Tag: classical music
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PROGRAM NOTES: ANDREA LUCCHESINI
Domenico Scarlatti Six Sonatas K 491 – K 454 – K 239 – K 466 – K 342 – K 146 The 550-odd sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti are perhaps the most successful works to migrate from the harpsichord to the modern grand piano. Their transparent texture of simple two- and three-part keyboard writing has one foot in the imitative counterpoint of…
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PROGRAM NOTES: IGOR LEVIT
Johann Sebastian Bach Chaconne in D minor BWV 1004 (arr. Brahms) The Bach revival of the 19th century began with a performance of the St. Matthew Passion in Berlin in 1829, conducted by the 20-year-old Felix Mendelssohn. It reached its stride at mid-century with the founding, by Robert Schumann and others, of the Bach-Gesellschaft, a society…
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PROGRAM NOTES: JERUSALEM QUARTET WITH PINCHAS ZUKERMAN & AMANDA FORSYTH
Richard Strauss String Sextet from Capriccio Capriccio (1942), Richard Strauss’ last stage work, is an opera about opera, constructed as a series of elegant salon conversations dealing with a question that has bedevilled opera lovers for centuries: which is more important, the words or the music? The year is 1775 and the setting is the…
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PROGRAM NOTES: EVGENY KISSIN
Frédéric Chopin and Robert Schumann “…calling it a sonata is a caprice if not a jest for Chopin seems to have taken four of his most unruly children and put them together possibly thinking to smuggle them, as a sonata, into company where them might not be considered individually presentable.” That’s the perceptive way Robert…
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PROGRAM NOTES: CASTALIAN STRING QUARTET
Franz Joseph Haydn String Quartet in D, Op. 76 No. 5 Having recently returned from his hugely successful visits to England and been liberated from financial woes, Haydn composed a set of six String Quartets, Op. 76 which were commissioned by Hungarian Count, Joseph Erdödy in 1797. Deviating from more traditional forms and establishing a…
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PROGRAM NOTES: PAUL LEWIS
Ludwig van Beethoven 11 Bagatelles Op. 119 Beethoven’s Op. 119 is a catch-all collection of pieces written without any preconceived formal plan for the enjoyment of amateur piano enthusiasts. The last five were published first as a contribution to a pedagogical publication called the Wiener Piano-Forte Schule (1821), with the first six added to that…
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PROGRAM NOTES: EDGAR MOREAU & JESSICA XYLINA OSBORNE
Francis Poulenc Sonata for Cello and Piano Op. 143 Mozart meets Stravinsky – in a Paris cabaret. As unlikely as such a meeting might be in historical terms, it is about as good a description as you can find for the musical style of French composer Francis Poulenc. The directness of his writing, its exuberance…
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PROGRAM NOTES: SIR ANDRÁS SCHIFF
Robert Schumann Variations on an Original Theme in E at major (“Ghost Variations”) WoO 24 In February of 1854, Robert Schumann was in a state of delirium, but a very musical one. He was surrounded by ghosts, he told his wife Clara, ghosts that fed him wonderful music and had occasionally tried to drag him down…
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PROGRAM NOTES: BENEDETTI ELSCHENBROICH GRYNYUK TRIO
Franz Schubert Adagio from Piano Trio in E at Major Op. 148 D 897 Schubert’s Adagio for Piano Trio D 897 was composed in 1827 but only published decades later, under the publisher’s title Notturno. And indeed, the opening section does conjure up images of nighttime serenity, with its heavenly texture of harp-like arpeggios in…
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PROGRAM NOTES: SCHAGHAJEGH NOSRATI
Johann Sebastian Bach GOLDBERG VARIATIONS BWV 988 Historical Background Such was Bach’s mastery of his musical materials that he was often tempted to explore a particular genre or compositional technique in a systematic way by providing a quasi-exhaustive compendium of its possibilities. Fugue, for example, is represented in the two books of The Well-Tempered Clavier…
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PROGRAM NOTES: MARC-ANDRÉ HAMELIN
