Tag: Recital
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…