even fff are common, and the mood alternates frequently and dramatically between defiant grandeur and melting lyricism. All these qualities are found within the first moments of the Polonaise on this program.

Aside from Bach’s Well-tempered Clavier, Chopin’s Preludes are surely the most famous group of pieces conceived as an orderly traversal of the 24 major and minor keys. (There also exists a solitary additional Prelude, Op. 45.) Franz Liszt, always one to recognize the bold innovations of genius, praised Chopin’s Preludes as “analogous to those of a contemporary poet [Lamartine], which soothe the soul with golden dreams and raise it to ideal regions. …Everything is full of spontaneity, élan, bounce.” No. 8 is one of the longer preludes, but its texture remains constant from beginning to end. It is a three-layered affair, with the middle one most prominent (long-short), a non-stop flurry of even thirty-second notes in the uppermost level, and an equally unvarying series of three shorts and a long in the bass. A lesser composer might quickly have induced aural fatigue with such a formula; Chopin sustains interest with his sophisticated harmony and dynamic control.

What the symphony was to Haydn and the piano sonata to Beethoven, the mazurka was to Chopin – the genre that occupied him throughout his life, the one in which he left the most examples (nearly sixty), and the one that serves more than any other to trace his artistic development, what biographer Jeremy Siepmann calls “a kind of lifelong diary of his innermost spirit.” A dictionary definition of a mazurka might go something like this: A dance in triple metre, usually slower than a waltz, with its strongest accent shifted to the third (or less frequently the second) beat of the measure. But this would not do justice to its spirit. Here is how James Huneker put it: “Chopin took the framework of the national dance, developed it, enlarged it and hung upon it his choicest melodies, his most piquant harmonies. He breaks and varies the conventionalized rhythm in half a hundred ways, lifting to the plane of a poem the heavy footed peasant dance.” Op. 30, No. 4 is one of the more extended mazurkas and one of the finest. Its harmonic language is adventurous to the degree of being almost avant-garde, its melodic lines are richly ornamented with twists, turns and arpeggios, and its rhythm is highly sophisticated.

Chopin inherited Beethoven’s freedom of approach to the scherzo, and his own four magnificent examples for solo piano display the same variety, intensity of emotion and power of expression as Beethoven’s, resulting in music that is far from the lighthearted jests or jokes implied by their titles. In fact, as a group, the Chopin’s scherzos are often held up as some of his most virile and dramatically powerful creations. Liszt characterized Chopin’s scherzos as follows: “Muted passion and suppressed rage are encountered in passage after passage of the scherzos, portraying distilled exasperation, dominated by a sense of hopelessness, now ironic, now proud.” In the C-sharp minor Scherzo of 1839, passages of restless, even feverish agitation alternate with chorale-like progressions, each of which ends in a gentle sprinkling of descending broken chords.

Programme Notes by Robert Markow, 2012.

Program Notes: Steven Osborne

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Ludwig van Beethoven
Piano Sonata (“Moonlight”) in C sharp minor, Op.27, no.2 (Sonata quasi una Fantasia)

The year 1801 marked not only the dawn of a new century, but also a significant new approach on Beethoven’s part to matters of form and structure in the piano sonata. The bold use of unusual and exotic keys, quasi-programmatic elements, irregular forms and unorthodox ordering of movements all contributed to heralding a new note in Beethoven’s sonatas. The composer called each of his two sonatas Op. 27 quasi una fantasia. In these works, the improvisatory impulse, free flights of fancy and avoidance of conventional forms are carried further than ever before. In Eric Blom’s words, these sonatas “show the composer emancipating himself from the classical sonata pattern and doing it as drastically as possible by substituting pieces in a freely chosen form for the traditional first movement that was always the most important part of a sonata, though not invariably in what we now call sonata form.”

While the first of the two Op. 27 sonatas may be one of Beethoven’s least-known, its sister, the Moonlight, is surely the best-known. The subtitle, as many people are aware, was not given by Beethoven. It came from the German critic and poet Ludwig Rellstab (l799-l860), who once commented that the first movement made him think of “a vision of a boat on Lake Lucerne by moonlight.” In point of fact, the composer never saw the Lake of Lucerne, and in any case, the mood ascribed to the sonata fits only the first movement.  Furthermore, Beethoven never even heard of the appellation “Moonlight” Sonata, as it was not affixed until five years after his death. The work was very popular in Beethoven’s lifetime, though the composer himself did not have a particularly high regard for it, and was annoyed that the public afforded it greater status than many of his other works.

The musical and structural (as opposed to the romantic and fictitious) elements of the sonata are considerable. The Moonlight is written in a rarely-used key, especially for the periodC-sharp minor. Mozart did not write a single work in this key, and Haydn did so only once. Also, most unusually, all three movements are based in the tonality of C-sharp: minor for the outer movements, major for the central one, at least to the ear. (The Allegretto is technically in D-flat major, the enharmonic equivalent of C-sharp major, and easier to read than C-sharp major; the latter would require seven sharps in its key signature!) Like the two previous sonatas, this one is an experiment in form, with Beethoven attempting to build a successful structure with the main weight at the end, not the beginning, of the sonata.

The opening movement in each of the two previous sonatas had been in slow or moderate tempo, while the finale was not only fast but also the most substantial movement. In the Moonlight, this approach is carried to extremes. In addition, each movement inhabits a single emotional world without contrasts: the unbroken placidity of the first movement gives way to the blithe, innocent charm of the second, which in turn is succeeded by the tempestuous upheavals of the third.

Maurice Ravel: Gaspard de la nuit

Gaspard de la nuit ranks as one of the most highly original, imaginative, evocative and technically difficult works in the entire piano repertory. Its composer made no bones about this surreal, hallucinatory music, describing it as “three romantic poems of transcendental virtuosity” in which he deliberately set out to surpass even Balakirev’s notorious Islamey in terms of sheer technical difficulty. The great French pianist Alfred Cortot called the composition “one of the most astonishing examples of instrumental ingenuity ever contrived.” Pianist Charles Rosen has called the second of the three pieces (“Le Gibet”) “an assault on the nerves of the listener, a creation of tension through insistence, like the Chinese water torture,” and the composer Henri Gil-Marchex once enumerated 27 different kinds of touch in this one piece alone. Clearly, Gaspard is something special indeed!

Ravel’s inspiration to write Gaspard de la nuit derived from vivid and macabre poems by the French Romantic poet Aloysius Bertrand (1807-1841), to whose work Ravel was introduced by the pianist Ricardo Viñes, a fellow pupil at the Paris Conservatoire. In 1908 Ravel set three poems from Bertrand’s eponymous collection, written in 1830. Viñes gave the first performance on January 9, 1909. Each piece is dedicated to a different musician, respectively Harold Bauer, Jean Marnold and Rudolph Ganz.

ONDINE: Ondine is a beautiful, mischievous water sprite who tries to attract mortal men to her magical kingdom through seductive singing. Ravel portrays her in the rare key of C-sharp major (seven sharps!) with glistening, delicate, “water-music” as befits Bertrand’s description of “Ondine who skims over the drops of water that resonate on the diamond-shaped segments of your window illuminated by the dismal rays of the moon.”

LE GIBET: A sinister atmosphere of desolation and ghostly terror pervades “Le Gibet.” The dynamic markings never rise above mezzo-piano. In some of the eeriest sounds in all music, Ravel portrays a corpse hanging from a gibbet, swaying in the wind against a sky reddened by the setting sun. The implacable tolling of a distant bell, represented throughout by the piano’s persistent B-flat octaves, is set against a richly varied harmonic landscape. So pervasive is this tolling B-flat that “Le Gibet” has been called “a fantasia on one note.”

SCARBO: This piece, no less eerie than “Le Gibet,” portrays the unpredictable, lightning-like appearances and disappearances of the malicious dwarf Scarbo, who changes his shape, size and colour at will. The scintillating, hallucinatory effects require such technical dexterity as to have earned Gaspard an almost mythic status among pianists.

Sergei Prokofiev: Visions fugitives, Op. 22

Like many of the great composers, Sergei Prokofiev showed his talent early. He was composing before he was six, he had produced an opera by twelve, and for his application to the St. Petersburg Conservatory, at thirteen, he submitted four operas, two sonatas, a symphony and several piano works. During his teens he studied with such luminaries as Glière, Rimsky-Korsakov, Liadov and Tcherepnin.

As a pianist he was no less sensational. He appeared as soloist in his own First Piano Concerto when he was 21 (July 25, 1912, in Moscow) and less than two years later played the same work, in place of the traditional classical concerto, for his final examination at the St. Petersburg Conservatory before a panel of twenty judges, each of whom had the published score in his hands. Prokofiev considered it his first “more-or-less mature composition,” and it became his first published work. For the piano alone he left a canon of nine completed sonatas and innumerable smaller pieces, including many written as a boy.

The Visions fugitives date from the years 1915-1917. These twenty miniatures (average length about a minute) take their cue from Beethoven’s Bagatelles and Chopin’s Preludes, their title and inspiration from these lines by the Russian Symbolist poet Konstantin Balmont: “In every fugitive vision I see worlds, / Full of the changing play of rainbow hues.” While overall the expressive range is oriented more toward the restrained end of the emotional spectrum, they nevertheless serve as a workshop for a great variety of colourful, experimental epigrams. Prokofiev’s biographer Israel Nestyev describes them as “something like entries in a diary” and as “experiments from a laboratory, a storehouse of materials to be used in the future large works of a composer always eager to increase the scope of his art.” Moods range from the lyrical to the whimsical, from the spirited to the serene, from the sedate to the seductive.

