ChristopherAxworthy-MusicCommentary

Some beautiful refined playing of great intelligence and simple artistry from Dominika who had come to the rescue at the last minute of an indisposed clarinettist due to play in Hugh Mather’s Young Artists Series in Perivale.

I had not heard her before but when I saw she was studying with Christopher Elton I knew I should not miss her recital. Christopher and I had been part of a group of pianists (that included Stephen Hough,Peter Donohue ,Christian Blackshaw,Peter Uppard,Tessa Uys,Ann Shasby,Philip Fowke,Peter Bithell ……etc ) that was mentored by Gordon Green in the 60’s and 70’s.

Christopher recently celebrated his 80th birthday and has for many years taken over the golden mantle that our much loved Gordon shared so generously with such kindness and humanity at the Royal Academy ( as well as in Manchester and Liverpool) .There has remained a bond between all those touched by his genius and Christopher is one of the only musicians that finds time to come to his students recitals as he knows how important this human and professional bond is in a young musicians formative years

Sherri Lun at Steinway Hall for the Keyboard Trust Mastery,passion and intelligence of twenty year old pianist.

It was in the encore of a single Scarlatti Sonata K.87 in B minor that all Dominika’s superb qualities were demonstrated in a radiant prism of simple sounds .The same contrapuntal simplicity that she had brought to Chopin or the same clarity and subtle shading of Couperin and even the poignantly poetic beauty that had made her Polish Mazurkas so touchingly nostalgic . All this in just a couple of pages because it takes just two notes to reveal a true artist! She seemed to do nothing but said everything and was not that the secret of Rubinstein the Prince of all pianists? The Mazurkas by Szymanowski were dedicated to his friend Artur Rubinstein .I remember an all Chopin programme for the Polish Air force at the Fairfield Halls in Croydon where like a sorbet halfway through a sumptuous meal Rubinstein played these four Mazurkas ( only three of the four today) that just opened our ears as we strained to understand this subtle new language that carried the same message as Poland’s national hero.I was a schoolboy and I will never forget Rubinstein striking up the Polish and British National Anthems as we all stood out of respect for the values that our two nations had stood for so valiantly, side by side .

A programme that was dance inspired and began with Couperin ‘Les Tours….’ .Of crystalline clarity with a subtle dynamic range as she played with a style of delicacy and grace.The Passacaglia in B minor was immediately more serious with much denser harmonies but with ornaments that spun from her fingers within a finely spun web of poignant significance as an underlying rhythmic energy carried us forward with intensity and dynamic drive.

There was a pungent beauty to the Szymanowski Mazurkas that owed more to Messiaen than Bellini and which she played with a beautiful cantabile of aristocratic nobility.There was a rhythmic drive to the second with its sumptuous outpouring of Nationalistic joy.The etherial opening of the third reminded me of early Stravinsky but always with the underlying mazurka rhythm in the distance.I can see why she only played three of the four because this last one ended on a note of pure magic.

The three mazurkas by Chopin were written just four years before his untimely death and are a vision of nostalgic beauty,A bel canto that Dominika played with a beguiling rhythmic understanding and counterpoints that she untangled with searing intensity and beauty.The second Mazurka flowed so beautifully with disarming simplicity as the unmistakable voice of Chopin was allowed to express itself with unadorned beauty.There was a wonderful sense of balance as the melodic line was passed from one voice to another until a golden web of sounds brought us to a magical ending.The last was the robust Nationalistic dance that had remained in Chopin’s heart from when he left his homeland as a teenager setting out to seduce the Parisian Salons of the day.this heart was eventually restored to his homeland.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_of_Fr%C3%A9d%C3%A9ric_Chopin

The Chopin B minor Sonata was played with great clarity but the opening was played with simple musicianship not the more usual declaration of intent of showmanship.It was indeed her aristocratic good taste and musicianship that allowed her to maintain the same tempo that gave the second subject such nobility and significance.Ravishingly beautiful but more powerful for not being heart on sleeve sentimentality.Even the final chords of the first movement were played as if this were just the beginning of a wondrous voyage.Scintllating jeux perlé of the Scherzo with a glowing luminosity of will o’ the wisp agitation and with a beautifully flowing central Trio of nobility and actually part of an architectural whole that made such sense when the scherzo returned.Nobility of the perfectly timed entry of the Largo as the bel canto that follows was of subtle simple refined beauty.I have rarely heard the central ‘sostenuto’ played with such a sense of line and flowing beauty as the changing harmonies were illuminated by strands of melody.A magisterial opening to the presto non tanto was played with just the understated sense of importance that allowed the agitato to immediately emerge so naturally.Showers of golden sounds just rained over the keys as the rondo theme became ever more imperious and passionate.Enflamed in a coda a mastery and exhilaration which brought this superb performance to a brilliant end

Dominika Mak is a Polish classical pianist, currently undertaking the Master of Arts course at the Royal Academy of Music under the tutelage of Christopher Elton (Professor Emeritus). While completing her BA and MPhil in Music at Trinity College, Cambridge, Dominika became the Artistic Director of a Trinity College Music Society, a choral soprano in Trinity College Choir, Cambridge under Stephen Layton OBE, a Chopin scholar, an avid accompanist, and a solo pianist. In the past, Dominika has benefited from tuition from professors Pascal Nemirovski at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, and Graham Caskie at Chethams’ School of Music.

During her time as an undergraduate, Dominika became a laureate of various competitions, such as the National EPTA Competition, the Edith Leigh Prize, the Arthur Bliss Lieder Scheme with baritone Florian Störtz, the IAS award in Cambridge etc. The ‘liquidity’ of Dominika’s performances of Chopin’s works has been described as ‘perfection.’ Recent performances include Chopin’s Concerto op. 21 in F minor, his Preludes op. 28 etc. Dominika has given performances at St John’s Smith Square, St Martin-in-the-Fields, West Road Concert Hall in Cambridge and other venues. Dominika has benefitted from masterclasses from Yevgeny Subdin, Katya Apekisheva, Stephen Hough, Joseph Middleton and others.

An exciting young Italian piano talent, Andrea Molteni is developing his international profile with regular appearances in the USA, Italy, UK, Europe, China and Singapore, including concerts at the Esplanade in Singapore,  the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Wiener Saal of the Mozarteum University in Salzburg, DiMenna Center in New York, Qingdao Grand Theatre  (China).

His latest album, Scarlatti Sonatas (that was released in January 2022), has already got important reviews (Magazine Musica, June 2023) and has been broadcasted in the German radio MDR Kultur. 

Andrea Molteni arrived in Florence with his latest CD issued just a few days ago. Quite a colossal undertaking for a young musician to present an all Beethoven programme that includes the Sonata ‘Hammerklavier’ op 106 ,the Sonata op 110 and with a fill up of the solo piano version of the mighty Grosse Fuge op 133!

It was even more remarkable that his programme in Florence did not include any of these works but instead the Sonata op 101 which is the first of the five last Sonatas that a totally deaf Beethoven was to pen with visionary precision. He prefaced this with one of Beethoven’s own favourite Sonatas ‘a Thérèse’ op 78. The little two movement sonata ,dedicated to a pupil ,where beauty and simplicity combine with clarity and luminosity in a mellifluous outpouring worthy of Schubert. Andrea played it with aristocratic simplicity allowing the music to unfold on this mellow sounding Bechstein of 1898 that sits so proudly and justly in ‘a room with a view.’ Surrounded by books in the Harold Acton Library that is the seat of the British Institute in Florence, Andrea immediately created a warmth and intimacy with playing of subtle delicacy and refined good taste.

Andrea is quite a live wire as those that encounter him are immediately aware. Eyes that light up with a brilliance and sparkle but that hide the depths that his music making can reveal. It was in the ‘Allegro vivace’ second movement that he suddenly changed the mood from the slow and contemplative to the highly strung brilliance of notes that just spun from his fingers with oiled ease.There is a great intellectual depth too to this musician and in the rehearsal he was keen to show me the discoveries of phrasing and tempi that he had found in the depths of the score which was a new work in his repertoire and a great addition to his voyage of discovery into the world of Beethoven.

It was in fact in the second sonata that his intelligence and musicianship were allied to pianistic mastery and poetic vision. Op 101 after the ‘Hammerklavier’ is considered by many to be an equal technical challenge as the intricacies and rhythmic drive of the second and fourth movement need an architectural understanding that belies the seemingly gentle pastoral opening. It was the same beauty as op 78 that Andrea brought to the seemingly improvised first movement but with an expansiveness creating an atmosphere of pastoral peace and well being. Short lived because this is the world of Beethoven where sudden contrasts and tumultuous outpourings are part of the high’s and lows’ of his rumbustuous life style and character. There was a dynamic drive to the ‘Lebhaft Vivace alla marcia’ of the second movement but Andrea managed to keep it under control and with a technical mastery that was able to transform this march into a lyrical rather than military procession. Following Beethoven’s long pedal indications with poetic understanding he brought a clarity to the central episode before the return of the ‘alla marcia’. The long improvised ‘Adagio ma non troppo’ that Beethoven himself marks to be played ‘con affetto’ was given a poignant sense of fantasy as Beethoven searches for a way through the momentary apparition of the first movement to the irascible entry into the Finale. Knotty twine indeed but with Andrea’s precision and clarity the inconclusive trills and dynamic strands of melody were allowed to erupt with sparkling brilliance and masterly control.

What better way to celebrate Brahms’s birthday ( 7 May 1833) than with his Four Ballades op 10. This was an early Brahms from a passionate and deeply introverted 21 year old. He was already under the spell of his mentor Clara Schumann who was to play such a significant part in his life as the Schumann /Brahms triangle played itself out with selfless passion and genius.The shimmering beauty and passionate pulsating of the heart in these four tone poems are evidence enough of the inspiration for such sublime outpourings. Andrea just a few years older that Brahms when he wrote these magical pieces could understand the intensity and burning message of youthful serenity and hope.It was the glowing fluidity that he brought to the sound as well as a driving military insistence to the contrasting central episode that built to a sumptuous climax of Philadelphian proportions with glorious full golden sounds played with aristocratic nobility. It was the same fluidity and glowing beauty that’s he brought to the second with its ominous rhythmic central episode.There was a youthful call to arms with a dynamic rhythmic drive of the third Ballade which dissolved with such poetic artistry into the beautifully suggestive whispered ending. Opening the gate for a vision of paradise with the searing whispered intensity of the ‘Andante con moto’. Andrea visibly transformed as we were all moved by the throbbing heart beat of sumptuous whispered sounds on which emerges an enigmatic melody of heart rending beauty. It was Michelangeli who made this piece his own and I remember the atmosphere that he created in the Festival Hall in London with his own piano specially prepared with loving care by his great friend Fabbrini, who would follow him on his tours to ensure that the nearest thing to perfection was possible. Andrea today produced sounds on a piano that has a voice of mellow beauty like a faded photograph where beauty is suggested and becomes much more poignant than a sharply defined modern print.He was able to share with us the extraordinarily intense vision of the twenty year old Genius of Brahms with as much intimacy as Michelangeli in a hall of two thousand.

Andrea chose a piece of brilliance and subtle colouring to finish his recital.The Toccata by Goffredo Petrassi was written in 1933 and is not only of brilliance but also of a subtle tone palette and sound world that reminds one of the haunting beauty and fantasy of a very particular moment between the wars when composer were searching for a new means of expression but still using the traditional polyphonic sound world of the past. A Toccata that is also a tone poem as it’s hauntingly whispered opening erupts into a true toccata of technical exhilarance and dynamic drive only to dissolve into the opening mystery with which it had begun. Masterly playing and one of the works that this young musician has recorded on his recent CD of the piano works of Petrassi and Dallapiccola.

A sparkling Scarlatti Sonata just spun from his well oiled fingers with delicacy and style and is one of the nine that he has recorded on yet another CD for piano Classics. His second encore of Chopin’s Study op 10 n.4 had the audience on its feet and ready to buy his CD’s to take back home with them to prolong the enjoyment and ‘joie de vivre’ that this young man had brought into their lives.

The Piano Sonata No. 24 in F sharp, Op. 78.