Franz Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody No. 13 in A minor Liszt’s 19 Hungarian Rhapsodies pay tribute to the gypsy music of his native Hungary. Like an ancient insect trapped in amber, they encapsulate for posterity the dramatic, improvisatory performance style of the roving bands of Romani musicians that Liszt heard as a boy growing up in…
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PROGRAM NOTES: NIKOLAJ ZNAIDER & ROBERT KULEK
Ludwig van Beethoven Sonata for Violin & Piano in G major Op. 30 No. 3 “Who are you, and what have you done with Ludwig van Beethoven?” Such is the question that Beethoven enthusiasts raised on the Pathétique Sonata, the Fifth Symphony, and the late quartets might wish to ask of the musician responsible for…
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PROGRAM NOTES: TARA ERRAUGHT & JAMES BAILLIEU
Franz Liszt Victor Hugo Poems It may seem strange to think of Liszt as a song composer, so firmly is his name associated with 19th-century virtuoso pianism. But the extraordinary breadth of his musical sympathies is already clearly evident in the wide range of styles and moods in his piano compositions alone, from the bombast…
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PROGRAM NOTES: PAUL LEWIS (CONCERT 1)
Franz Joseph Haydn Sonata in C major Hob. XV1:50 Haydn’s last three piano sonatas, Nos. 60 to 62 (Hob. XVI: 50-52), were written during the composer’s second trip to London in 1794-1795. All three were composed with a specific dedicatee in mind: the female keyboard virtuoso, Therese Jansen Bartolozzi (1770-1843), a student of Clementi that…
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PROGRAM NOTES: ALBAN GERHARDT & STEVEN OSBORNE
Johann Sebastian Bach Cello Suite No. 2 in D minor BWV 1008 The instrumental suite, with its predictable allemande-courante-sarabande-gigue sequence of dances and its un-predictable addition of various galanteries (minuets, bourrées, gavottes, etc.), was a staple of the Baroque. Arising from neither of the period’s two great wellsprings of musical emotion – religious piety and…
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PROGRAM NOTES: GEORGE LI
Franz Joseph Haydn Sonata in B minor Hob. XVI:32 It is not often that you catch the congenial, ever-chipper Haydn writing in a minor key. But minor keys were all the rage in the 1770s, the age of Sturm und Drang (storm and stress), an age when composers such as C. P. E. Bach sought to…
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PROGRAM NOTES: ZHANG ZUO
Ludwig van Beethoven 32 Variations in C minor WoO 80 The theme that Beethoven chose for his 32 Variations in C minor (1806) has a Baroque feel to it, with its chaconne-like harmonic pattern in the left hand and sarabande-like second-beat emphasis in the right. This theme, however, is far from the characterless blank canvas…
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PROGRAM NOTES: YEKWON SUNWOO
Franz Schubert Sonata in C minor D 958 Schubert’s unabashed admiration for Beethoven is vividly on display in the opening bars of his Sonata in C minor D 958, composed in September 1828, shortly before his death. Schubert had served as a pallbearer at Beethoven’s funeral the year before, and his own death from tertiary…
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PROGRAM NOTES: THE VERONA QUARTET
Franz Joseph Haydn Quartet in B at major Op. 50 No. 1 The art music of Western Europe underwent a period of transition in the mid- 18th century as the thickly embroiled scores of the Baroque, with their long spun-out melodic lines and constant harmonic churn, gradually yielded to the clearer textures, symmetrical phrases and slower…
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PROGRAM NOTES: MURRAY PERAHIA
Johann Sebastian Bach French Suite No. 6 in E Major BWV 817 The spirit of the dance can be felt across a wide range of Bach’s works, from the fugues of the Well-Tempered Clavier to the Mass in B minor. For Bach lovers with toes eager to tap, then, an entire suite of dance pieces…
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PROGRAM NOTES: DOVER QUARTET & AVI AVITAL
Sulkhan Tsintsadze Six Miniatures for String Quartet and Mandolin (arr. Ohan Ben-Ari) The Soviets promoted the ideal of music rooted in the traditions of their native soil and in this regard it would be hard to find a composer more congenial to Soviet ideals than Sulkhan Tsintsadze, one of the leading composers of the Soviet…