Sergey Rakhmaninov: Piano Sonata no. 2 in B flat minor, Op. 26

Rakhmaninov wrote only two piano sonatas, the First in 1907, the Second in 1913. He heavily revised the original version of the Second in 1931, considerably shortening it and lightening the textures in numerous passages. In 1940, with the composer’s permission, Vladimir Horowitz made his own variant, combining elements of both versions, and continued to make additional revisions over the years. Pianists today often feel free to create their own synthesis of Rakhmaninov’s and Horowitz’s versions.

Although not especially long in minutes, this sonata is big in scope and impact, embracing an enormous emotional range, and approaching symphonic proportions in its textures and polyphonic complexities. The sound of heavy, pounding bells, which fascinated the composer all his life, and which found their way into so many of his scores, are evoked frequently over the course of the sonata.

The three movements are not defined as such in the score, and are played without pause, underscoring their close interrelationship. Thematic ideas are shared among the three movements, particularly motifs deriving from the drooping four-note figure first heard in the sonata’s opening gesture under a rapidly pulsating B-flat minor chord. The first movement conforms to a traditional sonata-allegro structure, whose second subject (D-flat major) is announced during the first moment of relief from the furious onslaught of dense textures, rhythmic complexities and dramatic flourishes. Nevertheless, upon close investigation, this “new” theme reveals itself as a transformation of the first.

The second movement serves as an oasis of quiet meditation separating the traumas of the first movement from the virtuoso pyrotechnics of the third. Both main themes from the first movement make return appearances.

The third movement is launched with a precipitous plunge, fortissimo, spanning four and a half octaves. The first subject is less a theme than a seismic upheaval. Rakhmaninov saves his “big tune” for later, one that might well have found its way into a concerto instead, characteristically decked out with richly layered accompaniment. The sonata ends with a grand salute to B-flat major.

Programme notes by Robert Markow, 2012.

Rodion Pogossov: Programme Notes

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Alessandro Stradella: “Pietà, Signore”Pogossov

Orphaned at the age of eleven, Alessandro Stradella went on to lead one of the most colourful lives of any composer who ever lived. He was involved in Mafiaesque schemes, had a reputation for womanizing, got himself wounded by pursuing avengers, and was eventually murdered. In between all this he found time to compose. Alas, the only piece by Stradella that has his name attached to it, and that has any degree of circulation today, “Pietà, Signore” (a heart-rending plea to the Lord for mercy in suffering), was actually written by someone else,  possibly the Italian Rossini, possibly the Belgian historian-theorist-composer François Joseph Fétis, or possibly the Swiss-born composer and pedagogue Louis Niedermeyer.

George Frederick Handel: “Ombra mai fù”

The recitative and aria from Handel’s light and elegant opera Serse (or Xerxes, London, 1738), “Frondi tenere e belle … Ombra mai fù,” is not only the most famous number from Serse, but it may well be the most famous vocal number from any of Handel’s forty-plus operas. In mock-heroic terms, Xerxes, King of Persia addresses an affectionate tribute to the foliage of a plane-tree in the garden of his residence at Abydos, located on the southern shore of the Hellespont.

Antonio Cesti: “Si mantiene il mio amor”

Antonio Cesti’s life was scarcely less tumultuous than Stradella’s. Like Vivaldi, he trained for the priesthood. However, he couldn’t keep his hands off the ladies, and in 1658 got himself released from his vows. Rumour has it that he died by poisoning. Most of his output was for voice, and his magnum opus was the huge, five-act, 24-scene opera Il pomo d’oro (The Golden Apple), produced in 1667 on the occasion of a royal wedding.

“Si mantiene il mio amor” is a dolorous aria from Cesti’s first opera Alessando, vincitor di se stesso (Venice, 1651). It is sung by Efestione, a general in the army of Alexander the Great. Efestione is in love with Campaspe, but he has been promised to Alexander’s sister Cina, and he dares not risk offending the powerful Alexander. “My love survives on pain, sorrow and distress,” he sings. “I love, even without hope.”

Samuel Barber: “Un cygnet”

While many other composers of the mid-twentieth century were jumping on bandwagons, afraid to be left behind by the latest fad, ism or experiment, Samuel Barber remained true to his inner conviction of writing music founded on tonal centers, emotional expression and traditional values. His music breathes lyricism, heartfelt emotions, nostalgia, and, in some cases, highly dramatic gestures.

“Throughout his life, Barber was never without a volume or two of poetry at his bedside,” writes pianist John Browning. “Poetry was as necessary to his existence as oxygen.”  The Mélodies passagères (1950-51) are settings of poems by Rainer Maria Rilke and constitute the only songs Barber set to verses in a foreign language. They were first performed in Paris in 1952 by two of France’s preeminent musicians, baritone Pierre Bernac and composer Francis Poulenc, who also recorded the songs. Barbara Heyman, in her monograph on Barber, observes that the Mélodies passagères are close in style to the French art song “not merely because of the texts, but primarily because of their semi-parlando vocal lines, fluid piano accompaniments marked with gentle syncopations, and expanded tonal language.” The haunting “Un cygne” (A Swan), third of the five Mélodies passagères, is imbued with the gliding quality we associate with this bird, but also with a pervasive darkness and gloom. The meaning of the text, like that of the other “passing melodies,” is enigmatic, even elusive: “A swan moves over the water surrounded by itself… a whole moving space. And draws near, doubled … on our troubled soul.”

Francis Poulenc: “Chansons Gaillardes”

Francis Poulenc was unquestionably one of the greatest composers of mélodies in the twentieth century. Numbering nearly 150, they were written across a 42-year span, Poulenc’s entire adult life. For the most part the songs are tonal, tuneful, concise, and use texts from some of the best French poets of the twentieth century, among them Guillaume Apollinaire, Jean Cocteau, Paul Éluard and Max Jacob. For the Chansons gaillardes (1925-1926), however, he turned to anonymous texts from the seventeenth century. They deal mostly with earthy, even risqué subjects in an often satirical, playful or flippant manner. Even the songs about death and fate do not take themselves very seriously. The first is about a fickle mistress, the second is probably the most lugubrious drinking song ever written, the third a paean to a beautiful girl, the fourth a promise to love forever (subject to the will of the Fates!), the fifth a salacious comparison between wine and women, the sixth a variant of poet Robert Herrick’s admonition “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may” (the most lyrical of the songs), the seventh an exuberant recommendation to remain single and never marry, and the last praise for womanly charms.

The great French baritone Pierre Bernac gave the first performance on May 2, 1926 with the composer at the piano. As Poulenc was a highly accomplished pianist, he wrote lively parts for his instrument.

Erich Wolfgang Korngold: “Mein Sehnen, mein Wähnen”

Korngold’s middle name was well chosen (he added it himself), for in precocity and fluency, he rivaled his namesake of years before, Mozart. He wrote his first major orchestral work at fourteen (premiered by that titan of the podium, Arthur Nikisch, with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra) and two one-act operas at eighteen (premiered by Bruno Walter at the Munich State Opera). Korngold was not yet 24 when his full-length opera Die tote Stadt (The Dead City) was first heard on December 4, 1920. Initially, the opera was so popular that some eighty theaters produced it. 

Die tote Stadt is adapted from Georges Rodenbach’s novel Bruges – la Morte (1892), a dream-tale suffused with images of death and decay, and descriptions of a sleepy, stagnant, deserted city. Paul imagines that the young dancer he has met (Marietta) is actually the re-embodiment of his late wife Maria. The acting troupe of which Marietta is a member shows up in Act II. Among them is the character Fritz, who plays the role of Pierrot in the troupe. Marietta asks him for an impromptu song, one that “makes you dance and sway, dream sweetly in the moonlight’s ray, a song that lures and beguiles.” The music Korngold wrote for Fritz fulfills these demands perfectly. Further, the words to his song (“My yearning, my dreaming, returns to the past, the days of young love …”) allude to Paul’s own situation vis-à-vis Marie and her stand-in, Marietta.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: “Papagena, Papagena, Papagena”

Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) was Mozart’s last opera, premiered on September 30, 1791 just a few weeks before his death. Virtually unique in the annals of opera, it combines low camp with high morals, the comic and the serious, the ridiculous and the sublime, plus generous doses of mischief, satire, theatrical effects, Egyptology and Masonic symbolism in a work of unsurpassed genius. The aria we hear tonight comes from near the end of the opera. The birdcatcher Papageno, one of the flightiest yet most likeable characters in all opera, is at the end of his rope – literally. He has despaired of ever finding a sweetheart and is about to hang himself. He thought he had found one in Papagena, but no, he’s been stood up. Or so he thinks. All turns out right just after his “suicide aria” ends.

Pyotr Il’yich Tchaikovsky: “Kogda by zhizn’”

Tchaikovsky’s approach to opera was highly personal. He tended to avoid spectacular battle scenes, marches, exotic locales, large contingents of supernumeraries and other trappings of “grand” opera. “Give me a subject in which the human element will predominate: love, jealousy, ambition,” he wrote.  I search for powerful, yet intimate drama, based on a conflict of situations which I have experienced and that I feel.” These words offer a custom-made prescription for Eugene Onegin (1879), Tchaikovsky’s fifth completed opera and the best known. It received its first professional production on January 23, 1881 (a student production had been given two years earlier).