1. Adagio cantabile — Allegro ma non troppo
2. Allegro vivace

Nicknamed ‘à Thérèse’ because it was written for his pupil Countess Thérèse von Brunswick who.with her sister Josephine was his pupil. According to her diary Beethoven had stronger feelings than just for her intellect and sisterly tenderness .For sometime it has been thought that the famous letters from Beethoven to his ‘distant beloved’ were indeed to her.Composed in 1809 and consisting of two movements:According to Czerny,Beethoven himself singled out this sonata and the ‘Appassionata’as favourites together later with the ‘Hammerklavier’Wagner found it ‘profoundly personal’ but D’Indy said :’What sort of artist or man could admit that the only work dedicated to the Countess of Brunswick is the insipid Sonata in F sharp,the same recipient of the passionate letters that all the world has read’

The Piano Sonata No. 28 in A major, op 101, was composed in 1816 and published in 1817 and dedicated to the pianist Baroness Dorothea Ertmann née Graumen  and is considered the first of the composer’s late piano sonatas

This sonata marks the beginning of what is generally regarded as Beethoven’s final period, where the forms are more complex, ideas more wide-ranging, textures more polyphonic, and the treatment of the themes and motifs even more sophisticated than before. Op. 101 well exemplified this new style, and Beethoven exploits the newly expanded keyboard compass of the day.As with the previous sonata op 90 it is unclear why Beethoven wrote Op. 101. The earliest known sketches are on leaves that once formed the parts of the Scheide Sketchbook of 1815–16. It shows the first movement already well developed and notated as an extended draft in score, and there are also a few preliminary ideas for the final Allegro Beethoven himself described this sonata, composed in the town of Baden, just south of Vienna during the summer of 1816, as “a series of impressions and reveries.” The more intimate nature of the late sonatas probably has some connection with his deafness, which by this stage was almost total, isolating him from society so completely that his only means of communicating with friends and visitors was via notebooks.

The Sonata Op. 101 is the first of the series of Beethoven’s “Late Period”  (although sometimes op.90 is considered the first), when his music moved in a new direction toward a more personal, intimate, sometimes even introspective, realm of freedom and fantasy. In this period he had achieved a complete mastery of form, texture and tonality and was subverting the very conventions he had mastered to create works of remarkable profundity and beauty.It is also characteristic of these late works to incorporate contrapuntal techniques (e.g. canon and fugue)into the sonata form.

This was the only one of his 32 sonatas that Beethoven ever saw played publicly; this was in 1816, and the performer was a bank official and amateur musician.

The Ballades, Op. 10, were written by Brahms in his youth. They were dated 1854 and were dedicated to his friend Julius Otto Grimm. Their composition coincided with the beginning of the composer’s lifelong affection for the pianist and composer Clara Schumann, who was helping Brahms launch his career. The Scottish ballad “Edward” from J. G. Herders anthology of folk songs “Stimmen der Völker in Liedern” made such a deep impression on Brahms that, as he told a friend, the melodies came to him effortlessly. 

Dein Schwert, wie ist’s von Blut so rot? Edward, Edward!
Dein Schwert wie ist’s von Blut so rot, und gehst so traurig her? – O!
O, ich hab’ geschlagen meinen Geier todt, Mutter, Mutter!
O, ich hab’ geschlagen meinen Geier todt, und keinen hab’ ich wie er – O!

Why does your Brand sae drop wi’ blude, Edward, Edward,
Why does your Brand sae drop wie blude, and why sae sad gang ye, O?
O, I hae kill’d my hawk, sae gude, mither, mither,
O, I hae kill’d my hawk, sae gude, and I had nae mehr but he, O

“Edward” provided the motif for the first of four ballade compositions, musical tales of a dramatic romantic nature that were linked with memories of Clara Schumann for Brahms. Julius Grimm, to whom the pieces were dedicated, also said that “the Ballades are really for her”. Robert Schumann was very enthusiastic about his young colleague’s composition. Chopin had written the last of his four Ballades only 12 years earlier, but Brahms approached the genre differently from Chopin, choosing to take its origin in narrative poetry more literally.

They are arranged in two pairs of two, the members of each pair being in parallel keys . The first ballade is one of the best examples of Brahms’s bardic or Ossianic style; its open fifths, octaves, and simple triadic harmonies are supposed to evoke the sense of a mythological past.

1. D minor. Andante
2. D major. Andante
3. B minor. Intermezzo. Allegro
4. B major. Andante con moto

The tonal center of each ballade conveys an interconnectedness between the four pieces: the first three each include the key signature of the ballade that follows it somewhere as a tonal center, and the fourth ends in the key signature of D major/B minor despite cadencing in B major.

Brahms returned to the wordless ballade form in writing the third of the Six pieces for piano op 118 . His Op. 75 vocal duets titled “Ballads and Romances” include a setting of the poem “Edward”—the same that inspired Op. 10, No. 1.

Mr. Molteni enjoys the artistic guidance of William Grant Naboré and Stanislav Ioudenitch under the auspices of the prestigious International Lake Como Piano Academy. In 2020, he was awarded a master’s degree Magna cum Laude in Advanced Performance Studies by the Conservatorio della Svizzera Italiana in Lugano. After he graduated with top marks, honors and honorable mention with Mario Patuzzi at the Conservatorio G.Verdi in Como, Andrea studied in Milan with Vincenzo Balzani. He also took part in various masterclass with Sir. Andras Schiff, Elisabeth Leonskaja, Arie Vardi, Pavel Gililov, Dang Thai Son, Piotr Paleczny, Vladimir Feltsman, Christopher O’Riley, Aquiles Delle Vigne.

At the age of 15, Mr. Molteni formed a youth orchestra, “L’Orchestra del Lago”, which he conducted and played with. His earliest orchestral collaborations also include Orchestra Antonio Vivaldi, Orchestra Filarmonica Mihail Johra di Bacau in Romania, and Orchestra of the Costa Rica University. The special scholarship of Cercle Wagner Association in France allowed Mr. Molteni to participate at the Bayreuth Festival celebrating the 200th anniversary of Richard Wagner, as well as to perform a series of concerts in Nice, Menton, Cannes, and Monte Carlo. An exciting young Italian piano talent, Andrea Molteni is developing his international profile with regular appearances in the USA, Italy, UK, Europe, China and Singapore. He has played at the Esplanade in Singapore, Verbrugghen Hall of the Sydney Conservatorium of Music in Sydney, Wiener Saal of the Mozarteum University in Salzburg, Scriabin Museum in Moscow, DiMenna Center in New York, Qingdao Grand Theatre in Qingdao (China) and other prestigious venues around the world.His latest album, Scarlatti Sonatas (that was released in January 2022), has already got important reviews (Magazine Musica, June 2023) and has been broadcasted in the German radio MDR Kultur. The album “Petrassi and Dallapiccola Complete Piano Works” (May 2021) has been appreciated by distinct pianistic personalities such as V.Ashkenazy and L.Howard. It received reviews on significant music magazines (Magazine Musica, December 2021; Opus Klassiek, May 2021) and it has been broadcasted on radio programmes (in cuffia, Radio Classica, July 2021 and November 2021; France Musique, September 2021).

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https://christopheraxworthymusiccommentary.com/2022/04/29/astonished-and-enriched-by-andrea-moltenis-hammerklavierin-viterbo/

https://christopheraxworthymusiccommentary.com/2022/03/24/andrea-molteni-at-steinway-hall/

Beethoven Sonata n. 8 in do minore op. 13 “Patetica”
Schönberg 3 Klavierstücke op. 11
Beethoven Sonata n. 2 in la maggiore op. 2 n. 2
Schönberg 3 Klavierstücke (1894)
Schönberg 6 Kleine Klavierstücke op. 19
Beethoven Sonata n. 23 in fa minore op. 57 “Appassionata”

Emanuel Ax in Rome to pay homage to Maurizio Pollini on the day when the much loved pianist should have given his annual recital for the Accademia di Santa Cecilia . The tribute that he put into words at the end of two hours of pure whispered magic was crowned by a performance of one of the nocturnes that were particularly associated with Pollini. Rubinstein made the Chopin Nocturne in D flat op 27 n.2 his own as Pollini did with its twin op 27 n.1 .

Op.27 n.2 is full of luminosity and ravishing Bel Canto with a seemless melodic line floated on a cloud of velvet whereas op 27 n.1 is much more restless and darker with its Debussy like opening creating sounds full of mystery and foreboding. It was here that the wondrous sounds and kaleidoscope of unforced whispered colours created the same atmosphere that Pollini would often do in the half century of performances that Emanuel Ax movingly described later in a short speech in well prepared Italian.The beauty of sound and selfless identification with the music had created a spell from the very first notes of a typical Pollini programme of Beethoven and Schonberg.

The ‘Pathétique’ sonata was as though hearing it for the first time such was the palette of sounds where the notes were not projected out to this vast hall but the audience were drawn in to him.By some magic,called consummate artistry, he managed to play with whispered sounds of luminosity and beauty which arrived in the nearest and farthest seats with the same intensity.A singer with a diaphragm is an art that is rapidly being forgotten as more and more artists rely on acoustically assisted sound to help them in the vast halls that are springing up throughout the world . But the few great artists,one of which is certainly Emanuel Ax ,that still grace the concert halls have cultivated this art as part of their genes with a lifetime of sharing music with audiences worldwide. It is nice to note that Emanuel Ax was much admired at the first Rubinstein competition where the great maestro awarded him his Gold Medal. Much as Rubinstein years earlier had also awarded an 18 year old Pollini the Gold Medal at the Chopin Competition in Warsaw.Rubinstein famously and with his great generosity exclaimed that this young man played better than any of them on the jury!

And so Maurizio Pollini was to demonstrate in a career that was to span over seventy years.Pollini ,like Guido Agosti and Busoni before that treated the score with the reverence that it demanded with a selfless dedication where they became the medium through which the music still wet on the page could be transmitted and shared. Audiences that clamoured to be rid of showmen who in the early part of the last century would take the composer’s notes as a means to show off their virtuosity and in the case of pianists like De Pachmann ,their own personality. I remember a review forty years ago of Cherkassky in Milan where he had been asked to play a programme of scintillating show piece transcriptions :’Juggler of the notes’ was the title of the review in the Corriere della Sera. Cherkassky like Volodos vowed never to deviate from the programmes that they had decided on for the season.

It was very much Pollini who had created this new path for performances of absolute fidelity to the score and the composers wishes.Pollini would be an advocate of living composers too such as Nono and Stockhausen.And so tonight ,on the same evening that Pollini should have appeared, there could be no more fitting way to pay homage to his genius than with a programme of the ‘old’ and the ‘new’.

Beethoven alternating with Schonberg ,where one illuminated the other and made one listen afresh to works that we have heard almost too many times. The Beethoven was freshly minted with sounds that truly spoke as they were not percussive but full of subtle colour .The language of Music which allows us to enter a world where words are just not enough!

Beethoven op 13 was played with delicacy and a refined tone palette combined with an architectural shape ,never loosing the extraordinary finesse and subtle phrasing, but within a greater framework.There was an exemplary sense of harmonic structure as rarely heard sounds recreated an old ‘war horse’ as seen through the visionary eyes of a great artist. Even the rests were as pregnant with meaning as the actual sounding notes.The famous slow movement of the ‘Pathétique ‘ is only on a par with the ‘Moonlight’ for fame .Neither titles were given by the composer but designed by the publisher to sell and make popular the rather serious sounding word,’Sonatas’. Well they certainly succeeded as they were the two sonatas to be seen on the music stands of the obligatory piano that stood in most living rooms only to be ousted by the advent of the TV. There was a beautifully flowing seemless outpouring of Belcanto whispered beauty where even the gently hinted deep bass notes took on a new meaning. The Rondo,too,was played with delicacy but also a ‘ joie de vivre’ and rhythmic drive where the interruption with explosions of dynamic sounds took on a new significance.

Even the Sonata op 2 n.2 took on a new life with its tongue in cheek opening played with such insolent eloquence.The music spoke with charm and youthful exhilaration but also the sense of fantasy that was to reveal the true revolutionary genius of Beethoven.The ‘Appassionata’ I have never heard played with such extraordinary whispered lyricism where even the tumultuous explosions became mere blocks of moving harmonies. Whispered it might have been but I have never experienced ,since Pollini , such an overwhelming feeling of a masterpiece being unfolded with burning intensity.I remember Pollini ending his recital in Carnegie Hall with this sonata and being overwhelmed as today by a work that I thought I knew inside out.The true revelation came of course with the works of Schonberg .From the early almost Mendelssohnian /Brahmsian 1894 pieces to the sparse pieces of op 19 where there was a range of sounds of quicksilver fleetness allied to a rhythmic precision that brought these pieces vividly to life .Visions Fugitives Prokofiev called his early miniatures but these were Visions de vie of a world that cannot be described in words but can only be lived and experienced in sound as we did today.

