Tag: concert
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PROGRAM NOTES: NIKKI AND TIMMY CHOOI AND ANGELA CHENG
Claude Debussy Sonata in G minor for violin and piano The sound of Debussy’s music confounded many of his contemporaries. From a tonal point of view, it floated in stasis in a world of pastel sounds that arrived at their destination more by whim than by design. How, they asked, could what he composed actually…
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PROGRAM NOTES: TETZLAFF-TETZLAFF-VOGT TRIO
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Piano Trio No. 1 in B-flat Major K 502 The piano trio developed out of the ‘accompanied’ keyboard sonata, a makeshift compositional genre that attempted to compensate for the weak ‘tinkly’ tone of the early fortepiano (forerunner of the modern pianoforte) by the addition of a violin to reinforce the singing line…
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PROGRAM NOTES: ANDREW TYSON
Alban Berg Sonata Op. 1 The tonal system in use throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, from Bach to Tchaikovsky, was predicated on the understanding that pieces would be in a home key – from which they would depart, and to which they would return – and that harmony would result from the interaction of chords…
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PROGRAM NOTES: JONATHAN ROOZEMAN
Luigi Boccherini Sonata in A major G 4 Luigi Boccherini was perhaps the greatest cellist of the 18th century, and like his compatriot of a previous generation, Domenico Scarlatti, he spent the most active portion of his professional life at the court of Spain. His royal patron, the Spanish Infante Don Luis Antonio, younger brother…
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PROGRAM NOTES: CHIAROSCURO QUARTET AND KRISTIAN BEZUIDENHOUT
Franz SchubertString Quartet No. 14 in D minor (“Death & the Maiden”) Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” string quartet is a sombre work, with all four of its movements set in a minor key. It takes its name from the composer’s lied Der Tod und das Mädchen (1817) that provides the theme for the quartet’s…
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PROGRAM NOTES: PAUL LEWIS
Franz Joseph Haydn Sonata in E minor Hob. XVI:34 It is unusual to encounter a sonata in a minor key from “Papa” Haydn, a composer best known for his chipper disposition. But his Sonata in E minor likely dates from the late 1770s, which could explain its turbulent mood. The 1770s was the decade of…
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PROGRAM NOTES: DANISH STRING QUARTET
Ludwig van Beethoven String Quartet in C minor Op. 18 No. 4 In the Napoleonic era, when a Viennese aristocrat was thinking of entertaining friends at home, he might pop down to the local shop to pick up a six-pack—of string quartets, that is. The most refined form of home entertainment in Austria’s capital was…
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PROGRAM NOTES: FILIPPO GORINI
Ludwig van Beethoven Sonata A flat major Op. 110 Beethoven’s penultimate piano sonata is remarkable for the utter simplicity of its musical ideas and the directness with which they are expressed. The most obvious late-period features of this work are an extremely wide keyboard range and a melding of slow movement and finale into a…
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PROGRAM NOTES: BEHZOD ABDURAIMOV
Richard Wagner Isolde’s Liebestod arr. Franz Liszt The 19th century in Europe was an age in which psychological states went mainstream in the arts, becoming a particularly powerful stimulus for musical expression. A new genre, the nocturne, for example, captured that eerie feeling of being alone with one’s lyrical thoughts at a still point in…
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PROGRAM NOTES: ZOLTÁN FEJÉRVÁRI
Robert Schumann Waldszenen Op. 82 It is not by chance that Carl Maria von Weber’s opera Der Freischütz, the founding work of German musical Romanticism, is set in a forest. Nor is it a coincidence that German Romantic poets from Ludwig Tieck to Joseph von Eichendorff and Heinrich Heine extolled the deep spiritual joys of…
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PROGRAM NOTES: PAUL LEWIS
Johannes Brahms 7 Fantasies Op. 116 If the word fantasy implies improvisation and free association of thoughts, then the collection of three capricci and four intermezzi that Brahms published under the title Fantasien in 1892 are misnamed, as they are among the most densely expressive and tightly crafted miniatures to come from his pen. Some…
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PROGRAM NOTES: SIR SIMON KEENLYSIDE
Johannes Brahms Songs from Opp. 6, 72, 86 & 96 It may be surprising to learn that while Brahms is universally revered as a giant of 19th-century instrumental music, he is often listed as one of the lesser composers of 19th-century art song. This may be because the texts he chose to set were for…
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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: JULIA BULLOCK & JOHN ARIDA
FRANZ SCHUBERT (1797–1828) Four Lieder About the Composer Franz Schubert established the German lied as an important art form and then set a standard of excellence that no one since has quite matched. Schubert created more than 600 songs in a prodigious outpouring that sometimes saw him composing five songs in a single day. However,…
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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: 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: 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: SHEKU KANNEH-MASON & ISATA KANNEH-MASON
Gaspar Cassadó Suite for Solo Cello Gaspar Cassadó is hardly a household name, but he was one of the great cellists of the twentieth century, active as a performer, composer and transcriber for his instrument. Born in Barcelona in 1897, he was discovered at the age of nine by a young Catalan cellist just starting…