Tatiana is in love with Onegin, to whom she pours out her feelings in a long and famous letter. But the next time they meet, Onegin advises her that he is not the marrying type; he is not even the type for warm affection. It is best that she know this now, he tells her, before any more emotional damage is done. The story comes from Pushkin, but it fit Tchaikovsky’s own life to a T. If ever there were a case of art mirroring life, this is it, for less than two months earlier, the composer had found himself in a very similar situation.

Tchaikovsky: three songs

Tchaikovsky wrote more than one hundred songs spread more or less evenly across his entire creative life, but only a few are well known. In these songs, writes his biographer David Brown, “Tchaikovsky probed directly into the human soul to expose its desires and passions, its joys and sorrows, its tenderness and its vulnerability. … he favoured verses concerned with strong, personal feeling.”

The Op. 38 songs were published in 1878, the year of the Violin Concerto. “Amid the Din of a Ball,” set to a poem of Alexis Tolstoy, is steeped in nostalgia and is one of Tchaikovsky’s most popular. A young man reflects wistfully on the vision of a beautiful woman he spies in a crowded ballroom. Set to the waltz rhythm, the image calls to mind similar scenes in Berlioz’ Symphonie fantastique (also a waltz), and Roméo et Juliette.

“Why?” comes from Tchaikovsky’s first set of published songs, Op. 6 (1875), which also includes his most famous, “None but the lonely heart.” Set to a poem of Heinrich Heine, it asks eight questions, each beginning with the same word and inquiring about some aspect of nature. The music moves forward relentlessly, culminating in a fortississimo outburst of anguish for the final question, “Why … did you forget me?” The piano postlude suggests resignation.

In “Don Juan’s Serenade,” another A. Tolstoy setting, we find the same lilting metre that Don Giovanni used in his serenade in Mozart’s opera (Tchaikovsky adored Mozart), but in place of suavity and elegance we find in Tchaikovsky the Don’s legendary arrogance and bluster. There is no mistaking the piano’s imitation of a furiously strummed guitar.

Federico Moreno Torroba: “Amor vida de mi vida”

Like Vaughan Williams, Moreno Torroba has a non-hyphenated surname, though one sometimes sees it also spelled with the hyphen. Moreno Torroba made his fame, both as a composer and a conductor, mostly through music for guitar and through zarzuela, the traditional Spanish version of comic opera. He is credited with a large role in making zarzuela known to international audiences, but he also wrote serious operas, of which the last, El Poeta, written in 1980 at the age of 89, starred Plácido Domingo in the title role.

The aria “Amor, vida de mi vida” (Love, Life of My Life) comes from the zarzuela Maravilla, premiered in Madrid in 1941. The story involves the classic love triangle with a complication from a family member: Raphael loves Elvira, who is having an affair with Faustino, who is the manager of Elvira’s mother Marvilla, who is an opera singer who will be Raphael’s partner in the next production. Such is the fame of Rapheal’s poignant aria that it turned up in Three Tenors concerts, sung by Domingo.

Gioachino Rossini: “Largo al factotum”

Great operatic comedies are far less plentiful than operatic tragedies. The Barber of Seville (1816) indubitably stands at the very pinnacle of this small repertory, and year after year ranks as one of the Top Ten most frequently performed operas of any kind, not surprisingly in view of its irrepressible high spirits, rich humor and wealth of great tunes. The barber of the title is Figaro, the same Figaro as in Mozart’s opera. Here he is about ten years younger and not yet employed as a servant in a royal household. His role, which he hugely enjoys, is the crafty, resourceful, clever citizen of Seville ever-ready to assist anyone and everyone with anything. Figaro is fully aware of his popular standing in the community, and shows no inhibitions in boasting about it. This he does in his enormously exuberant entrance aria, “Largo al factotum” (I’m the factotum).

Program notes by Robert Markow, 2012.

Florian Boesch: programme notes

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Florian BoeschA recital of Lieder set exclusively to poems of Heinrich Heine and composed solely by Schubert and Schumann is particularly apt inasmuch as Heine was born the same year as Schubert (1797) and died the same year as Schumann (1856). He was not only one of Germany’s leading romantic authors, he also wrote about travel, German thought and French politics (he became a staunch liberal, espoused the cause of the French Revolution and spent the last 25 years of his life in Paris). Heine is best remembered for his exquisite lyrics and ballads. His Buch der Lieder (1827) became one of the most popular books of German verse ever published. Nietzsche called Heine “the highest conception of the lyric poet,” and, with no lack of modesty, claimed that “it will one day be said that Heine and I have been by far the first artists of the German language.” In addition to Schubert and Schumann, Mendelssohn, (both Felix and his sister Fanny), Brahms, Wolf, Strauss, Tchaikovsky, Wagner and Orff, among many others, have set his verse to song. Pietro Mascagni, composer of Cavalleria rusticana, made an opera out of Heine’s William Ratcliff.

Just as Goethe was Schubert’s poet of choice, it was Heine to whom Schumann turned most often for verses to set. Both composers were masters at capturing the psychological atmosphere of each poem, and in both, the piano writing is of utmost importance in defining the mood, which is often extended in the postludes.

Robert Schumann: Liederkreis, Op. 24

Schumann wrote his first songs the year before Schubert died. Schumann was seventeen at the time, and was already deeply under the spell of the older composer. But he wrote no more works in this genre until 1840, his annus mirabilus of song, during which he wrote more than half of his total output of Lieder (nearly 140 out of more than 250), including most of the best as well.

The impetus that gave birth to such a profusion of songs was Clara Wieck, whom he had been courting for years, but with whom marriage had been barred by Clara’s father. Now with legal entanglements out of the way, the future looked bright and rosy, Schumann was in the most buoyant of moods, and he was ready to flex his musical wings in new directions. His abrupt turn from writing exclusively solo piano music to almost exclusively vocal music reflected this turn of events, and he threw himself into his new pursuit with passionate intensity. “Oh Clara,” he wrote, “what bliss to write songs! Too long I have refrained from doing so.… I should like to sing myself to death like a nightingale.”

If Op. 24 is not strictly speaking a cycle in the sense of an identifiable course of events or a continuous story, there is nevertheless a psychological unity of theme and atmosphere in that all the songs are related to love and nature, and the moods expressed therein show the sequence of thoughts toward a final, exuberant flowering of love’s triumph. Schumann dedicated his first Liederkreis to the famous mezzo Pauline Viardot.

Presumably Schumann was inspired to write the cycle’s first song, “Morgens steh’ ich auf und frage” (Each morning I awake and ask …”) by a prolonged absence from Clara. Over the piano’s “walking” accompaniment, the poet sings with scarcely concealed rapture of the joy of seeing his beloved again.

“Es treibt mich hin” (I’m driven this way and that) is another song about separation. Here, the lovers are due to meet in just a few hours, but the pain of waiting is almost unendurable. Frequent, impetuous changes of tempo and dynamics, sometimes in conjunction with unexpected pauses, convey the mental strain on the poet.

“Ich wandelte unter den Bäumen” (I roamed under the trees) is steeped in melancholy and nostalgia. It is framed by a prelude and postlude that perfectly capture the gentle mood of a mid-day reverie.

“Lieb’ Liebchen, leg’s Händchen” (Put your hand on my heart, darling) is surely one of Schumann’s most fascinating. In less than a minute, the composer captures the sinister picture of a carpenter fashioning a coffin for the lovesick poet. The piano part consists only of carpenter’s hammer, tapping steadily on the offbeats with the exception of two startling moments when it “jumps the gun” to articulate words the singer dreads to utter.

“Schöne Wiege meiner Leiden” (Cradle of my sorrows) is the most extended song of the cycle save the last. “Lebe wohl” (Farewell), that favorite cry of the Romantic poets, is heard eight times in the course of the song.

“Warte, warte, wilder Schiffmann” (Wait, wait, wild ferryman) makes its effect less through the vocal line, vigorous though it is, than through the piano writing, which consists mostly of rising scale fragments that dovetail, overlap, and interweave in an almost continuous counterpoint.

“Berg’ und Burgen, schaun herunter” (Mountains and castles look down) is another boat song, this one as tender and gentle as the preceding was spirited. The quiet undulation of the boat on sunlit waves is naturally reflected in the piano part, while the singer delivers four verses which to Schumann evoke only happiness and contentment, despite the evil lurking in Heine’s words.

Schumann borrowed the opening of “Anfangs wollt’ ich fast verzagen” (At first I was almost in despair) from a chorale melody Bach had used in no fewer than six cantatas. Richard Miller suggests that the text’s opening line – “If you earn God’s blessing, then it is every morning new!” – might have been Schumann’s “way of expressing thankfulness about his relationship with Clara.”

The closing song, “Mit Myrten und Rosen” (With myrtle and roses), is in a sense also the prologue to the cycle that immediately followed the Liederkreis, Myrthen (Op. 25), which Schumann had beautifully bound and gilded as a wedding present for his bride (they were married in September). Schumann gives the performance direction innig (heartfelt, sincere and intimate) for the first time in a song, a fitting embellishment for this tribute to the woman he loved so deeply.

Robert Schumann: selected songs

Both Schumann and Heine were admirers of Napoleon. In “Die beiden Grenadiere,” one of Schumann’s most successful excursions into the ballad form, two of Napoleon’s troops are en route home from the disastrous Russian campaign. Bugle calls, drum rolls and weary tramping are all depicted. To the sounds of the Marseillaise, one of them imagines his heroic deeds in defense of Napoleon. But the ballad’s last moments indicate a far different scenario – death.