What greater epitaph could there be to the Genius that was undoubtedly Pollini.

https://christopheraxworthymusiccommentary.com/2022/02/08/maurizio-pollini-twilight-of-a-god-rome-pays-homage-to-a-monument/

London salutes a legend. Maurizio Pollini – The story of a miracle by Antonio Morabito. ’One of the most remarkable descriptions of the humanity and courageous playing of a great artist I have ever read …. required reading for any musician and listener who values untouchable integrity in music and life itself …. an astonishing and creatively constructive piece of assessment …’ Michael Moran (distinguished Australian critic and musicologist in Warsaw)

https://christopheraxworthymusiccommentary.com/2023/06/26/london-salutes-a-legend-maurizio-pollini-the-story-of-a-miracle-by-antonio-morabito/

Ax was born to a Polish-Jewish family to Joachim and Hellen Ax in Lviv, Ukraine , formerly part of the Soviet Union . Both parents were Nazi concentration camp  survivors. Ax began to study piano at the age of six; his father was his first piano teacher. When he was seven, the family moved to Warsaw, where he studied piano the at Miodowa school. Two years later, Ax’s family moved to Winnipeg, Canada, where he continued to study music, including as a member of The Junior Musical Club of Winnipeg. In 1961, when Ax was 12 years old, the family moved to New York City, and Ax continued his piano studies under Mieczyslaw Munoz  of the Juilliard School  until 1976, when Munz left New York to teach in Japan. In 1970, Ax received his B.A. in French at Columbia University and became an American citizen. The same year, he won honorable mention at the VIII International Chopin Competition in Warsaw. In 1971, he won third place at the Vianna da Motta Competition.In 1972, he placed 7th at the Queen Elisabeth Competition  in Brussels. He caught the public eye when he won the Arthur Rubinstein Competition  in 1974, where he was personally congratulated by Rubinstein , who was a judge for the competition. The New York Times  reported on Ax’s win in 1974 and said that in addition to a prize of $5,000, Ax “will receive the Artur Rubenstein Gold Medal engagements with the Israel Philharmonic   and the BBC Orchestra ,a recording contract with RCA and an artist‐management contract with Hurok Artists.”Recalling his competition years, Ax said “You tend to forget how really awful the tension was. Here you were, No. 19, trying to play something better than No. 18. Ridiculous.” For Ax, saying which pianist is better is only a subjective judgement at the highest levels, “can anyone really go to piano recital and say Horowitz is better than Rubinstein? The most I can say is that Rubinstein speaks to me with greater voice than this one or that one.” Though he admits that competitions are a necessary means toward success for pianists, Ax hopes to never “sit on a jury and eliminate people”.

When speaking about performance reportoire, Ax said that one should not perform at a concert with pieces they have only learned recently: “People think pianists are lazy because they play the same works again and again, but it’s not that. It’s being afraid of something you haven’t done in public before. A conductor can do what he does very well whether his hands are cold or his baton is trembling. He can still get what he wants. But if I’m afraid, things will suffer. Physical and mental coordination must be perfect.”

https://christopheraxworthymusiccommentary.com/2024/03/24/nikolai-lugansky-in-rome-pays-homage-to-a-legend-maurizio-pollini/

Drei Klavierstücke (“Three Piano Pieces”), op .11, was written in 1909. And represent an early example of atonality in the Schoenberg’s work.

The tempo markings of the three pieces are:

1. Mässige  (at a moderate speed)
2. Mässige  (very slowly)
3. Bewegte  (with motion)

The first two pieces, dating from February 1909, are often cited as marking the point at which Schoenberg abandoned the last vestiges of traditional tonality.

The three pieces are given a unity of atonal musical space through the projection of material from the first piece into the other two, including recurring use of motivic material. The first of the three motivic cells of the first piece is used throughout the second, and the first and third cells are found in the third.

The third piece is the most innovative of the three. In its atomisation of the material and its agglomeration of the motivic cells through multiple connections, it isolates its musical parameters (mode of attack, rhythm, texture, register, and agogics) and employs them in a structural though unsystematic manner that foreshadows the integral serialism of the 1950s.

Sechs kleine Klavierstücke, Op. 19 (Six Little Piano Pieces) was published in 1913 

After having written large, dense works such as Pelleas und Melisande, up until 1907, Schönberg decided to turn away from this style, beginning with his second string quartet  of 1908. The following excerpt, translated from a letter written to Ferruccio Busoni  in 1909, well expresses his reaction against the excess of the Romantic period:

‘My goal: complete liberation from form and symbols, cohesion and logic. Away with motivic work! Away with harmony as the cement of my architecture! Harmony is expression and nothing more. Away with pathos! Away with 24 pound protracted scores! My music must be short. Lean! In two notes, not built, but “expressed”. And the result is, I hope, without stylized and sterilized drawn-out sentiment. That is not how man feels; it is impossible to feel only one emotion. Man has many feelings, thousands at a time, and these feelings add up no more than apples and pears add up. Each goes its own way. This multicoloured, polymorphic, illogical nature of our feelings, and their associations, a rush of blood, reactions in our senses, in our nerves; I must have this in my music. It should be an expression of feeling, as if really were the feeling, full of unconscious connections, not some perception of “conscious logic”. Now I have said it, and they may burn me.^’

This work was composed at the same time that Schoenberg was working on his orchestration of his massive Gurre- Lieder .While he maintained a lifelong love of Romantic music, the extreme contrast between his Klavierstücke and his more romantic works comes from his modernist  desire to find a new means of expression. For him, works like the Gurre-Lieder or Verklarte Nacho  fulfilled the tradition he loved, but it was works like these Klavierstücke that attempted to reach beyond it.The first five pieces were written in a single day, February 19, 1911, and were originally intended to comprise the entire piece. Schoenberg penned the sixth piece on June 17, shortly after the death of Mahler .Indeed, it is a, “well circulated claim that Schoenberg conceived op. 19/vi as a to beau to Mahler”.It was first performed on February 4, 1912, in Berlin, by Louis Closson.

The six pieces do not carry individual names, but are often known by their tempo  marking:

1. Leicht, zart (Light, delicate)
2. Langsam (Slow)
3. Sehr langsame  (Very slow )
4. Rasch, aber leicht (Brisk, but light)
5. Etwas rasch (Somewhat brisk)
6. Sehr langsam (Very slow)

The Three Piano Pieces and Scherzo of 1894

A symphony theme cited by Schoenberg as having been written by him in about 1892 already shows a familiarity with Brahms’s Tragic Overture specifically, and with Brahms’s procedures of thematic evolution more generally (Frisch 1984, 159). Schoenberg’s Three Piano Pieces of 1894 are the first substantial instrumental compositions that survive, show that the twenty-year-old composer had continued to study Brahms intensively—in this case, the short piano works published recently in Brahms’s collections opp. 116, 117, 118, and 119 (1892–93).

3 pieces:

1. Andantino
2. Andantino grazioso
3. Presto

Year/Date of Composition 1894. Publication 1968 Duration7 minutes

Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 8 in C minor, Op. 13, commonly known as Sonata Pathétique, was written in 1798 when the composer was 27 years old, and was published in 1799 and is dedicated to his friend Prince Karl von Lichnowsky.

Although commonly thought to be one of the few works to be named by the composer himself, it was actually named Grande sonate pathétique (to Beethoven’s liking) by the publisher, who was impressed by the sonata’s tragic sonorities.

1. Grave – Allegro  di molto e con brio 
2. Adagio cantabile  
3. Rondo : Allegro 

When the pianist and composer Ignaz Moscheles discovered the work in 1804, he was ten years old; unable to afford to buy the music, he copied it out from a library copy. His music teacher, on being told about his discovery, “warned me against playing or studying eccentric productions before I had developed a style based on more respectable models. Without paying heed to his instructions, however, I laid Beethoven’s works on the piano, in the order of their appearance, and found in them such consolation and pleasure as no other composer ever vouchsafed me.”

Anton Schindler ,a musician who was a friend of Beethoven in the composer’s later years, wrote: “What the Sonate Pathétique was in the hands of Beethoven (although he left something to be desired as regards clean playing) was something that one had to have heard, and heard again, in order to be quite certain that it was the same already well-known work. Above all, every single thing became, in his hands, a new creation, wherein his always legato playing, one of the particular characteristics of his execution, formed an important part.”

Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 2 in A major op 2 No. 2, was written in 1795  and dedicated to Joseph . It was published simultaneously with his first and third sonatas in 1796.

1. Allegro vivace, 
2. Largo appassionato, 
3. Scherzo : Allegretto, 
4. Rondo : Grazioso,  

 Beethoven’s Sonata No. 23 in F minor, op 57 known as the Appassionata was composed during 1804 and 1805, and perhaps 1806, and was dedicated to Count Franz von Brunswick. The first edition was published in February 1807 in Vienna.

Unlike the early Pathetique the Appassionata was not named during the composer’s lifetime, but was so labelled in 1838 by the publisher of a four-hand arrangement of the work. Instead, Beethoven’s autograph manuscript of the sonata has “La Passionata” written on the cover, in Beethoven’s hand.

1. Allegro assai
2. Andante con moto
3. Allegro ma non troppo – Presto

Playing of extraordinary clarity and mastery on Ischia today from Misha Kaploukhii .From Beethoven to Schubert via Chopin,Liszt,Medtner and Brahms .Whatever he played there was a dynamic drive and authority that was quite overwhelming. https://christopheraxworthymusiccommentary.com/2024/02/17/hats-off-the-chappell-gold-medal-has-uncovered-a-genius/ Having recently won one of the two top prizes at the Royal College of Music in London together with Magdalene Ho , the artistic director of La Mortella ,Lina Tufano immediately invited them both to play in this paradise of music and nature that was an oasis for the Waltons whose express wish was to give a platform to talented young musicians at the start of their careers.

A full house despite a very rough sea to reach this paradise of Ischia that is just off the bay of Naples. And so it was to Beethoven that Misha opened the first of his two afternoon recitals.The 32 Variations in C minor, a key that so often signifies defiance and nobility for Beethoven as it did too for Mozart. It was with a gesture of aristocratic nobility that the theme was allowed to ring out with a call to arms in this concert hall built alongside the music room where Sir William Walton would pen his mighty fanfares.

Those for the Royal occasions and for the famous films of Shakespeare with Lawrence Olivier who would often holiday here with his close friends,the Waltons, seeking peace and anonymity from the Hollywoodian spotlight.

A mighty opening where Beethoven’s duel personality would contrast vehemence with tenderness with very little in between.These are variations that have long been associated with the learning of a classical piano technique as they are 32 variations posing different problems for the pianist more in vein with Brahms than most of Beethoven’s other works. In fact the other two essential works for aspiring young instrumentalists are the Handel Variations by Brahms and the Wanderer Fantasy of Schubert. They are all master works though and it is refreshing to be reminded of this as such masterly performances of the Beethoven and Schubert were allowed to unfold with the clarity and intelligent musicianship of this twenty one year old pianist.Variations that unwound with driving intensity always careful to follow Beethoven’s very precise markings.

The gentle opening of the first five variations from the alternating leggiermente patter,first from the right and then the left hands and finally together, leading to alternating rhythmic patterns before the first Beethovenian outburst of irascible impatience with the sixth variation. Gradually building up the tension and speeded up note values before dissolving quite abruptly to the major.Here Misha produced a sumptuous full string quartet sound as this produced the means for the next four variations .Double thirds played with clarity and etherial lightness and a play on rhythmic diversity before the beautifully mellifluous return to the minor.

Misha reserving the Beethovenian shock tactic for the eighteenth variation with its streams of notes shooting off like rockets leading to the dynamic rhythmic drive of the next four variations. An alternation of dynamism and delicacy brought us to the remarkable last two variations where Beethoven’s genius begins to shine through after a deftly hidden but nevertheless didactic display of musical exercises. A gentle cloud of C minor on which the music gradually builds to boiling point and the inevitable explosion before the gradually diminishing forces and the triumphant final bars that were played with aristocratic nobility before the final tongue in cheek whispered farewell. A remarkable performance where Misha was able to restore a work that even Beethoven did not particularly admire, to the concert hall,as did Emil Gilels and Annie Fischer in a glorious past era.

Two Chopin Mazurkas were played with the beguiling style of hypnotic rhythmic freedom and sense of dance .A haunting beauty of deep nostalgia with beautifully spun ornaments that unwound from his well oiled fingers like glittering springs but always incorporated into an architectural shape of subtle musicianship.

Liszt’s Bagatelle S.216 a was perhaps the unexpected highlight for me of the recital with Misha’s absolute clarity that could spin Liszt’s busy web of sounds with brilliance and teasing virtuosity.A remarkable rhythmic energy and very powerful vision of a work that can seem very ungrateful in lesser hands but today was made to sparkle with tantalising nonchalance and hypnotic insistence.The final remarkable bars just thrown off with masterly ease and was like a breath of fresh air before the sumptuous gloom and brooding intensity of Medtner.