“Mein Wagen rollet langsam” (My Carriage Rolls Slowly) consists of three connected parts: the poet dreaming of his beloved as his carriage rumbles peacefully over the uneven country road; the intrusion of three mysterious ghosts into the carriage (or is it just into the poet’s mind?); and a piano postlude that occupies more than a third of the song’s length.

“Abends am Strand” (Evening by the Sea) is short but gives the impression of a full-length ballad. Some girls are sitting by a little seaside shack, gazing out at sea. As the evening mists gather and lights come on in the lighthouse, their minds turn to ships and sailors, to storms and shipwrecks, to faraway lands and strange peoples.

“Belsazar” (Belshazzar) constitutes an opus number by itself, a practice Schumann repeated in several other songs of greater-than-normal length. In this miniature drama, King Belshazzar of Babylon feasts in his splendid palace, gets drunk on wine, blasphemes against God, beholds the  terrifying fiery writing on the wall, and is slain by his vassals – all events Schumann depicts with changes of texture, dynamics and vocal delivery.

“Der arme Peter” (Poor Peter) is actually three songs in one. They tell of the pitiable Peter watching his beloved (Grete) wed another (Hans), with fatal consequences to the bereft.

From the music alone, “Dein Angesicht” (Your face) would seem to be an expression of blissful love, but its text has an ominous ring: the face of the poet’s beloved is sweet but pale; only the lips are red, and those too will soon be white in death.

“Die Lotosblume” (The Lotus Blossom), from the collection Myrthen, is set to Heine’s allegory of chaste love in the form of a flower floating on a lake. The placid surface of the lake is reflected in the unvarying triplets in the piano, but passion seethes just below the surface in the form of Schumann’s constantly changing harmonic palette.

Another flower song from Myrthen is “Du bist wie eine Blume” (Thou art like a flower). Here too the piano provides a pulsing accompaniment (this time in quadruplets) richly decked out in harmonic splendor. Eric Sams describes Schumann’s paean of praise to his wife Clara as “sumptuously sensual.”

Franz Schubert: six songs from Schwanengesang, D. 957

The fourteen songs collected under the rubric Schwanengesang are among Schubert’s last efforts in the genre, mostly written in the final year of his life. They were assembled by the Viennese editor-publisher Tobias Haslinger in the year after Schubert died. The group comprises seven songs set to texts of Ludwig Rellstab, six to Heinrich Heine and one to Johann Seidl. The Heine songs are the only ones Schubert composed to this poet. To Schubert scholar John Reed, “their mood of bitter irony and tragic alienation is much closer to Winterreise than it is to the Rellstab songs. In a real sense, the Heine songs begin where Winterreise leaves off.”

“Das Fischermädchen” (The Fishermaid) is a deceptively pleasant barcarolle in which the gentle lapping of water on the boat encourages the poet’s false trust in the fishermaid.

“Am Meer” (By the Sea) too is a lover’s lament, full of irony and bitterness.

In “Ihr Bild” (Her Picture), a portrait comes to life to remind the forlorn poet of what he has lost.

“Die Stadt” (The Town) is another water picture, this one describing a weary journey across the lake, accomplished to thoughts of a lost love.

The darkly brooding tragedy “Der Doppelgänger” (The Double), more a declamation than a song, is one of Schubert’s most powerful lyric utterances, rising to a heartrending fff as the poet recognizes his double in the moonlight, grieving outside the home of a long-lost beloved.

And finally, “Der Atlas” plunges us again into a world of spiritual turmoil and suffering. Its portrayal of the weary Atlas bearing the world on his shoulder serves as a metaphor for the heaviness of a lover’s broken heart.

Program notes by Robert Markow, 2012.

Tine Thing Helseth: program notes

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Tine Thing HelsethTine Thing Helseth, trumpet
Havard Gimse, piano

Next Generation Series at The Vancouver Playhouse
Sunday, February 5, 2012

Bohuslav Martinů: Sonatina for Trumpet and Piano
Bohuslav Martinů followed in the footsteps of his compatriots Dvořák, Smetana, Janáček and Suk in the incorporation of elements from Bohemian and Moravian folk music into his works. Martinů was driven from his homeland by Nazi oppression to settle in America and never returned to his native country. He arrived in New York in 1941 and found himself disoriented, unknown, and barely able to cope with the new language. Salvation came in the person of conductor Serge Koussevitzky, who offered Martinů a commission for a major work (his First Symphony) to be premiered by the Boston Symphony.

Martinů was an enormously prolific composer, particularly in the realm of chamber music. He left multiple examples of everything from duos to nonets with a single exception (no octets). The Sonatina for Trumpet and Piano dates from January of 1956 while Martinů was living in the Great Northern Hotel on 57th Street in New York and commuting to Philadelphia to teach at the Curtis Institute. This seven-minute, one-movement, tuneful work is free in form and employs elements of folk dance, jazz, chorale and neoclassicism.

George Enesco: Légende

Most concertgoers tend to think of Georges Enesco (the commonly Gallicized form of George Enescu) as the composer of a famous Romanian Rhapsody (actually, he wrote two) and leave it at that. However, Romania’s most outstanding composer was also one of the twentieth century’s most unfairly neglected musical geniuses. He was a virtuoso violinist, a conductor, a teacher, an administrator, and a tireless champion of music in Romania. His centenary in 1981 went largely ignored outside his native country, but so highly respected is he in Romania that there is a festival, a museum, a composer’s prize, a violin competition, a symphony orchestra and even a town (his birthplace) named after him.

Enesco wrote the Légende in 1906 as a competition piece for students at the Paris Conservatoire and dedicated it to Merri Franquin, head of the trumpet department there. (Enesco also wrote, about the same time, competition pieces for flute, viola and harp.) According to Noel Malcolm, in his biography of the composer, the Légende “awakened an interest on Enseco’s part in the trumpet’s powers of soft and muted evocative expression.” The title suggests something along the lines of a ballad or rhapsody – a story told in music, though anything more specific is left to the listener’s own powers of imagination. The trumpet is treated in the three slower, reflective sections in a lyrical manner almost as if it were a violin, while virtuosity is demanded in the two brief intervening passages.

Rolf Wallin: Here

Born in Oslo, September 7, 1957; now living in Oslo.

Rolf Wallin – teacher, music critic, essayist, trumpet player and above all composer – is one of the leading figures on Norway’s contemporary music scene. He was the first composer in residence with the Oslo Philharmonic (2006-07), which performed one of his most important works, Act, on a European tour. When Oslo’s new opera house opened in April of 2008, Wallin’s dance piece Urban Bestiary was the first work to be heard there. Music inspired by computer systems, mathematical formulae like fractals, “crystal chord” technique (chords based on a 3D harmonic model in which three main intervals are constantly repeated) and human breathing, brain wave and speech patterns have played roles in his music, all tempered by a free musical intuition. Ligeti, Xenakis, Stockhausen and Berio are often cited as the composers who have influenced Wallin’s musical thinking.

Here is a four-minute piece composed for Tine Thing Helseth, who gave the first performance in Münster, Germany on February 6, 2011. On February 18 of that year she gave the American premiere in Carnegie Hall; tonight she gives the Canadian premiere.

Here (obviously intended as a homonym for hear) refers to the concert hall experience where the constant barrage of technological assaults on our attention are momentarily put in abeyance while we listen to music (Wallin calls attention “an endangered species of our times.”) – sanctuaries where the mind is active but not distracted,” as Jacob Cooper put it in his Carnegie Hall notes last year. Wallin writes that “this little piece is made in gratitude for these sanctuaries, and it is made in gratitude for amazing musicians like Tine Thing Helseth, who devote their lives to making our attention blossom.” Cooper adds that Here “presents a series of phrases, each divided by considerable rest as if to encourage a meditative state. The phrases themselves are usually characterized by a certain focus as well, with grace notes and quick turns presenting a halo around one or two central pitches.”

Paul Hindemith, Trumpet Sonata, Op. 137

No major composer has written more sonatas for a greater variety of instruments than Paul Hindemith. There are sonatas for all the expected ones – piano, violin, cello, flute, clarinet, etc., but also for instruments that often get slighted – English horn, trombone, bassoon, saxophone, double bass and tuba. All of these are with piano.

Hindemith wrote the Trumpet Sonata in 1939, a year that also saw the birth of sonatas for violin, viola, clarinet and horn. Hindemith was not Jewish, but by now he was living in Switzerland, exiled from his native Germany because of pressure from the Nazi Party attempting to regulate what was acceptable and unacceptable music. In 1939, Germany annexed Austria, occupied Czechoslovakia and invaded Poland. Perhaps as a reflection of these ominous events, Hindemith’s Trumpet Sonata took on a rather somber hue. Hindemith held this sonata in high esteem. To a friend he wrote that “it is maybe the best thing I have succeeded in doing in recent times.”

The sonata opens with the trumpet proclaiming a sturdy theme over piano figuration to the performance direction mit Kraft (with strength). Two more ideas are presented, with the movement’s eventual form set out in the neatly symmetrical arrangement of A-B-C-A-C-B-A. The second movement has a quirky, whimsical air to it, somewhat like a comical march. The last movement is the longest and the sonata’s center of emotional gravity. Entitled Trauermusik (music of mourning), it takes the trumpet, so often used as an instrument of brilliance and pomp and celebration, on a troubled, meditative journey that culminates in the somber intoning of the chorale-theme Alle Menschen müssen sterben (all men must die), which Bach had set as a chorale-prelude (BWV 643).

Edvard Grieg: Haugtussa, Op. 67

As Grieg had studied in Leipzig, it is hardly surprising that he was at ease in following the romantic Lied tradition as manifested in Schumann, Mendelssohn and Brahms. He wrote more than 180 songs, published and unpublished, making them one of the most significant genres in his catalogue. They are largely unknown outside his native Norway, owing largely to the language barrier, but nearly all are imbued with the characteristics that have endeared his far better known works to the public, including engaging melodies, distinctive Norwegian modal inflections and the rhythms of native folk dances. Grieg scholar Robert Matthew-Walker claims that Haugtussa is “Grieg’s masterpiece. [It is] certainly one of the greatest song-cycles for the female voice ever written, revealing the composer at the very height of his powers.” (Tine Thing Helseth performs the cycle on trumpet with the vocal line virtually untouched.)

Haugtussa (The Mountain-Maid) dates from 1895, the year Arne Garborg’s eponymous verse-novel was published. It made a deep impression on the composer, who composed twenty songs (some incomplete) set to Haugtussa texts, eight of which went into the cycle at hand. Although we hear no words tonight, the trumpet nevertheless conveys the essence of the poems. The first song is something of a siren call (the title Det syng is variously translated as “singing” and “enticement”), luring the listener into the mountain-maid’s realm. The second song gives a physical description of the girl – fair, young, slender, with deep grey eyes and an impassive, dreamy manner. “Blueberry Slope” is a frisky, exuberant portrait of outdoor life, each of its five stanzas devoted to a different subject: berries, a bear, a fox, a wolf, and, what is really on the singer’s mind, “that nice boy from over by Skare-Brôte.” She meets him in “The Encounter,” which quickly leads to “Love.” The “Kids’ Dance” is the only song besides “Blueberry Slope” with a frivolous or light-hearted tone, serving as a sort of interlude within the serious business of having a love affair. But the affair is a short one, for already in the following song the mountain-maid has been jilted. In the final song she pours out her heart’s sorrow to a babbling brook.

Grieg: three songs transcribed for piano

Grieg made two sets of his own song transcriptions, one in 1884 (Op. 41) and one in 1890 (Op. 52), six in each. Eleanor Bailie, in her volume on Grieg’s piano music, remarks that “each transcription takes the form of variations on the melody of the song – the theme set out in simple form, much as in the original, and then embellished, sometimes elaborately, in varied accompaniments. … Grieg undoubtedly loved these songs, and, sensitive to mood and atmosphere as he was, these poems and their melodies evoked some of his most rapt piano music.”

The “Cradle Song” has a rather somber cast to it, but its gentle rocking rhythm provides the necessary sleep-inducing agent. “A Mother’s Grief,” set to the same rocking rhythm, is even more doleful in mood and leaner in texture, as its original text concerns a mother mourning the death of her infant son. “The Poet’s Heart,” on the other hand, is, in typically Romantic fashion, a turbulent affair set to a poem of Hans Christian Andersen. Surging waves of sound from the piano underscore the imagery of the text, whose theme is the misunderstood poet as a reflection of nature and which includes numerous action words like “swell,” “flaming,” “longing” and “struggle.”

Manuel de Falla: Siete canciones populares españolas

Manuel de Falla was one of the most Spanish of all Spanish composers. He regarded the promotion of Spanish music as his mission in life, and his Siete canciones populares españoles (Seven Spanish Folkongs) are just one of the many manifestations of this purpose. The texts are anonymous, but the tunes have been traced to actual popular songs from all over Spain. De Falla’s treatment of the songs ranges from free composition to slight alteration to nearly untouched originals.

Written in 1914-1915 for voice and piano, the Seven Spanish Folksongs were first heard in Madrid sung by Luisa Vela with the composer at the piano on January 14, 1915. The songs were later orchestrated by the composer’s friend Ernesto Halffter in 1938-1945 and by Luciano Berio in 1978. Additionally there exist arrangements for violin (by the Polish violinist Paul Kochanski in 1924), viola and cello (by Maurice Marechal) replacing the voice, in which form the songs are known as Suite populaire espagnole. Tonight we hear still another version, with trumpet replacing the voice.

“El paño moruno” (The Moorish cloth) is set to a pulsating Moorish rhythm from the southeastern province of Murcia. The singer (or trumpet player) deplores the stain on the lovely cloth that will cause its selling price to plummet.

“Seguidilla murciana” is also inspired by Murcia, A seguidilla is a moderately fast dance in triple meter. The song’s text begins with the famous adage, “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.”

In “Asturiana” a weeping woman seeks consolation under a pine tree, which itself breaks into tears out of compassion. The melody comes from Asturias, in Spain’s far north.

From Aragon, another northern province, comes a “Jota” in rapid triple meter about two lovers in a clandestine relationship.

“Nana” is a lullaby from the southernmost province of Andalusia, whose songs have a decidedly oriental cast.

“Cancion” (song) is another love song, this one about eyes with traitorous qualities.

“Polo” is a wailing lament from Andalusia over the heartache of unrequited love. The fiery flamenco idiom will be familiar to those who know de Falla’s famous ballet score The Three-Cornered Hat.

Tine Thing Helseth

Program Notes

Bohuslav Martinů: Sonatina for Trumpet and Piano

Bohuslav Martinů followed in the footsteps of his compatriots Dvořák, Smetana, Janáček and Suk in the incorporation of elements from Bohemian and Moravian folk music into his works. Martinů was driven from his homeland by Nazi oppression to settle in America and never returned to his native country. He arrived in New York in 1941 and found himself disoriented, unknown, and barely able to cope with the new language. Salvation came in the person of conductor Serge Koussevitzky, who offered Martinů a commission for a major work (his First Symphony) to be premiered by the Boston Symphony.

Martinů was an enormously prolific composer, particularly in the realm of chamber music. He left multiple examples of everything from duos to nonets with a single exception (no octets). The Sonatina for Trumpet and Piano dates from January of 1956 while Martinů was living in the Great Northern Hotel on 57th Street in New York and commuting to Philadelphia to teach at the Curtis Institute. This seven-minute, one-movement, tuneful work is free in form and employs elements of folk dance, jazz, chorale and neoclassicism.

George Enesco: Légende

Most concertgoers tend to think of Georges Enesco (the commonly Gallicized form of George Enescu) as the composer of a famous Romanian Rhapsody (actually, he wrote two) and leave it at that. However, Romania’s most outstanding composer was also one of the twentieth century’s most unfairly neglected musical geniuses. He was a virtuoso violinist, a conductor, a teacher, an administrator, and a tireless champion of music in Romania. His centenary in 1981 went largely ignored outside his native country, but so highly respected is he in Romania that there is a festival, a museum, a composer’s prize, a violin competition, a symphony orchestra and even a town (his birthplace) named after him.

Enesco wrote the Légende in 1906 as a competition piece for students at the Paris Conservatoire and dedicated it to Merri Franquin, head of the trumpet department there. (Enesco also wrote, about the same time, competition pieces for flute, viola and harp.) According to Noel Malcolm, in his biography of the composer, the Légende “awakened an interest on Enseco’s part in the trumpet’s powers of soft and muted evocative expression.” The title suggests something along the lines of a ballad or rhapsody – a story told in music, though anything more specific is left to the listener’s own powers of imagination. The trumpet is treated in the three slower, reflective sections in a lyrical manner almost as if it were a violin, while virtuosity is demanded in the two brief intervening passages.

Rolf Wallin: Here

Born in Oslo, September 7, 1957; now living in Oslo.

Rolf Wallin – teacher, music critic, essayist, trumpet player and above all composer – is one of the leading figures on Norway’s contemporary music scene. He was the first composer in residence with the Oslo Philharmonic (2006-07), which performed one of his most important works, Act, on a European tour. When Oslo’s new opera house opened in April of 2008, Wallin’s dance piece Urban Bestiary was the first work to be heard there. Music inspired by computer systems, mathematical formulae like fractals, “crystal chord” technique (chords based on a 3D harmonic model in which three main intervals are constantly repeated) and human breathing, brain wave and speech patterns have played roles in his music, all tempered by a free musical intuition. Ligeti, Xenakis, Stockhausen and Berio are often cited as the composers who have influenced Wallin’s musical thinking.

Here is a four-minute piece composed for Tine Thing Helseth, who gave the first performance in Münster, Germany on February 6, 2011. On February 18 of that year she gave the American premiere in Carnegie Hall; tonight she gives the Canadian premiere.

Here (obviously intended as a homonym for hear) refers to the concert hall experience where the constant barrage of technological assaults on our attention are momentarily put in abeyance while we listen to music (Wallin calls attention “an endangered species of our times.”) – sanctuaries where the mind is active but not distracted,” as Jacob Cooper put it in his Carnegie Hall notes last year. Wallin writes that “this little piece is made in gratitude for these sanctuaries, and it is made in gratitude for amazing musicians like Tine Thing Helseth, who devote their lives to making our attention blossom.” Cooper adds that Here “presents a series of phrases, each divided by considerable rest as if to encourage a meditative state. The phrases themselves are usually characterized by a certain focus as well, with grace notes and quick turns presenting a halo around one or two central pitches.”