And so on to a masterly performance of Medtner’s G minor Sonata op. 22. It was played with nobility and wild abandon and a kaleidoscope of colours .With its chameleonic changes of moods but, as with most of Medtner’s works, I find it hard to come to terms with his seemingly incoherent sense of line and direction. Misha played it with evident authority and total conviction I just wish I could have found the magic line that could bind these seemless streams of notes together into one architectural whole. I am so glad and grateful to be able to listen twice this weekend on Ischia to this work being performed by such an accomplished young virtuoso and will do my best to dispel my idea of Medtner as Rachmaninov without the tunes! It was the great Emil Gilels who only a year after the composers death began to include this very sonata in his programmes in the Soviet Union.There could be no greater commendation than that!

There was a dynamic Beethovenian drive to the opening of the ‘Wanderer Fantasy’ where again it was the remarkable clarity of his playing that illuminated the unusual virtuoso demands that Schubert makes of all those that dare play this extraordinarily revolutionary work. Playing of searing intensity where even Schubert’s usually seemless mellifluous outpourings are short lived as the music erupts with tempestuous fury. Extraordinary control and a dynamic range of sounds allowed Misha to sweep all before him as he lay the music exhausted to one side allowing the rhythmic impetus to gradually subside for the ‘Adagio ‘ of ‘Die Sonne dunkt mich hier so kalt’ of the song ‘Der Wanderer’. Beautifully played with full string quartet sound where every note had a poignant meaning as the theme unfolded to a series of variations of fantasy and beauty. Eventually the theme was allowed to float magically on a gently weaving accompaniment as seemless streams of jeux perlé golden sounds poured with exquisite delicacy from Misha’s sensitive fingers.Gradually building to a Beethovenian climax of unbridled dynamic drive before the etherial sounds that Schubert depicts with such genius allowing the music to disappear into the very depths of the keyboard. Masterly playing from this young pianist of vision and imagination.

The eruption of the Scherzo was as surprising as it was breathtaking in its audacity.Streams of notes spread over the entire keyboard that were mere waves of moving colours anchored by an imperious bass before the lyrical beauty, charm and hushed tones of the trio. Erupting again with demonic intensity the return of the Scherzo was played with breathtaking waves of notes of exhilaration and excitement where the silence after the final fortissimo chord was of expectancy and suspense. The opening declaration of the Fugue in the left hand was played with great authority and the whole movement played with a driving intensity and technical prowess that was overwhelming and quite breathtaking in its fearless abandon.A total control even in moments of red hot passion demonstrated Misha’s total mastery allied to impeccable musicianship and sense of style.His playing of Messiaen was masterly with a kaleidoscopic sense of colour that was quite extraordinarily poignant and with a pregnant beauty of searing intensity and heart rending meaning.A transcendental control of sound that was a revelation as indeed Messiaen can be if played with the same passionate intensity of a true believer.

An encore of the deeply moving chorale prelude ‘Herzlich Tut mich verlangen’ by Brahms was written in his last days on this earth with thoughts of death and the hereafter deeply embedded in his soul.Intense poetic playing of great sensibility and ravishing beauty was the only way that this young poet of the keyboard knew how to thank such an attentive audience.

32 Variations on an Original Theme in C minor, WoO 80 (German: 32 Variationen über ein eigenes Thema), for solo piano by WAS written in 1806.They have have been called “Beethoven’s most overt pianistic homage to the Baroque.” Receiving a favorable review in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung  (Leipzig) in 1807,it remains popular today especially amongst music students where together with Schubert Wanderer and Brahms Handel Variations is allows aspiring young musicians to acquire a classical technique and understand styles .Nevertheless, Beethoven did not see fit to assign it an opus number . It is said that later in his life he heard a friend practicing it and after listening for some time he said “Whose is that?” “Yours”, was the answer. “Mine? That piece of folly mine?” was his retort; “Oh, Beethoven, what an ass you were in those days!” Beethoven’s most overt pianistic homage to the Baroque, the 32 Variations on an original theme in C minor, WoO80, date from the end of 1806 (the year of the ‘Razumovsky’ quartets, the fourth symphony and the violin concerto) and were published the following year without dedication or opus number. The variations are an elaborate take on the traditional chaconne, a ceremonial triple-time dance over a ground bass that was popularized at the court of Louis XIV. (Bach’s monumental D minor violin ciaconna and Handel’s G major chaconne are famous examples, though it is doubtful that Beethoven would have known either.) Again, the music may have originated in the composer’s famous extemporizations.The poetic heart of the work lies in the five central major-keyed variations, beginning with No 12, closer in outline to the original theme than any of the previous variations.

The Fantasie in C major, Op. 15 ( D.760), popularly known as the Wanderer Fantasy, is a four-movement fantasy for solo piano composed by Schubert in 1822 when only 25 in a life that was tragically cut short by the age of 31.It is widely considered his most technically demanding composition for the piano and Schubert himself said “the devil may play it,” in reference to his own inability to do so properly.The whole work is based on one single basic motif from which all themes are developed. This motif is distilled from the theme of the second movement, which is a sequence of variations on a melody taken from the lied “Der Wanderer”, which Schubert wrote in 1816. It is from this that the work’s popular name is derived.The four movements are played without a break. After the first movement Allegro con fuoco ma non troppo in C major and the second movement Adagio (which begins in C-sharp minor and ends in E major), follow a scherzo presto in A-flat major and the technically transcendental finale, which starts in fugato returning to the key of C major and becomes more and more virtuosic as it moves toward its thunderous conclusion.Liszt was fascinated by the Wanderer Fantasy, transcribing it for piano and orchestra (S.366) and two pianos (S.653). He additionally edited the original score and added some various interpretations in ossia and made a complete rearrangement of the final movement (S.565a).I remember a recent lesson I had listened to of Elisso Virsaladze in which I was struck by the vehemence of the Wanderer Fantasy and the ragged corners that we are more used to in a Beethoven almost twice Schubert’s age .It made me wonder about the maturity of the 25 year old Schubert and could he have had a premonition that his life was to be curtailed only six years later.We are used to the mellifluous Schubert of rounded corners and seemless streams of melodic invention.But surely in the final three sonatas written in the last months of his life the A major and C minor start with a call to arms and only in the last B flat sonata do we arrive at the peace and tranquility that Beethoven was to find too in his last sonata.But the deep rumblings in the bass in Schubert’s last sonata give food for thought that his life was not all sweetness and light.I remember Richter’s long tribulation in the recording studio to put on record as near definitive version as possible of the Wanderer Fantasy with the help of the pianist and musicologist Paul Badura Skoda.

Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy and the challenges of an Urtext edition

At the heart of ‘Wanderer’ is a song he wrote in 1816 based on a text by Georg Philipp Schmidt von Lübeck (1766 – 1849). In the song, the wander seeks happiness, but cannot find it anywhere – when he sighs ‘where?’ the answer comes back, ‘There, where you are not, is your happiness.’ Schmidt von Lübeck’s original title, Des Fremdlings Abendlied (The Stranger’s Evening Song) places it in greater perspective – this is the question of every stranger looking for something that may not exist where he’s seeking it.

The work as a whole is the product of experimentation on Schubert’s part – he links the entire work in four movements through a set of similar rhythms and in the last movement, wraps the whole structure around to bring in elements of the first movement. The work is a challenge for the pianist, and both its virtuosity and structure fascinated the Romantics (most importantly Liszt)for decades.The Fantasy was commissioned by a wealthy amateur pianist, Emanuel Karl Liebenberg, a pupil of Hummel ( who had been a pupil of Mozart ) Schubert recognized that he had written a work that makes greater technical demands on the performer than did the two piano sonatas he wrote after this piece was completed.

Franz Liszt (1811–86)

Bagatelle without tonality, S.261a 

At a later stage in his life Liszt experimented with “forbidden” things such as parallel 5ths in the “Csárdás macabre”and atonality in the Bagatelle sans tonality (“Bagatelle without Tonality”). Pieces like the “2nd Mephisto-Waltz” are unconventional because of their numerous repetitions of short motives. Also showing experimental characteristics are the Via crucis of 1878, as well as Unstern!, Nuages Gris and the two works entitled La lugubre gondola of the 1880s.

Bagatelle sans tonalité was written by in 1885. The manuscript bears the title “Fourth Mephisto Waltz”and may have been intended to replace the piece now known as the Fourth Mephisto Waltz when it appeared Liszt would not be able to finish it; the phrase Bagatelle ohne Tonart actually appears as a subtitle on the front page of the manuscript.

While it is not especially dissonant, it is extremely chromatic becoming what Liszt’s contemporary Fétis called “omnitonic”in that it lacks any definite feeling for a tonal center.Like the Fourth Mephisto Waltz, however, it was not published until 1955.Written in waltz form,the Bagatelle remains one of Liszt’s most adventurous experiments in pushing beyond the bounds of tonality, concluding with an upward rush of diminished sevenths .

Performed by Prokofiev and Horowitz, recorded by Moiseiwitsch and Gilels, this one-movement work, completed in 1910, is the Medtner sonata which is the best known of his 14 Sonatas ,for its powerful drama strongly appealing to the emotions but also its coherence as a perfect organic whole on a large scale. As Heinrich Neuhaus wrote: ‘The sonata’s trajectory is felt from the first to the last note as one uninterrupted line.’ All the thematic material is integrated and never ceases to grow organically right up to the massive coda, which is a true culmination in both synthesizing and intensifying what has gone before, with two pages of characteristically Medtnerian contrasting rhythms in the right and left hands. The sonata’s daring tonal scheme—a rising sequence of alternately minor and major thirds—is further evidence of Medtner’s originality in his use of traditional musical language and design.

Over the years 1825–1849, Chopin wrote at least 59 compositions for piano called Mazurkas referring to one of the traditional Polish dances

• 58 have been published
  • 45 during Chopin’s lifetime, of which 41 have opus numbers (with the remaining four works being two early mazurkas from 1826 and the famous “Notre Temps” and “Émile Gaillard” mazurkas that were published individually in 1841)
  • 13 posthumously, of which 8 have posthumous opus numbers (specifically, Opp. 67 & 68)
• 11 further mazurkas are known whose manuscripts are either in private hands (2) or untraced (at least 9).

The serial numbering of the 58 published mazurkas normally goes only up to 51. The remaining 7 are referred to by their key or catalogue number.

Chopin while he used the traditional mazurka as his model, he was able to transform his mazurkas into an entirely new genre, one that became known as a “Chopin genre”.

In 1852, three years after Chopin’s death, Liszt published a piece about Chopin’s mazurkas, saying that Chopin had been directly influenced by Polish national music to compose his mazurkas. Liszt also provided descriptions of specific dance scenes, which were not completely accurate, but were “a way to raise the status of these works [mazurkas].”While Liszt’s claim was inaccurate, the actions of scholars who read his writing proved to be more disastrous. When reading Liszt’s work, scholars interpreted the word “national” as “folk,” creating the “longest standing myth in Chopin criticism—the myth that Chopin’s mazurkas are national works rooted in an authentic Polish-folk music tradition.”In fact, the most likely explanation for Chopin’s influence is the national music he was hearing as a young man in urban areas of Poland, such as Warsaw.

After scholars created this myth, they furthered it through their own writings in different ways. Some picked specific mazurkas that they could apply to a point they were trying to make in support of Chopin’s direct connection with folk music. Others simply made generalizations so that their claims of this connection would make sense. In all cases, since these writers were well-respected and carried weight in the scholarly community, people accepted their suggestions as truth, which allowed the myth to grow. However, in 1921, Béla Bartok  published an essay in which he said that Chopin “had not known authentic Polish folk music.”By the time of his death in 1945, Bartók was a very well known and respected composer, as well as a prominent expert on folk music, so his opinion and his writing carried a great deal of weight. Bartók suggested that Chopin instead had been influenced by national, and not folk music.Schumann described Chopin Mazurkas as ‘Canons covered in flowers’.The Op. 24 mazurkas  were published in 1836, when the composer was 26 

Mazurka in C major, Op. 24 No. 2

The second mazurka marked Allegro non troppo opening with a quiet alternation of C and G major sotto voce chords.

Mazurka in B-flat minor, Op. 24 No. 4

The fourth mazurka of the set is in B flat minor but ends on the dominant note (F) alone

Olivier Messiaen was born on 10 December 1908 in Avignon into a literary family. His father was an eminent translator of English literature and his mother, Cécile Sauvage, was a published poet. Messiaen displayed a precocious musical talent from an early age, being accepted by the time he was eleven into the Paris Conservatoire where he studied piano, composition and organ. After graduation, he served as organist at the Église de la Sainte-Trinité in Paris from 1931 until his death, and his own contribution to the organ repertoire is arguably greater than that of any other composer since Bach.