Paul Hindemith, Trumpet Sonata, Op. 137

No major composer has written more sonatas for a greater variety of instruments than Paul Hindemith. There are sonatas for all the expected ones – piano, violin, cello, flute, clarinet, etc., but also for instruments that often get slighted – English horn, trombone, bassoon, saxophone, double bass and tuba. All of these are with piano.

Hindemith wrote the Trumpet Sonata in 1939, a year that also saw the birth of sonatas for violin, viola, clarinet and horn. Hindemith was not Jewish, but by now he was living in Switzerland, exiled from his native Germany because of pressure from the Nazi Party attempting to regulate what was acceptable and unacceptable music. In 1939, Germany annexed Austria, occupied Czechoslovakia and invaded Poland. Perhaps as a reflection of these ominous events, Hindemith’s Trumpet Sonata took on a rather somber hue. Hindemith held this sonata in high esteem. To a friend he wrote that “it is maybe the best thing I have succeeded in doing in recent times.”

The sonata opens with the trumpet proclaiming a sturdy theme over piano figuration to the performance direction mit Kraft (with strength). Two more ideas are presented, with the movement’s eventual form set out in the neatly symmetrical arrangement of A-B-C-A-C-B-A. The second movement has a quirky, whimsical air to it, somewhat like a comical march. The last movement is the longest and the sonata’s center of emotional gravity. Entitled Trauermusik (music of mourning), it takes the trumpet, so often used as an instrument of brilliance and pomp and celebration, on a troubled, meditative journey that culminates in the somber intoning of the chorale-theme Alle Menschen müssen sterben (all men must die), which Bach had set as a chorale-prelude (BWV 643).



Edvard Grieg: Haugtussa, Op. 67

As Grieg had studied in Leipzig, it is hardly surprising that he was at ease in following the romantic Lied tradition as manifested in Schumann, Mendelssohn and Brahms. He wrote more than 180 songs, published and unpublished, making them one of the most significant genres in his catalogue. They are largely unknown outside his native Norway, owing largely to the language barrier, but nearly all are imbued with the characteristics that have endeared his far better known works to the public, including engaging melodies, distinctive Norwegian modal inflections and the rhythms of native folk dances. Grieg scholar Robert Matthew-Walker claims that Haugtussa is “Grieg’s masterpiece. [It is] certainly one of the greatest song-cycles for the female voice ever written, revealing the composer at the very height of his powers.” (Tine Thing Helseth performs the cycle on trumpet with the vocal line virtually untouched.)

Haugtussa (The Mountain-Maid) dates from 1895, the year Arne Garborg’s eponymous verse-novel was published. It made a deep impression on the composer, who composed twenty songs (some incomplete) set to Haugtussa texts, eight of which went into the cycle at hand. Although we hear no words tonight, the trumpet nevertheless conveys the essence of the poems. The first song is something of a siren call (the title Det syng is variously translated as “singing” and “enticement”), luring the listener into the mountain-maid’s realm. The second song gives a physical description of the girl – fair, young, slender, with deep grey eyes and an impassive, dreamy manner. “Blueberry Slope” is a frisky, exuberant portrait of outdoor life, each of its five stanzas devoted to a different subject: berries, a bear, a fox, a wolf, and, what is really on the singer’s mind, “that nice boy from over by Skare-Brôte.” She meets him in “The Encounter,” which quickly leads to “Love.” The “Kids’ Dance” is the only song besides “Blueberry Slope” with a frivolous or light-hearted tone, serving as a sort of interlude within the serious business of having a love affair. But the affair is a short one, for already in the following song the mountain-maid has been jilted. In the final song she pours out her heart’s sorrow to a babbling brook.

Grieg: three songs transcribed for piano

Grieg made two sets of his own song transcriptions, one in 1884 (Op. 41) and one in 1890 (Op. 52), six in each. Eleanor Bailie, in her volume on Grieg’s piano music, remarks that “each transcription takes the form of variations on the melody of the song – the theme set out in simple form, much as in the original, and then embellished, sometimes elaborately, in varied accompaniments. … Grieg undoubtedly loved these songs, and, sensitive to mood and atmosphere as he was, these poems and their melodies evoked some of his most rapt piano music.”

The “Cradle Song” has a rather somber cast to it, but its gentle rocking rhythm provides the necessary sleep-inducing agent. “A Mother’s Grief,” set to the same rocking rhythm, is even more doleful in mood and leaner in texture, as its original text concerns a mother mourning the death of her infant son. “The Poet’s Heart,” on the other hand, is, in typically Romantic fashion, a turbulent affair set to a poem of Hans Christian Andersen. Surging waves of sound from the piano underscore the imagery of the text, whose theme is the misunderstood poet as a reflection of nature and which includes numerous action words like “swell,” “flaming,” “longing” and “struggle.”

Manuel de Falla: Siete canciones populares españolas

Manuel de Falla was one of the most Spanish of all Spanish composers. He regarded the promotion of Spanish music as his mission in life, and his Siete canciones populares españoles (Seven Spanish Folkongs) are just one of the many manifestations of this purpose. The texts are anonymous, but the tunes have been traced to actual popular songs from all over Spain. De Falla’s treatment of the songs ranges from free composition to slight alteration to nearly untouched originals.

Written in 1914-1915 for voice and piano, the Seven Spanish Folksongs were first heard in Madrid sung by Luisa Vela with the composer at the piano on January 14, 1915. The songs were later orchestrated by the composer’s friend Ernesto Halffter in 1938-1945 and by Luciano Berio in 1978. Additionally there exist arrangements for violin (by the Polish violinist Paul Kochanski in 1924), viola and cello (by Maurice Marechal) replacing the voice, in which form the songs are known as Suite populaire espagnole. Tonight we hear still another version, with trumpet replacing the voice.

“El paño moruno” (The Moorish cloth) is set to a pulsating Moorish rhythm from the southeastern province of Murcia. The singer (or trumpet player) deplores the stain on the lovely cloth that will cause its selling price to plummet.

“Seguidilla murciana” is also inspired by Murcia, A seguidilla is a moderately fast dance in triple meter. The song’s text begins with the famous adage, “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.”

In “Asturiana” a weeping woman seeks consolation under a pine tree, which itself breaks into tears out of compassion. The melody comes from Asturias, in Spain’s far north.

From Aragon, another northern province, comes a “Jota” in rapid triple meter about two lovers in a clandestine relationship.

“Nana” is a lullaby from the southernmost province of Andalusia, whose songs have a decidedly oriental cast.

“Cancion” (song) is another love song, this one about eyes with traitorous qualities.

“Polo” is a wailing lament from Andalusia over the heartache of unrequited love. The fiery flamenco idiom will be familiar to those who know de Falla’s famous ballet score The Three-Cornered Hat.

Khatia Buniatishvili: program notes

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Khatia BuniatishviliKhatia Buniatishvili, piano
Chan Centre for the Performing Arts
Monday, January 23, 2011

Franz Joseph Haydn, piano sonata no. 33 in C minor, Hob. XVI/20

Although Haydn’s role in the development of the symphony and string quartet is secure in the minds of many people, but they are still apt to forget just how important the genre of the piano sonata was to this composer. Haydn wrote about sixty of them, spread across a span of over forty years, from the 1750s to the 1790s.

The C-minor Sonata is an extraordinary work by any means of measure. It is the first sonata Haydn obviously intended as being specifically for the piano as opposed to the harpsichord, and the first to which he assigned the title “sonata” rather than “divertimento” or “partita.” It dates from 1771, when the composer was in his brief but significant Sturm und Drang period.

The Sturm und Drang (usually translated as “storm and stress”) movement originated in literature of the period, emphasizing emotional intensity, dark pathos, stormy moods, restless anxiety and a general avoidance of the elegant and superficial language common to the age. In music, this form of expression manifested itself in the frequent use of minor keys, persistent and dramatic alternations of loud and soft, rich textures, a large harmonic palette, unusual formal designs and wide tessituras (melodic range).

All these qualities can be found in the sonata at hand. It begins unequivocally in C minor, with an elegiac subject filled with expressive “sighs” and an atmosphere of yearning. But the key of the second subject is far more difficult to determine. It begins in A-flat major, moves to E-flat, and seems to resolve in B-flat, but only momentarily. Then it’s off to still more keys, and remote ones at that. Throughout the movement, little cadenzas, unexpected pauses, a profusion of decorative touches (notes ornamented with trills, mordents, appoggiaturas, and the like), rhythmic surprises, and chromatic twists of both harmony and melody keep the attentive ear constantly on edge. A development section worthy of Beethoven and an abrupt pianissimo ending to the movement are additional features of note.

The slow movement, in A-flat major, exists on a somewhat lower emotional plane. A singing melodic line (absent in the first movement) is the first quality to strike the listener. Later we hear long strings of syncopation, the bass line and the upper voice moving independently and at the same pace but in alternation (“out of sync,” in the vernacular).

The Finale returns to the pathos of the opening movement. It is full of restless momentum, daring modulations into distant keys, and abrupt excursions into contrasting, lighthearted moods. Music theorists have a ball analyzing its form, which ambiguously combines development and recapitulation sections.

Franz Liszt: piano sonata in B minor

More words have probably been written about Liszt’s B-minor Sonata than about any other single piano composition of the nineteenth century. Like many works we regard today as indubitable masterpieces, this one suffered a difficult birth.

Liszt completed the sonata on February 2, 1853 and dedicated it to Robert Schumann, who had fifteen years earlier dedicated his great Fantaisie, Op. 17 to Liszt.