In 1932 Messiaen married the violinist Claire Delbos and they had a son five years later. During World War II, he was captured while serving as a medical auxiliary and held as a prisoner of war at Görlitz in Silesia. It was there that he wrote one of his most famous works, the Quatuor pour le fin de temps (Quartet for the End of Time), which was first performed in the camp by four of the prisoners. After his release in 1941, Messiaen returned to Paris and took up a professorship at the Conservatoire. Towards the end of war, Claire developed mental health problems following an operation. Her condition worsened steadily and she was eventually hospitalised until her death in 1959.

Messiaen had been fascinated by birdsong since adolescence; he once described birds as ‘probably the greatest musicians to inhabit our planet’. In 1953 he began travelling around France, meticulously notating different birdsong and using it in his music. By the 1960s as his growing international reputation was taking him further afield (including Japan, Iran, Argentina and Australia), he extended concert trips to further his birdsong research, often accompanied by his second wife, the pianist Yvonne Loriod, whom he had married in 1961.

Messiaen wrote Vingt regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus between March and September 1944. The origins of the work lay in a request from the writer Maurice Toesca for twelve short piano pieces to accompany his poetry on the Nativity in a radio production. However, Messiaen strayed extensively from his brief to produce his largest, most ambitious work to date. Vingt Regards places enormous technical and musical demands on the pianist; it is a work of great contrasts, ranging from the aching tenderness of Regard de la Vierge, through the awesome mystery of L’échange (referring to the divine trade whereby God became man in order that men could become gods) to the primal brutality of Par Lui tout a éte fait. Today, the work is rarely heard in full, though shorter sections or individual movements are often included in recital programmes.

The twenty Regards, variously translated as ‘gazes’, ‘aspects’ or ‘glances’, are twenty contemplations on the Infant Jesus, seen from different perspectives; in other words the Regard du Père represents a contemplation on Jesus by God the Father, Regard de l’étoile by the star, Regard de la Vierge by the Virgin,and so on.Vingt Regards had its première on 26 March 1945 at the Salle Gaveau in Paris with Yvonne Loriod, the work’s dedicatee, who was only twenty-one years old at the time. The event divided critical opinion, with one critic paying homage to ‘a very great musician who proclaims himself triumphantly in the Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus’, while another vehemently asserted that the composer was ‘attempting to translate the sublime utterances of the Apocalypse through muddled literature and music, smelling of the hair-shirt, in which it is impossible to detect either any usefulness or pleasure’. Over half a century later, the work has stood the test of time and is regarded today as a keystone in twentieth-century piano repertoire.Le Baiser is the 15th of 20

Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992)
Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus

1. Regard du Père (Gaze of the Father)
2. Regard de l’étoile (Gaze of the Star)
3. L’échange (The Exchange)
4. Regard de la Vierge (Gaze of the Virgin)
5. Regard du Fils sur le Fils (Gaze of the Son upon the Son)
6. Par Lui tout a été fait (By Him Everything was Created)
7. Regard de la Croix (Gaze of the Cross)
8. Regard des hauteurs (Gaze of the Heights)
9. Regards du Temps (Gaze of Time)
10. Regard de l’Esprit de joie (Gaze of the Spirit of Joy)
11. Première communion de la Vierge (First Communion of the Virgin)
12. La parole toute puissante (The All-Powerful Word)
13. Noël (Christmas)
14. Regard des Anges (Gaze of the Angels)
15. Le baiser de l’Enfant-Jésus (The Kiss of the Infant Jesus)
16. Regard des prophètes, des bergers et des Mages (Gaze of the Prophets, the Shepherds and the Magi)
17. Regard du silence (Gaze of Silence)
18. Regard de l’Onction terrible (Gaze of the Great Anointment)
19. Je dors, mais mon cœur veille (I Sleep, but my Heart is Awake)
20. Regard de l’Eglise d’amour (Gaze of the Church of Love)

Eleven Chorale Preludes, Op. 122, is a collection of works for organ by Johannes Brahms , written in 1896, at the end of the composer’s life, immediately after the death of his beloved friend, Clara Schumann, published posthumously in 1902. They are based on verses of nine Lutheran chorales, two of them set twice, and are relatively short, compact miniatures. They were the last compositions Brahms ever wrote, composed around the time that he became aware of the cancer that would ultimately prove fatal; thus the final piece is, appropriately enough, a second setting of “O Welt, ich muß dich lassen.” Brahms was prepared for death and even longing for it . It is no coincidence that the text to most of the chorales are concerned with death and the hereafter Busoni arranged the six most pianistic for piano in 1897 and they are 4/5/8/9/10/11.

1. Mein Jesu, der du mich (My Jesus. who [chose] me) in E minor
2. Herzliebster Jesu,was hastily du verbrochen (O dearest Jesu) in G minor
3. O Welt, ich muß dich lassen (O world, I must leave you) in F major
4. Herzlich tut mich erfreuen (My heart is filled) in D major
5. Scmucke dich,o liebe Seele  (Deck yourself, O dear soul) in E major
6. O wie selig seid ihr doch, ihr Frommen (O how blessed are you pious ones)in D minor
7. O Gott, du frommer Gott (O God, you faithful God) in A minor
8. Es ist e in Ros’entsprungen  (It is an upspringing rose) in F major
9. Herzlich tut mich verlagen  (I am heartily longing) in A minor
10. Herzlich tut mich verlangen (second setting) in A minor
11. O Welt, ich muß dich lassen (second setting) in F major

https://christopheraxworthymusiccommentary.com/2022/10/13/misha-kaploukhii-plays-rachmaninov-beauty-and-youthfulness-triumph/

https://christopheraxworthymusiccommentary.com/2022/10/28/misha-kaploukii-plays-liszt-at-the-rcm-a-sea-symphony-concert-youth-and-music-a-joy-to-behold/

https://christopheraxworthymusiccommentary.com/2023/11/15/misha-kaploukhii-at-st-jamess-piccadilly-the-intelligence-and-maturity-of-a-young-master/

MISHA KAPLOUKHII winner of the Sheepdrove Piano Competition today
Many congratulations you can hear him also at Cadogan Hall next February 19th playing Brahms Second Piano Concerto also at the Royal College of Music on Friday 24th at 11.50 for his Graduation Recital ( free entry)

A wonderful opportunity to hear the best international piano students drawn from all the major UK conservatoires – and to cast your vote for the audience prize!
Now celebrating its 15th Anniversary, this notable competition, established by the Sheepdrove Trust, is open to candidates aged 26 and under from the eight major UK music colleges, and attracts young pianists of the highest standard from around the world. Today’s competition, which this year has an emphasis on Chopin, features four shortlisted finalists and takes place in the tranquil setting of Sheepdrove on the Lambourn Downs. The overall winner will perform a solo recital in the Corn Exchange on Monday 20 May as part of the Festival’s popular Young Artists Lunchtime Recital Series.
Prizes

1st Prize: The Kindersley Prize of £3,000. Misha Kaploukhii
2nd Prize: £1,500 donated by Greenham Trust. Kasparas Mikuzis
3rd Prize: £750 donated by the Friends of NSF. Yuxuan Zhao
4th Prize: £500 donated by an anonymous donor.Max Artemenko
Audience Prize: £250 donated by an anonymous donor Misha Kaploukhii
The Robert Turnbull Piano Foundation Prize Angeliki Giannopoulow and Xizong Chen
Jury

Rupert Christiansen
Mark Eynon
Mikhail Kazakevich
Elena Vorotko
David Whelton

Some superb playing if rather unusual attire.One could say the same about Yuja Wang but it is their playing that astonishes and astounds.
Misha Kaploukhii’s graduation recital today kissing the Enfant Jesu a breathtaking goodbye as only Messiaen knew how.
After an all or nothing performance of Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy ,a monumental Medtner G minor Sonata and even a Bukovina Prelude it is hardly surprising that last Sunday saw him winner of the coveted Sheepdrove Competition and considered the finest artist from all the eight major conservatories of the land.

A poet of the keyboard with Luigi Carrochia showing us what it means to bring the Bel Canto back to this magnificent historic hall.

A scintillating display of brilliance and poetry where notes became streams of gold and Chopin’s glorious mellifluous outpourings became heart rending love letters shared with us with simplicity and refined aristocratic style .

Luigi Piovano hovering like a golden eagle ready to pounce as he followed his fellow Luigi’s every move .
An orchestra inspired by such selfless music making made Chopin’s oft criticised orchestration a subtle blend of dynamic drive as well as creating a sumptuous velvet carpet on which the Luigi’s could place their glistening jewels .
A hall full to the rafters with many illustrious guests not least Louis Lortie flown in especially from Berlin to cheer a musician he has helped to grow and mature into an artist who he is proud to call a colleague .

After two Chopin concertos with the public hungry for more Luigi was happy to be able to play just one more time the ravishing opening of the second movement of the second concerto.
What more could one add?
If music be the food of love please oh please play on !

Beginning with the last of the two concertos number one in E minor is certainly the longest and most overtly brilliant of the two.
Playing from Carroccia of aristocratic style of refined good taste and poetry. His solo entry immediately established the presence of a poet of the piano.There had been dynamic drive with rich sumptuous sounds that the celebrated cellist and elected kapellmeister of this very fine Orchestra delle Cento Città conducted with the conviction of his great artistry that he has demonstrated for years with Pappano at S.Cecilia.
Carroccia found some exquisite left hand colours that illuminated the streams of notes that were pouring from his agile hands as the beauty of his jeux perlé was as exhilarating as it was ravishing.
If he sometimes missed the weight and incisive rhythmic drive it was always because he was searching for the true poetic meaning behind Chopin’s stream of silver sounds.

Towards the end of the first movement there was a sudden change of gear as the musicians had realised what a joy it was to make such rarified music together in a hall that has seen in the past the greatest musicians of our times . The hall that was used by Visconti for his magical ‘Death in Venice’ ,with the ‘Adagietto’ from Mahler’s Fifth directed by the never forgotten Franco Ferrara.I remember too,as a student in Rome of Mozzato and Agosti, sitting on this stage and being entranced by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and later seated in the hall for Pina Carmirelli playing the Brahms violin sonatas with a very young Murray Perahia standing in for an indisposed Rudolf Serkin! More recently I heard one of the last recitals of Aldo Ciccolini that he dedicated to the Neopolitan family who had befriended him in his hour of need.

Piovano provided a wonderfully atmospheric opening to the slow movement which allowed Carroccia to float the beautiful bel canto melodic line with fluidity and a glowing sense of projection.The streams of arabesques that he wove over the orchestras seemless melodic outpouring was a wonder of sensitivity of chamber music proportions.We and the orchestra had been captivated by the spell that this young musician had created where we all followed every note in one of those magic moments that can sometimes happen with live performance.The spell was broken with a joyful last movement egged on by Piovano who shared his evident ‘joie de vivre’ with the orchestra and pianist.The lyrical central episode was an exquisite oasis before the explosive brilliance of the youthful virtuoso Chopin.

After a brief interval there followed the Second Concerto that was infact written before the first. It is shorter and much less openly brilliant than the first op 11, as every note has a poignant meaning of youthful yearning and simplicity. The orchestra here sounded rather breathless as the opening of this concerto is more a fantasy than the march like opening of op 11. However it took our poet of the piano only a few notes to take us into a world of poignant youthful hope and beauty. Poetic rather than heroic and a continuous outpouring of song as Chopin was to show us later,in the last of his all too short 39 years on this earth ,with the Barcarolle op 60. Carroccia revealed the beauty and innocence of this haunting work with ravishing playing where every note was projected with glowing sounds of poetic poignancy.

Embellishments that unwound so naturally and were simply part of the melodic line – here was the Caballé of the piano. And it was the exquisite beauty of the slow movement (that obviously had remained in Caroccia’s heart as he played it again as an encore – a solo musing of past beauty). Piovano too was under his spell as he hovered over the keyboard ready to capture those magic moments together and transmit them to their noble accomplices. A final slow flourish which I remember from Rubinstein’s hands was played with the same timeless beauty but ready to float into the beautifully simple final movement without breaking the spell. A final movement that was was of delicacy and charm but also of the scintillating brilliance of a poet of the piano.

An ovation for this young pianist who had had the courage to play these two concertos together in the same programme when still only a few years older than the composer who had written them as a visiting card for himself as an aspiring young virtuoso. I remember the excitement that Kissin and Mehta brought to the same ‘tour de force’ especially as Kissin was only 11 at the time!!!!

I concerti combinano due elementi diversi, per non dire – opposti: un puro suonare e una poeticità fortemente espressiva; il virtuosismo e la romanticità. Sono stati composti secondo il modello preso da Hummel, ma proveniente da Mozart. In essi il compositore porta la brillantezza pianistica elaborata con i brani scritti in precedenza, nello stile brillant, all’apice e allo stesso tempo le dice addio. È diventata un mezzo di espressione, non un fine in sé. Metaforicamente parlando – nella musica dei concerti è apparso il volto di Chopin, fino a quel momento velato con una convenzione stilistica. Ambedue i concerti esprimono in modo diretto la personalità del compositore la quale per la prima volta si manifesta con una grande forza e si concretizza in un insieme di caratteristiche che formano l’inconfondibile idioma stilistico particolare di Chopin, facilmente riconoscibile. Il tratto dominante è la “romanticità”: nei concerti, soprattutto nelle parti centrali, cioè nei due Larghetto, essa appare in forma di “poeticità” del primo romanticismo.

(Mieczysław Tomaszewski, “Chopin. Człowiek, dzieło, rezonans”)

Chopin’s compositions for piano and orchestra originated from the late 1820s to the early 1830s, and comprise three concert pieces he composed 1827–1828, while a student at the Central School of Music in Warsaw ,two piano concertos , completed and premièred between finishing his studies (mid 1829) and leaving Poland (late 1830),and later drafts, resulting in two more published works.Among these, and the other works in the brilliant style which Chopin composed in this period, the concertos are the most accomplished ones.Chopin’s compositions for piano and orchestra belong to a group of compositions in brilliant style, no longer confined by the tenets of the Classical period which were written for the concert stage in the late 1820s to early 1830s. In September 1828, while a student of Josef Elsner at Warsaw’s Central School of Music, Chopin visited Berlin and having graduated in July 1829 the next month, he visited Vienna , where he successfully presented the Variations on ‘Là ci darem la mano’ and the Rondo à la Krakowiak  in concert.

Chronologically the works for piano and orchestra are :

Variations on ‘Là ci darem la mano in B♭ major (1827), Op. 2.

• Fantasy on Polish Airs in A major (1828), Op. 13.
• Rondo à la Krakowiak, in F major (1828), Op. 14.
• Piano Concerto n. 2 in F minor (1829–1830), Op. 21.
• Piano Concerto n. 1 in E minor (1830), Op. 11.
• Grande polonaise brillante (1830–1831), in 1834 expanded with an introductory Andante spianato for solo piano, and a fanfare-like transition to the earlier composition, together published as op. 22
• Drafts for more concertos, ultimately resulting in the Allegro de Concert for solo piano (1832–41), Op. 46.

https://christopheraxworthymusiccommentary.com/2024/03/20/christopher-axworthy-dip-ram-aram/

It was the music of his native South America played as an encore that ignited this young musicians imagination with playing of haunting beauty and a kaleidoscope of colours and sounds of radiance and fluidity. His total authority and hypnotic sense of communication in a very atmospheric work by Villa Lobos created an atmosphere of the scintillating colours and the native rhythms of his homeland bringing a recital full of radiance and beauty to a breathtaking end.

José is a master musician as his playing of Beethoven demonstrated .A scrupulous attention to the composers very precise indications were allied to a technical command with sounds of clarity and beauty.The dialogue between the bass and the soprano in the development was played with simplicity where Beethovens careful shaping of the left hand was beautifully played without disturbing the mellifluous beauty of the right hand. Sometimes his Latin temperament took over and embellishments could have unwound with more ease and the deep left hand throbbing in the recapitulation could have been less passionate.But it was his love and respect for Beethoven’s most mellifluous of his last sonatas that shone through all he did. The Allegro molto – Scherzo was shaped with real style and sense of proportion.A dynamic drive but never overpowering but beautifully shaped.Beethoven’s irascible character had been tamed as the coda gently flowed into the ‘Adagio’ that was played with poignant dignity and beauty.Beethoven’s long pedal and vibrating notes created a haunting atmosphere on which could float one of Beethoven’s most beautiful melodies.The gentle left hand heartbeat was beautifully controlled as the melodic line was allowed to float unimpeded with flowing luminosity. The Fugue was masterly controlled and allowed to unfold naturally as it built to the long E flat that miraculously dissolves down to D for the return of the ‘Arioso’ ‘perdendo le forze – dolente’. Beethoven fills this most poignant of melodies with a series of rests that are like breaths for a singer but that José took a little too literally and his Latin temperament disturbed the simplicity that he had kept so aristocratically under control.The inversion of the fugue was gently whispered as it gradually built to the glorious outpouring with which this Sonata finishes.Again José’s temperament and passionate love of the music almost made him loose control and his arrangement of the hands for the final great triumph of A flat lost the noble impact it surely should have. José is indeed a intelligent young artist with a passionate heart of gold!

It was refreshing to hear the Holberg Suite in concert as I have not heard it since my own school days when it was standard fare for advanced piano students.It is a beautiful piece that José played with nobility and poignant beauty.The prelude has a haunting beauty that pervades it and José’s sumptuous sound palette was very touching.He brought delicacy and simplicity to the ‘Sarabande’ and charm and grace of orchestral nobility to the ‘Gavotte’.The ‘Air’ he played with weight and intensity as the long drawn out melodic line was allowed to sing with simple beauty.There was a beauty to the tenor melody as it was gently accompanied by whispered embellishments.I found the ‘Rigaudon’ a little too fast for comfort as it lost a little of it’s rhythmic precision. It created,though, the excitement and exhilaration needed to round off the simple innocence of this delightful suite of dances and if the ending was a little too thrown away it was because the pianist was obviously enjoying every minute of it as we were too.

The three Chopin Mazukas were played with great style and colour but were sometimes rather too fast and breathless .One felt that José was playing more in the style of Chopin that actually what was written on the printed page and infact he left out a big chunk of the first one too! There were ,of course, many beautiful moments as José is a true artist and there was the haunting beauty of the opening of op 50 n.2 and the beauty of Chopin’s knotty twine in op 50 n.3.

It was the Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody that suddenly unleashed the showman in José as the ‘Pesther Karneval’ took to the stage opening with dynamism and grandiose nobility .With chameleonic changes of colour and character and scintillating virtuosity he swept across the keys as Liszt must have done with this,the longest of his 19 Rhapsodies.A glorious outpouring of sumptuous sounds of dynamic drive and passionate conviction brought this very varied programme to a brilliant close.

The young Bolivian pianist has performed in different countries in venues and festivals in Europe, South America and USA. Halls include Teatro Municipal “Alberto Saavedra Pérez” in his hometown La Paz to the Musikverein in Vienna. He is a Talent Unlimited Artist in London. As a soloist, he has performed with the Jena Philharmonic Orchestra, Norddeutsche Philharmonie Rostock, Georgian Philarmonic Orchestra, La Paz Symphony Orchestra, Orquesta de Jóvenes Musicos Bolivianos, Orquesta Sinfónica Juvenil de Santa Cruz de la Sierra among others. He is a prize winner at the Anton Rubinstein Piano Competition in Düsseldorf, Tbilisi International Piano Competition in Georgia, International Competition Young Academy Award in Rome, Claudio Arrau International Piano Competition in Chile among many others. He was a finalist at the Eppan Piano Academy and at the 63r d Ferruccio Busoni International Piano Competition. In Bolivia he gave masterclasses in La Paz Conservatory, Sucre Conservatory Santa Cruz Fine Arts College and Laredo School in Cochabamba. He served as a jury member in national music competitions. He was mentored by Paul Badura Skoda. He studied with Balasz Szokolay at the Franz Liszt University in Weimar and with Claudio Martínez Mehner at the University of Music and Dance in Cologne. At the moment he is at the Artist Diploma programme at the Royal College of Music in London under the guidance of Norma Fisher and Ian Jones.He holds scholarships from Royal College of Music, Herrmann Foundaiton Liechtenstein- Bolivia, Theo and Petra Lieven Foundation of Hamburg, Clavarte Foundation in Bern and Elfrun Gabriel Foundation for Young Pianists.

https://christopheraxworthymusiccommentary.com/2023/06/08/jose-navarro-silberstein-masterly-performances-of-red-hot-intensity/

https://christopheraxworthymusiccommentary.com/2023/06/21/jose-navarro-silberstein-at-st-jamess-a-master-musician-with-a-heart-of-gold/

https://christopheraxworthymusiccommentary.com/2023/08/02/jose-andres-navarro-at-st-jamess-piccadilly-temperamentauthority-and-musical-integrity/

Beethoven’s A flat major Sonata, Op 110, was his penultimate sonata, written in 1821, The outward gentleness of the opening movement belies its tautness of form, and the contrast with the brief second, a scherzo marked Allegro molto – capricious, gruffly humorous, even violent – is extreme. Beethoven subversively sneaks in references to two street songs popular at the time: Unsa Kätz häd Katzln ghabt (‘Our cat has had kittens’) and Ich bin lüderlich, du bist lüderlich (‘I’m dissolute, you’re dissolute’)! 

Facsimile of last movement p.43 

But it’s in the finale that the weight of the sonata lies, and it begins with a declamatory, recitative-like passage that starts in the minor, moving to an emotionally pained aria-like section.Beethoven introduces a quietly authoritative fugue, based on a theme reminiscent of the one that opened the sonata. Its progress interrupted by the aria once more, its line now disjunct and almost sobbing for breath. The way in which the composer moves into the major via a sequence of G major chords is a passage of pure radiance, that Edwin Fischer described as ‘like a reawakening heartbeat’. This leads to a second appearance of the fugue in inversion culminating in a magnificently triumphant conclusion.

The legendary Guido Agosti held summer masterclasses in Siena for over thirty years.All the major pianists and musicians of the time would flock to learn from a master,a student of Busoni,where sounds heard in that studio have never been forgotten.He was persuaded by us in 1983 to give a public performance of the last two Beethoven Sonatas.The recording of op 110 from this concert is a testament,and one of the very few CD’s ever made,of this great master.
This is a recently made master of op 111 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zdb2qjgWnA3HyPph_6FxnxjLHy7APc_f/view?usp=drive_web

https://christopheraxworthymusiccommentary.com/2024/01/03/forli-pays-homage-to-guido-agosti/The facsimile of the manuscript were given to the Ghione theatre by Maestro Agosti.They still adorn the walls of this beautiful theatre ,created by Ileana Ghione and her husband,that became a cultural centre of excellence in the 80’s and 90’s.

Beethoven’s own markings with the ‘bebung‘ or vibrated notes in the Adagio of op.110

In the summer of 1819, Adolf Martin Schlesinger from the Schlesinger firm of music publishers based in Berlin sent his son Maurice to meet Beethoven to form business relations with the composer.The two met in Modling,where Maurice left a favourable impression on the composer.After some negotiation by letter, the elder Schlesinger offered to purchase three piano sonatas for 90 ducats in April 1820, though Beethoven had originally asked for 120 ducats. In May 1820, Beethoven agreed, and he undertook to deliver the sonatas within three months. These three sonatas are the ones now known as Op. 109,110, and 111 the last of Beethoven’s piano 

The composer was prevented from completing the promised sonatas on schedule by several factors, including his work on the Missa solemnis (Op. 123),rheumatic attacks in the winter of 1820, and a bout of jaundice in the summer of 1821.Op. 110 “did not begin to take shape” until the latter half of 1821.Although Op. 109 was published by Schlesinger in November 1821, correspondence shows that Op. 110 was still not ready by the middle of December 1821. The sonata’s completed autograph score bears the date 25 December 1821, but Beethoven continued to revise the last movement and did not finish until early 1822.The copyist’s score was presumably delivered to Schlesinger around this time, since Beethoven received a payment of 30 ducats for the sonata in January 1822.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Lfnq7ZuDuGQ&feature=shared

The Holberg Suite was originally composed for the piano, but a year later was adapted by Grieg himself for string orchestra .The suite consists of an introduction and a set of dances. It is an early essay in neoclassicism an attempt to echo as much as was known in Grieg’s time of the music of Holberg’s era.The Holberg Suite, op 40, more properly From Holberg’s Time (Norwegian: Fra Holbergs tid), subtitled “Suite in olden style” (Norwegian: Suite i gammel stil), is a suite of five movements based on eighteenth-century dance forms, written in 1884 to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Dano-Norwegian humanist  playwright Ludvig Holberg (1684–1754).