In this sonata, Liszt brought to perfection the form Schubert had tried in his Wanderer Fantasy of 1822 – absorption of the four-movement sonata into a gigantic, single-movement work in several sections, all unified through the continuous process of thematic transformation. Liszt was intimately familiar with Schubert’s model, for he had made a transcription for piano and orchestra just a year before he completed his Sonata.

Like a sculpture, the sonata takes on a different character depending on the angle from which it is viewed.  Most commentators agree that the work conforms more or less to a large-scale sonata-allegro design (introduction – exposition – development – recapitulation – coda), though just where the divisions occur is a matter of differing viewpoints. Furthermore, this sonata-allegro design is superimposed onto a traditional four-movement structure as found in the classical symphony or string quartet (fast first movement – slow second movement – scherzo-like third movement – finale).  Hence, at any given moment in the sonata’s design, one can regard it from varying perspectives.

Essentially, the genius of this sonata can be summarized in pianist Louis Kentner’s words: “In the B-minor Sonata Liszt uses the device of presenting, in a short Introduction, three seemingly incongruous elements … and then proceeds to demonstrate how these can be welded into a unity of such compactness, of such compelling power, that it convinces even the unregenerate.” These three elements have no names, but might be identified as follows: a) a quietly gliding downward scale; b) a defiant outburst; c) a sinister ten-note motif preceded by a “drum-roll.” There are two further themes of great significance, a grandiose chorale-like subject first heard shortly after one of the famous double-octave passages, and a quietly reflective Andante sostenuto idea in F-sharp major (Liszt’s “beatific” key).  The initial gliding downward scale serves as a point of demarcation, recurring at major junctures of the sonata’s formal plan: at the beginning, leading into the Grandioso subject, the transition to the fugato, in the recapitulation again leading into the Grandioso subject, and at the very end. Some listeners like to regard it as a curtain used to separate acts of a drama.

As a rough guide, one might regard the exposition as the first movement; the development section as the quiet Andante sostenuto and the demonic fugato (equivalent to the second and third movements of a traditional design); and the recapitulation as the finale, followed by a coda that takes the listener full circle back to the mysterious downward gliding scale with which the sonata opened nearly half an hour before.

Needless to say, the sonata’s appeal lies in more than structural concerns. It is full of virtuosic effects, dramatic outbursts, profoundly meditative passages and intriguing variants of the basic motivic material. Perhaps Louis Kentner’s words will serve as the best approach to listening:  “Analysis should not attempt to break the seal of the mystery that is artistic creation anyway, but should say with humility: ‘We are in the presence of genius.’ The alchemy of genius will, thank God, forever remain a secret.

Sergei Prokofiev: piano sonata no. 7 in B flat major, Op. 83

As Prokofiev was a formidable concert pianist, it is not surprising that he devoted a large part of his output to solo piano music. Nine sonatas appeared throughout his lifetime, though not evenly spaced. The first four (1907-08) came from his conservatory years, though all were later re-written, followed by the fifth in 1923 (revised in 1953). A sixteen-year hiatus separated the fifth from the next three sonatas, sketched simultaneously in 1939 and sometimes referred to as the “war sonatas.” Of the nine, the Seventh is by far the best known.

Prokofiev began working on this sonata in 1939 and completed it in 1942. Sviatoslav Richter gave the first performance on January 18, 1943 in Moscow. Glenn Gould characterized the sonata as “built to last. … With its schizophrenic oscillation of mood and its nervous instability of tonality, it is certainly a war piece. It is full of that uniquely Prokofievian mixture of bittersweet lamentation, percussive intensity and … lyricism.”

Violent contrasts are found throughout the work, beginning on the first page of the score. The opening theme skims nervously and lightly over the keyboard, but culminates in a ruthless pounding figure. Yet even the contrasts within the entire first subject become a collective contrast to the calm and lyrical second subject (Andantino). Much of the tension in this sonata-form movement derives from the large-scale contrasts between the driving restlessness of the first subject and the gentleness of the second. The central movement is marked Andante caloroso (caloroso = warm) and does indeed offer a sweetly ingratiating theme in E major. This gives way to a new section (Poco più animato) that recalls somewhat the restlessness of the first movement. After the music grows to a powerful climax, we hear a brief reminder of the gently lyrical E-major theme, thus setting in strongest juxtaposition the violent harshness of the third movement, which moves relentlessly forward in 7/8 meter with the terrifying power of a musical juggernaut.

Igor Stravinsky: Three Movements from Petrushka

Stravinsky’s boundless fertility of imagination is nowhere more in evidence than in his ballet score for Petrushka (1911), one of the cornerstones of twentieth-century music. It actually began life as a concert piece for solo piano and orchestra, but when the composer played the passages that later became the “Russian Dance” and “Petrushka’s Cry” (within the section called “In Petrushka’s Room”) for Serge Diaghilev, the legendary impresario of the Ballets russes in Paris, Stravinsky was persuaded to alter the work and turn it into a ballet score.

The scenario involves the carnival scene at Shrove-tide (the three days preceding Ash Wednesday) in early nineteenth-century St. Petersburg, with all its attendant noise, bustle, high spirits, dances, magicians, vendors, side shows and attractions of all sorts – a veritable riot of sound and color. One of these attractions is a puppet show about a poor, unhappy clown found in fairgrounds in nearly every country. In Russia he is called Petrushka.

Ten years after the ballet was introduced in Paris, Arthur Rubinstein persuaded the composer to arrange a “Petrushka Sonata” for solo piano. (Details can be found in Rubinstein’s entertaining autobiography, My Many Years.)  It is dedicated to the pianist, as well it might be, for he paid Stravinsky the hefty fee of 5,000 francs for it, though one also notes that Rubinstein earned many times that amount for recitals in which he featured this dazzling display piece.

The three numbers amount to a bit less than half the complete ballet score. The highly animated “Russian Dance” is the music to which Petrushka and other puppets dance after being brought to life by a magician. “In Petrushka’s Room” was the first music Stravinsky wrote in his original conception of the score for piano and orchestra, wherein the puppet “exasperates the patience of the orchestra with diabolical cascades of arpeggios, [and] the orchestra retaliates with menacing trumpet blasts.” In these first two movements the piano part can be lifted largely intact from the complete orchestral score. However, “The Shrove-tide Fair” represents a true piano reduction of orchestral textures and sonorities. So brilliantly did Stravinsky realize this task that the piano “reduction” is scarcely less fascinating and colorful than the original. Here, in a sequence of episodes and dances, is displayed all the excitement and razzle-dazzle of the crowded carnival scene in Admiralty Square of old St. Petersburg.

In listening to this music, one is left with the indelible impression that, to Stravinsky, the piano is indeed a percussive instrument – an object of steel wires and hammers, not an instrument of vocal and lyrical attributes. He and Rubinstein had violent arguments over this matter (again, see My Many Years), but in the end, both emerged victorious with the resounding success of Petrushka in each of its versions.

Program notes by Robert Markow.

George Li: program notes

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George LiLi at piano
Programme Notes
Performance: Vancouver Playhouse, Sunday, December 4, 2011

Carl Czerny
Variations on a Theme by Rode, Op. 33 (“La Ricordanza”)

Most concertgoers know Carl Czerny only as the early nineteenth-century pedagogue who churned out endless dull exercises that continue to be inflicted upon piano students this day. True, he did compose a tremendous amount – 861 opus numbers and an even greater amount published without opus numbers – and true, the exercises are dull. But Czerny composed much else that is decidedly not dull.

Unlike his teacher Beethoven, and unlike his star pupil Franz Liszt, Czerny was no innovator, but within the parameters of his time much of his music is eminently pleasing, charming, tasteful and sensitively written. He wrote voluminously in nearly every known form and genre of the time: sonatas, fantasias, theme and variation sets, piano concertos, symphonies, sacred choral music, string quartets and much other chamber music. His most frequently recorded composition would seem to be an Andante and Pollaca for horn and piano, with the Variations on this afternoon’s program not far behind.

The variation form and its close cousin the fantasia were immensely popular in the early nineteenth century. Beethoven wrote some twenty sets of variations for piano. Czerny mined dozens of operas, symphonies, overtures, oratorios and ballets by Beethoven, Bellini, Cherubini, Donizetti, Handel, Haydn, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Rossini, Verdi, Wagner, Weber and others for his variation sets and fantasias. From the famous French violinist Pierre Rode (1774-1830) he borrowed the tune “La Ricordanza” and set it as a theme with five variations for solo piano. A stately one precedes the final and most brilliant variation, which in turn is followed by a return to the theme for a quiet closing.

Arnold Schoenberg
Sechs kleine Klavierstücke (Six Little Piano Pieces), Op. 19

Schoenberg, unlike the other composers represented on this program, was not a keyboard virtuoso. Nevertheless, he turned to the piano as a medium of experimentation on more than one occasion. One such occasion came in 1909, when he produced his first atonal composition, the Three Piano Pieces, Op. 11.

Essentially what Schoenberg achieved in these pieces was the emancipation of dissonance from its ties to traditional harmony. A “dissonant” note or chord no longer had any contextual relationship to surrounding pitches; it existed in and of itself. It is traditional to view these pieces as a milestone, a break with the past, a giant step forward in the development of music history. Yet Schoenberg always regarded this music as an absolutely logical continuation of the past, something “distinctly a product of evolution, and no more revolutionary than any other development in the history of music.”