1. Prelude – Allegro vivace
2. Sarabande – Andante
3. Gavotte – Allegretto
4. Aria – Andante religioso
5. Rigaudon – Allegro con brio

Hungarian Rhapsody No. 9, S.244/9 is nicknamed the “Carnival in Pest” or “Pesther Carneval” and was composed in 1847.Liszt used five themes in this rhapsody. The first of these, possibly Italian in origin, can be found in one Liszt’s manuscript notebooks. The second theme is a csardas by an unknown composer. After the third theme, which is an unidentified folk tune, Liszt quotes an authentic Hungarian folk song, A kertmegi káposzta. The final theme quoted is a third folk tune, Mikor én még legény voltam.Liszt wrote a set of 19 piano pieces based on Hungarian Folk Themes during 1846–1853, and later in 1882 and 1885. Liszt incorporated many themes he had heard in his native western Hungary and which he believed to be folk music, though many were in fact tunes written by members of the Hungarian upper middle class, or by composers such as Jozsef Kossovits ,often played by Gypsy bands. The large scale structure of each was influenced by the verbunkos a Hungarian dance in several parts, each with a different tempo.Within this structure, Liszt preserved the two main structural elements of typical Gypsy improvisation—the lassan (“slow”) and the friska (“fast”). At the same time, Liszt incorporated a number of effects unique to the sound of Gypsy bands, especially the pianistic equivalent of the cimbalom.He also makes much use of the Hungarian gypsy scale.

Over the years 1825–1849, Chopin wrote at least 59 compositions for piano called Mazurkas referring to one of the traditional Polish dances

• 58 have been published
  • 45 during Chopin’s lifetime, of which 41 have opus numbers (with the remaining four works being two early mazurkas from 1826 and the famous “Notre Temps” and “Émile Gaillard” mazurkas that were published individually in 1841)
  • 13 posthumously, of which 8 have posthumous opus numbers (specifically, Opp. 67 & 68)
• 11 further mazurkas are known whose manuscripts are either in private hands (2) or untraced (at least 9).

The serial numbering of the 58 published mazurkas normally goes only up to 51. The remaining 7 are referred to by their key or catalogue number.

Chopin while he used the traditional mazurka as his model, he was able to transform his mazurkas into an entirely new genre, one that became known as a “Chopin genre”.

In 1852, three years after Chopin’s death, Liszt published a piece about Chopin’s mazurkas, saying that Chopin had been directly influenced by Polish national music to compose his mazurkas. Liszt also provided descriptions of specific dance scenes, which were not completely accurate, but were “a way to raise the status of these works [mazurkas].”While Liszt’s claim was inaccurate, the actions of scholars who read his writing proved to be more disastrous. When reading Liszt’s work, scholars interpreted the word “national” as “folk,” creating the “longest standing myth in Chopin criticism—the myth that Chopin’s mazurkas are national works rooted in an authentic Polish-folk music tradition.”In fact, the most likely explanation for Chopin’s influence is the national music he was hearing as a young man in urban areas of Poland, such as Warsaw.

After scholars created this myth, they furthered it through their own writings in different ways. Some picked specific mazurkas that they could apply to a point they were trying to make in support of Chopin’s direct connection with folk music. Others simply made generalizations so that their claims of this connection would make sense. In all cases, since these writers were well-respected and carried weight in the scholarly community, people accepted their suggestions as truth, which allowed the myth to grow. However, in 1921, Béla Bartok  published an essay in which he said that Chopin “had not known authentic Polish folk music.”By the time of his death in 1945, Bartók was a very well known and respected composer, as well as a prominent expert on folk music, so his opinion and his writing carried a great deal of weight. Bartók suggested that Chopin instead had been influenced by national, and not folk music.Schumann described Chopin Mazurkas as ‘Canons covered in flowers’.The op .50 mazurkas are a set of three written and published in 1842.

Jean-Philippe Rameau – Suite in D major (Pièces de Clavecin):

I. Les Tendres Plaintes (Rondeau)

V. La Follette (Rondeau)

VIII. Les Cyclopes (Rondeau)

8min.

Claude Debussy – Estampes (“Prints”), L.100 :

I. Pagodes (“Pagodas”)

II. La soirée dans Grenade (“Evening in Granada”) 

III. Jardins sous la pluie (“Gardens in the Rain”)

15min.

Ashkan Layegh – For Solo Piano (2023)

8min.

Florence Anna Maunders – Tuphānī Rakasa

3,5min

C. Debussy – “La plus que lente” (Valse), L. 121

5min.

M. Ravel– La valse, M. 72

The French Baroque composer Jean – Philippe Rameau wrote three books of Pièces de clavecin for the harpsichord .The first, Premier Livre de Pièces de Clavecin, was published in 1706 ; the second, Pièces de Clavessin, in 1724; and the third, Nouvelles Suites de Pièces de Clavecin, in 1726 or 1727. They were followed in 1741 by Pièces de clave in En concerts, in which the harpsichord can either be accompanied by violin (or flute) and viola da gamba or played alone. An isolated piece, “La Dauphine“, survives from 1747.

Jean-Philippe Rameau topped the summit of the Musical Establishment—named Compositeur du Cabinet du Roi in 1745—yet his pedigree was hardly auspicious. For a time a travelling violinist, he held numerous undistinguished posts as provincial organist (rarely serving out his contract and on one occasion deliberately playing sufficiently badly to ensure his dismissal) before finally settling in Paris at the age of forty.

Something of a theorist—his treatise On the Technique of the Fingers on the Harpsichord makes for essential reading—Rameau’s intellectualism combines in his music to produce passion and tenderness, in his own words ‘true music … the language of the heart’. Some sixty keyboard works are known, gathered by key into five suites

Those played tonight are from 1724 and are the first,fifth and eighth from his Suite in D : Les Tendres Plaintes -la Follette– Les Cyclopes

1. Les Tendres Plaintes. Rondeau .An almost tongue-in-cheek character piece, with a title so hackneyed that Rameau was surely poking a bit of fun: Les tendres plaintes (‘The tender sighs ‘) It is nevertheless a ravishing pearl piece , and Rameau clearly thought enough of it to rework it as a ballet movement in Zoroastre (1749).
2. Les Niais de Sologne – Premier Double des Niais – Deuxième Double des Niais
3. Les Soupirs. Tendrement
4. La Joyeuse. Rondeau
5. La Follette. Rondeau (The Sprite) is a bright gigue like Rondeau
6. L’Entretien des Muses
7. Les Tourbillons. Rondeau
8. Les Cyclopes. Rondeau. Is the jewel of the set with a musical description of the mythological smithies who forged Jupiter’s thunderbolts in the deep recesses of the Earth. Here Rameau uses his special technique of ‘batteries’ which he claimed to have invented. As he explains in the preface to the 1724 collection: ‘In one of the batteries the hands make between them the consecutive movement of two drumsticks; and in the other, the left hand passes over the right to play alternately the bass and treble.’ Incidentally, Les cyclopes is believed to be one of the pieces played by the Jesuit Amiot before the Chinese Emperor; sadly, it seems to have not made much of an impression.
9. Le Lardon. Menuet
10. La Boiteuse

La plus que lente L.121 was written for solo piano in 1910,shortly after his publication of the Préludes Book 1.It was first played at the New Carlton Hotel in Paris, where it was transcribed for strings and performed by the popular ‘gipsy’ violinist, Léoni, for whom Debussy wrote it (and who was given the manuscript by the composer).^”La plus que lente is, in Debussy’s wryly humorous way, the valse lente to outdo all others.”It is marked “Molto rubato con morbidezza” indicating Debussy’s encouragement of a flexible tempo.

During the same year of its composition, an orchestration of the work was conceived, but Debussy opposed the score’s heavy use of percussion and proposed a new one, writing to his publisher:

“Examining the brassy score of La plus que lente, it appears to me to be uselessly ornamented with trombones,kettle drums,triangles , etc., and thus it addresses itself to a sort of de luxe saloon that I am accustomed to ignore!—there are certain clumsinesses that one can easily avoid! So I permitted myself to try another kind of arrangement which seems more practical. And it is impossible to begin the same way in a saloon as in a salon. There absolutely must be a few preparatory measures. But let’s not limit ourselves to beer parlours. Let’s think of the numberless five-o’-clock teas where assemble the beautiful audiences I’ve dreamed of.” Claude Debussy, 25 August 1910 

Estampes (“Prints”), L.100 It was finished in 1903. The first performance of the work was given by Ricardo Vines at the Salle Erard of the Société Nazionale de Musique  in Paris on 9 January 1904.

This three-movement suite is one of a number of piano works by Debussy which are often described as impressionistic , a term borrowed from painting. This style of composition had been pioneered by Ravel  in Jeu d’eau written in 1901, and was soon adopted by Debussy (for example in the earlier numbers of Images,but Debussy did not himself identify as an impressionist.

Pagodes evokes Indonesian gamelan music, which Debussy first heard in the Paris World Conference Exhibition of 1889.Debussy marks in the text that “Pagodes” should be played “presque sans nuance“, or “almost without nuance.” This rigidity of rhythm helps to reduce the natural inclination of pianists to add rubato and excessive expression.

La soirée dans Grenade uses the Arabic scale  and mimics guitar strumming to evoke images of Granada ,Spain .Debussy’s only personal experience with the country was a few hours spent in San Sebastian de los Reyes near Madrid. Despite this, Manuel de Falla said of the movement: “There is not even one measure of this music borrowed from the Spanish folklore, and yet the entire composition in its most minute details, conveys admirably Spain.”

Jardins sous la pluie describes a garden in the Normandy  town of Orbec during an extremely violent rainstorm. Throughout the piece, there are sections that evoke the sounds of the wind blowing, a thunderstorm raging, and raindrops dropping. It makes use of two folk melodies, the lullaby Dodo,l’enfant do and Nous n’irons plus au bois parce qu’il fait un temps insupportable (We will no longer go to the woods because the weather is unbearable).

The idea of La valse began first with the title “Vienne” as early as 1906, where Ravel intended to orchestrate a piece in tribute to the waltz form and to Johann Strauss.As he himself stated:’You know my intense attraction to these wonderful rhythms and that I value the joie de vivre expressed in the dance much more deeply than Franckist puritanism.^’Ravel completely reworked his idea of Wien into what became La valse, which was to have been written under commission from Diaghilev as a ballet. However, he never produced the ballet after hearing a two-piano reduction performed by Ravel and Marcelle Meyer saying it was a “masterpiece” but rejected Ravel’s work as “not a ballet. It’s a portrait of ballet”. Ravel, hurt by the comment, ended the relationship and when the two men met again during 1925, Ravel refused to shake Diaghilev’s hand. Diaghilev challenged Ravel to a duel, but friends persuaded Diaghilev to recant. The men never met again.Ravel described La valse with the following preface to the score:
‘Through whirling clouds, waltzing couples may be faintly distinguished. The clouds gradually scatter: one sees at letter A an immense hall peopled with a whirling crowd. The scene is gradually illuminated. The light of the chandeliers bursts forth at the fortissimo letter B. Set in an imperial court, about 1855.’

https://christopheraxworthymusiccommentary.com/2024/03/20/christopher-axworthy-dip-ram-aram/

I have known Ignas for many years now since I was invited by Alim Baesembayev’s teacher ,Tessa Nicholson,to listen to two first years students,Alim and Ignas playing the Mozart Double Concerto in the RAM Annual Piano Festival. Alim has gone on to win the Leeds International Piano Competition but Ignas has been slower to allow his extraordinary talent to mature.There are many temptations for young students when they leave their homeland to study in the great metropolis and the discipline and working attitude they were brought up with can take time to find its place as life and music must grow up side by side in a voyage of discovery which is never easy.Teenagers that are prepared to dedicate their youth to art require an enormous dedication and discipline.Ignas is proving in the past few years to have found that discipline and is having the just rewards that his remarkable talent has always demanded.It sounds foolish to talk about the fluidity of Lithuanian pianists and the relaxed way they seem to caress the keys like strokes of a swimmer in the water.It is a fact ,though, that all the Lithuanian pianist I know have this fluidity of sound that used to belong primarily to the great Hungarian School of Dohnyani : Geza Anda and Annie Fischer are two such examples. The Lithuanian pianists in London that I know well are Gabrielé Sutkuté,Milda Daunoraité,Rokas Valuntonis and Kasparas Mikuzis and are all strangely ‘birds of a feather’!

It was in the last work of the programme that Ignas revealed his great artistry and magnetic personality as rays of light glistened as he spread Chopin’s great web of sounds over the entire keyboard .I have heard him play this work many time before and it has now become part of his being as it was with Rubinstein .In fact there were moments when details were not quite focused and were blurred as rests were ignored and notes sometimes not quite as precise as in the score but there was an overall conviction allied to a quite extraordinary sound world that recreated this masterpiece before our very eyes.There was an architectural shape and an urgency that was compelling.I found the opening Polonaise ‘a tempo giusto’ a fraction too fast but what did it matter as we were drawn hypnotically into a magic world of this dashing young romantic – Rubinstein springs to mind even in his eternally youthful Indian Summer.There was a sumptuous beauty to the ‘Poco piu lento’ where the harmonic progression was as important as the melodic line.The final dynamic drive to the great climax was breathtaking and at the same time full of nobility and aristocratic control.