Schoenberg’s next piano music, Op. 19, appeared in 1911. But whereas the three pieces of Op. 11 require about a quarter of an hour to perform, the six pieces of Op. 19 require barely five minutes. “A novel in a sigh” was the expression coined for such pieces.

Continuing where he left off in Op. 11, Schoenberg made the non-recurrence of thematic material the operating principle in Op. 19. The dynamic level is also telescoped, with emphasis on the softer end of the spectrum. And as David Burge points out, the performance direction mit sehr zartem Ausdruck (with very delicate expression) three bars before the end of the last piece “might well serve as an overall injunction for performance of the entire set.”

The first five pieces were written in February of 1911, possibly all in a single day. Microcosmic wisps of sound flutter about in No. 1, which is played nearly all pianissimo (very quiet). No. 2 features a single interval, the major third, repeated playfully (or obsessively, if that is your response) throughout. The third is notable for its opening bars in which the right hand plays forte (loud), the left hand piano (soft or quiet). No. 4 opens in a mood of frolic, but comes to a crashing end just twenty seconds later in brutally hammered fortissimo chords (very loud). Not even Schoenberg was immune to the waltz – it seems to run in the veins of nearly all Viennese; No. 5 suggests its characteristic rhythmic pattern.

The final piece was written in June, one month after Schoenberg accompanied Mahler to his grave. Bell-like sonorities evoke the remote, pastoral landscapes Mahler conjured up in his symphonies. Paolo Petazzi sees this haunting music as “motionless planes of sound set against one another [to] create a chill, insubstantial timbre which hovers on the edge of silence, as if pointing to a dimension the ear cannot perceive.”

Ludwig van Beethoven
Sonata no. 23 in F minor, Op. 57 (“Appassionata”)

The “Appassionata” Sonata, composed in 1804-06, remains one of Beethoven’s greatest and most frequently heard works in any medium. The title helps, of course. It does have passion – to a generous degree. But it has much more than that. Czerny regarded the sonata as “the most perfect carrying out of a mighty and colossal plan.” As with so many of Beethoven’s compositions, the title was affixed not by the composer but by a publisher, in this case the Hamburg firm of Cranz, which brought out the sonata in a duet version in 1838. Strange as it may seem today, Czerny thought that an earlier Beethoven sonata ought to bear the title “Appassionata”, Op. 7 in E flat, a relatively tame work compared to Op. 57.

The opening movement is largely music of sound and fury, defined above all by rhythmic insistence. Both the defiantly rising principal subject (opening measures) and the lyrical, rising-and-falling second subject share a similar rhythmic pattern (long-short-long; long-short long), and both are built from arpeggios. “How wondrous that the composer can establish such diverse moods with the same material,” remarks pianist Anton Kuerti, “and especially that he can create such noble tranquility with this bumpy rhythm.” Additionally, there is a rhythmic motto appearing often throughout the movement that corresponds exactly to that of the opening of the Fifth Symphony (da-da-da-daahh).

The second movement offers an oasis of tranquility and repose. It is a theme-and-variations movement, built, like the second movement of the Seventh Symphony, more from a harmonic progression than from a melody. Each of the three variations employs increasingly rapid note values (eighths, sixteenths, thirty-seconds). Following is a small coda that disintegrates into a mysterious chord, which, as if jolted with an electric shock, reenergizes itself and launches into the finale.

This concluding movement, in sonata form like the first, is one of the most demonic things Beethoven ever wrote, a musical juggernaut of relentless forward momentum and almost frightening power. To Kuerti, “the accompaniment is the very substance of the music; its perpetuum mobile pervades all. It is quiet but chilling, like the waves in the middle of the ocean.  Over this rises a series of desolate, penetrating cries…” Tension builds to almost unbearable levels, finally bursting its bonds in the presto coda, which roars to an apocalyptic conclusion.

Mauric Ravel
Oiseaux tristes
Alborada del gracioso

In 1904-05, Ravel composed a set of five piano pieces collectively entitled Miroirs, which he claimed “marked a change in my harmonic development great enough to disconcert even those most accustomed to my style up to that point.” “Oiseaux tristes” (Sad Birds) is the second of the collection, “Alborada del gracioso” is the fourth. Each of the five Miroirs was dedicated to a different friend or colleague. “Oiseaux tristes” went to the famous Spanish pianist Ricardo Viñes, who gave the first performance of the entire set in 1906. Ravel wrote “in this work, I evoke birds engrossed in the torpor of a dark forest during the peak hours of summer heat.”

“Alborada del gracioso” is one of Ravel’s most brilliant and effective evocations of Spain, richly informed with coloristic detail, evocative images, percussive effects and pyrotechnical displays (particularly the rapidly repeated notes played at all-but-impossible speeds). The title resists direct translation; it implies something along the lines of a court jester singing to his ladylove at dawn, and perhaps dancing a bit as well. Ravel later orchestrated the work, in which form it is often heard at symphony concerts.

The ten-minute work is laid out in three connected sections. The brilliant outer parts are characterized by alternating patterns of vibrant rhythms set to the clack of simulated castanets and raucous strumming of a guitar. Boston Symphony annotator Steven Ledbetter refers to this music as “a glorious racket. As a real ‘dawn song,’ the work would be catastrophic; in addition to waking the lovers, it would arouse the entire neighborhood.” The somewhat meditative central section evokes more the clownish aspect of the work’s title.

Franz Liszt
Waldesrauschen
Gnomenreigen
Consolation no. 3 in D flat major
Hungarian Rhapsody no. 2

In 2009 it was Mendelssohn. In 2010, Chopin and Schumann. This year, another giant from the annals of the world’s greatest composer-pianists, Franz Liszt, takes the spotlight on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of his birth.

Liszt was the quintessential figure of nineteenth-century musical Romanticism. His long life encompassed any number of emotional upheavals, quasi-mystical religious experiences, a visit from the Pope, an attempted murder, a cancelled marriage at the eleventh hour, enough love affairs (including with royalty) for any ten normal men, at least half a dozen occupations, visionary ideas of Music of the Future, a compulsion to be different (he was the first to give a complete solo recital without sharing the stage with other artists), an all-consuming sense of destiny, pianistic powers beyond belief, and a mind of near-genius proportions. Liszt was a biographer’s dream.

In 1848 Liszt abandoned his career as a spectacular touring piano virtuoso to settle in Weimar as a conductor. Concurrently, his output for piano slowed considerably, but he did produce two final etudes in 1862-1863. Formally known as Two Concert Etudes, they are more commonly referred to by their poetic subtitles, which, incidentally, do not appear on the autograph manuscript. Both are dedicated to Liszt’s pupil Dionys Prunker.

In Waldesrauschen (Forest Murmurs), the trees rustle almost continuously as portrayed in the sextuplet figuration that alternates from right hand to left while the other hand spins out a single tranquil melody dolce con grazia (sweetly and gracefully). This music comes from the romantic world of the mysterious, dimly-lit forest (Schumann’s Waldszenen appeared just fifteen years earlier, and Wagner’s “Forest Murmurs” in the opera Siegfried were just a few years down the road), yet it is nevertheless highly chromatic. As Ben Arnold points out, there are no fewer than ten changes of key within its 97 measures.

While Waldesrauschen is a study in lyricism and tranquility, Gnomenreigen (Round Dance of the Gnomes) glitters and sparkles. Its spiritual ancestors are the Scherzo from Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream and the “Queen Mab” Scherzo from Berlioz’ Roméo et Juliet. “One of Liszt’s cleverest and most facetious works,” claims Arnold.

The six Consolations were published as a group in 1850 (all but No. 5 were composed in 1848). “Their reflective, self-communing character reveals a new and much more thoughtful Liszt,” writes Liszt scholar Alan Walker. The title has two possible derivations, both poetic. Most scholars, including Walker, attribute it to a collection of poems by Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, the Consolations of 1830. Another possibility is Lamartine’s poem “Une larme, ou consolation.”  In either case, a quality of melancholy and introspection permeates the music, as it does the poems (“music tinged with a secret sorrow,” as Walker writes). No. 3, marked Lento placido, is the longest, probably the best known, and the one closest in style to Chopin nocturnes – comparison with the one in the same key, D flat major (Op. 27, No. 2) is almost inevitable.

Liszt was captivated by Hungarian gypsy music all his life, right from childhood. He collected melodies he heard played at campsites and other locations. His writings are peppered with references to them and their music, and he even wrote a 450-page treatise on the subject, published in 1859. Liszt was mistaken in equating “gypsy” music with that of the Hungarian Magyars, as research by Bartók, Kodály and others has proven. The themes he used actually came from “urban” sources, mostly popular tunes recently composed. The gypsy flavor derives from use of the so-called “gypsy scale,” sectional structure punctuated by sudden breaks, abrupt transitions, and a freely improvisatory style. Contrast and gathering momentum are the principal shaping forces of this music.

The nineteen rhapsodies were composed across a span of more than four decades. No. 2, by far the most popular, comes from 1847. Thereafter came arrangements, rearrangements and disarrangements for everything from simplified versions for young piano students to full orchestra, and in everything from Bugs Bunny cartoons to feature films (100 Men and a Girl).

No. 2, like many of the Rhapsodies, begins with a slow introduction leading into an Andante mesto, which features a lush, passionate theme. The second main part is the friska, which begins quietly and gradually builds in speed, texture and volume.

Programme notes by Robert Markow, 2011.

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