The concert had begun with Schumann’s Kinderscenen that must be a new work in Ignas’s repertoire.It was played with disarming simplicity and an overall architectural shape but missed the ravishing colour and sense of fantasy that he was to reserve for later in the programme.A beautiful fluidity and sense of balance as the tale of distant lands unfolded with simplicity leading to a curious story of beautifully interwoven sounds.A dynamic drive to the Blind man’s buff also given an overall shape as the counterpoints in the pleading child were so delicately described.If perfect happiness was rather breathless it was only because he could not wait to show us the grandeur and nobility of a Great Adventure.Traumerei had a flowing beauty but missed the magic that was to come later in the programme.His beautiful liquid sound though allowed this most beautiful of Reverie’s to be expressed with disarming simplicity.There was a flowing beauty by the Fireside before the simple drive of the Rocking Horse.Almost too serious flowed directly into the Hobgoblins schizophrenic antics and the gentle slumbers of the child sleeping.But it was the Poet speaks that suddenly ignited Ignas’s imagination and was indeed a poet who had found a voice that illuminated the piano ready for the sumptuous sounds of Vine and Bortkiewicz.This is obviously a work in progress just as I had watched his Schumann Fantasy and Schubert B flat Sonata gradually be transformed from a pianist who had learnt his lesson and was now being recreated with great artistry as he had delved deep and found the gems that lay hidden to all but the very few.I await the next performance of Schumann when he has surely found the key to this chest of jewels.https://youtu.be/UroWVTDb8Oo

The works by Vine and Bortkiewicz obviously stimulated his imagination and with the beauty of his physical movements at the piano he was able to find a kaleidoscope of sounds and a use of the pedal that Anton Rubinstein so rightly said is its very soul. There was clarity and rhythmic drive in the second prelude and clusters of cloudy sounds in the third.His self identification with the Jazz sounds of the fourth saw him crouched low over the keyboard with shoulders moving first right then left as he relived the music with fantasy and brilliance.A slow lazy atmosphere in the last where he spread magic sounds over the entire keyboard.

Bortkiewicz opened with Rachmaninovian grandiosity contrasting with the ravishing beauty of the second prelude. Sombre and passionate sounds of great intensity of the third built to a tumultuous sumptuous climax dying away to a very suggestive ending.There was a wonderful fluidity to the quasi Chopiniana fourth prelude.This was a fascinating short survey of a Ukrainian composer rarely heard in the concert hall and hats off to Ignas for showing us with such artistry what wonders there still are to be discovered.

In July 2021 Ignas Maknickas received “The Queen’s Award for Excellence” as the highest-scoring graduate of the Royal Academy of Music. In 2023 Ignas became the winner of Young Classical Artists Trust (YCAT) International Auditions, had his debut recital at the Wigmore Hall and in January 2024 had his debut at the BBC Radio 3 programme “In Tune” with Sean Rafferty. Ignas has taken First Prize at the XIX Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition for Youth in Szafarnia, First Prize at the XX Piano Competition “Young Virtuoso” in Zagreb, Third Prize at the Aarhus Piano Competition and, in 2021, was the semi-finalist of the Vendome Prize. 2024-25 highlights include solo recitals at the Wigmore Hall in London, Konzerthaus Berlin, Brighton Dome, King’s Lynn, Fidelio Cafe and others.

Born in California in 1998, Ignas was raised in Lithuania. In 2017, graduating from the National M.K. Ciurlionis School of Art in Vilnius, he was honoured by the President of Lithuania, H.E. Dalia Grybauskaite. With his sister and three brothers the talented Maknickas Family Ensemble has represented Lithuania on National Television and at State Occasions. Ignas completed his Bachelor and Master of Arts programmes at the Royal Academy of Music on full scholarship under Professor Joanna MacGregor. In September 2023 he commenced the Advanced Diploma Programme with Professor MacGregor, also on full scholarship. He is a Leverhulme Arts Scholar, a recipient of the ABRSM Scholarship Award, the Imogen Cooper Music Trust Scholarship, Munster Trust Mark James Award, Robert Turnbull Piano Foundation Award, Tillett Trust and Colin Keer Trust Award and Hattori Foundation Award. He is an Artist of the Munster Trust Recital Scheme. As a soloist he has appeared at the Steinway Hall in London, Auditorium du Louvre in Paris, Charlottenborg Festival Hall in Copenhagen, Ed Landreth Hall in Fort Worth, Lithuanian National Philharmonic in Vilnius and Kinross House in Scotland.

https://christopheraxworthymusiccommentary.com/2023/11/27/ignas-maknickas-at-cranleigh-arts-the-birth-of-great-artist-of-humility-and-poetic-innocence/

https://christopheraxworthymusiccommentary.com/2023/02/15/ignas-maknickas-finds-a-home-in-an-artistic-oasis-between-the-gherkin-and-the-shard/

https://christopheraxworthymusiccommentary.com/2023/09/13/ignas-maknickas-opens-a-wondrous-box-of-jewels-the-magic-world-of-a-true-artist/

https://christopheraxworthymusiccommentary.com/2022/02/10/ignas-maknickas-at-st-jamess-piccadilly-a-great-artist-in-the-making/

https://christopheraxworthymusiccommentary.com/2023/07/06/ignas-maknickas-and-wouter-valvekens-music-at-the-matthiesen-gallery-if-music-be-the-food-of-love-pleaseplease-play-on/

https://christopheraxworthymusiccommentary.com/2022/01/11/ignas-maknickas-fluidity-and-romance-for-the-imogen-cooper-music-trust/

Some more superb playing from Shunta Morimoto in his annual recital in the Villa Aldobrandini in Frascati.

https://christopheraxworthymusiccommentary.com/2022/05/23/shunta-morimoto-a-colossus-bestrides-villa-aldobrandini-as-it-had-when-liszt-was-in-residence/

A fascinating programme opening with one of Bach’s finest of seven toccatas – the one in F sharp minor followed by one of Chopin’s most perfect works the Barcarolle op 60 in F sharp major. The first encore too was in F sharp major with the Fugue from Book 1 of the ‘Wohltemperierte Klavier’.Two works by Schubert followed with his C minor Sonata prefaced by the E flat Klavierstucke .I would not be surprised if all these key relationships were not just a coincidence but designed to give an architectural shape to the entire programme.Shunta at only nineteen has recently won two major competitions since his last appearance in this series organised by the distinguished French pianist Marylene Mouquet .It is not only his superb technical mastery but also his intelligent musicianship that shines through all he does.

Playing with a total commitment where the sounds he is making in the moments of creation are his life’s blood as he is able to hold the audience in his spell where we too feel that we are on a voyage of discovery with him.I have heard Shunta recently play the Schubert C minor Sonata but today’s performance had a drive and urgency that was mesmerising.Moments of sublime beauty too but always with the burning intensity of the most dramatic of the composers last works.

The Schubert Sonata I have written about recently but today was an even greater surprise as this burning intensity shone new light on so many memorable moments.

Here he is playing the Sonata as top prize winner of a competition https://christopheraxworthymusiccommentary.com/2024/03/03/shunta-morimoto-takes-hastings-by-storm/

The most extraordinary moment was in the development of the first movement where the streams of chromatic scales were played so quietly to allow the menace of the left hand to be fully appreciated .The rests gave the opening rhythm a terrifying significance before bursting out into the open once more.What noble beauty there was to the Adagio too building into a dynamic force that made the disarmingly beautiful last bars an oasis of whispered beauty . The legato lines of the ‘Menuetto’ where bar lines ceased to exist I have never heard played so beautifully .The gently innocuous last movement just bubbled over with pastoral simplicity but also showing us how much more there was of Beethoven’s tempestuous character in this work than in his others.

What a genial surprise to hear the Allegretto from the Klavierstucke as a bridge between the Barcarolle and the Sonata.The disarming simplicity of the melodic line was only disturbed by the momentary ruffling of the waters returning to the sublime beauty of a work we only ever hear with it’s other two neighbours ,which never really allows us to fully appreciate this unique tone poem on its own terms .Shunta played it,like all he touches,with refined good taste and beauty before the eruption of Schubert in tempestuous C minor mood.

Chopin’s Barcarolle too ,one of Chopin’s most mellifluous works that from the opening deep bass C sharp is a continuous outpouring of song .But today Shunta was in a turbulent mood and he brought an unusual intensity and drive to the work that gave it nobility and poignancy.The gently rocking rhythm to the central section was played truly ‘sotto voce’ as the composer indicates, leading into the most sublime ‘dolce sfogato’ that today in Shunta’s hands came like a ray of golden sunlight suddenly shining down on the water.The passion he then brought to the final pages was breathtaking in it’s abandon and sumptuous rich sound.The final gasping ‘calando’ phrases were played with the subtle inflections that only the greatest of bel canto singers could express .The streams of barely whispered notes with the left hand tenor melody allowed to emerge created a magic that was only to be dispelled with the final mighty fortissimo chords.All through this work there had been a sense of legato and weight where every strand was allowed to sing with beauty and intensity.Shunta’s hands were like limpets on the keys extracting every ounce of meaning from Chopin’s simple rocking melodic line.

The opening Bach Toccata too had been of burning intensity but also of great clarity with the deep bass notes acting as an anchor to the streams of the opening flourishes.The religious calm he brought to the ‘Adagio’ was played with simplicity and very little pedal that gave it a disarming purity before the spiky ‘Presto e staccato’. Shunta’s complete understanding of the contrapuntal direction of the voices showed his remarkable musicianship as he was able to carve this knotty into an architectural shape that took us to recitativi and the final relentless drive on to the noble finish.

Shunta was obviously in Fugal mood today as his first encore was the Fugue in F sharp from Book 1 of the Well Tempered Clavier.A clarity and again an unusual choice to play just the fugue divorced from its prelude.It had me thinking,in my ignorance,that maybe this was a piece by Rameau such was the rhythmic clarity and Sokolovian precision of articulation.Of course a great artist always has a surprise of two in store and Shunta certainly did today.Chopin’s study op 10 n.4 was played with a velocity and ease that were truly breathtaking.It was allied to a sense of character that made the final page as exciting as I remember from Rubinstein when he would raise himself up from the piano tool as he ignited the final page even in his 90th year!

https://christopheraxworthymusiccommentary.com/2023/06/09/shunta-morimoto-pitti-piano-festival-florence-the-inspired-recreation-of-a-great-artist/

The Toccatas for Keyboard, BWV 910–916, are seven pieces for clavier written by J S Bach Although the pieces were not originally organized into a collection by Bach himself (as were most of his other keyboard works, such as the Well Tempered Clavier and the English Suites etc.), the pieces share many similarities, and are frequently grouped and performed together under a collective title.

The seven Toccatas by J.S. Bach contain some of the great master’s most joyous keyboard music. They are youthful, improvisatory, virtuoso works, composed in the aftermath of Bach’s trip in 1705 to Lübeck to hear the great organist and composer Buxtehude.They represent Bach’s earliest keyboard compositions known under a collective title.The earliest sources of the BWV 910, 911 and 916 toccatas appear in the Andreas Bach Book ,an important collection of keyboard and organ manuscripts of various composers compiled by Bach’s oldest brother, Johann Christoph between 1707 and 1713. An early version of the BWV 912 (known as the BWV 912a) also exists in another collection compiled by Johann Christoph Bach known as the ‘Moller manuscript’ from around 1703 to 1707.This indicates that most of these works originated no later than Bach’s early Weimar years, though the early northern German style indicates possible Arnstadt origin.Though the specific instrumentation is not given for any of the works, none of them call for pedal parts and like Bach’s other clavier works, these toccatas are frequently performed on the piano

• Toccata in F-sharp minor, BWV 910
  1. (Toccata)
  2. [no tempo indication]
  3. Presto e Staccato (Fuga)
  4. [no tempo indication]
  5. (Fuga)

Schubert’s last three piano sonatas ,D.958, 959 and 960, are his last major compositions for solo piano. They were written during the last months of his life, between the spring and autumn of 1828, but were not published until about ten years after his death, in 1838–39.Like the rest of Schubert’s piano sonatas, they were mostly neglected in the 19th century but by the late 20th century, however, public and critical opinion had changed, and these sonatas are now considered among the most important of the composer’s mature masterpieces.

The last year of Schubert’s life was marked by growing public acclaim for the composer’s works, but also by the gradual deterioration of his health. On March 26, 1828, together with other musicians in Vienna he gave a public concert of his own works, which was a great success and earned him a considerable profit. In addition, two new German publishers took an interest in his works, leading to a short period of financial well-being. However, by the time the summer months arrived, Schubert was again short of money and had to cancel some journeys he had previously planned.

Schubert had been struggling with syphilis since 1822–23, and suffered from weakness, headaches and dizziness. However, he seems to have led a relatively normal life until September 1828, when new symptoms appeared. At this stage he moved from the Vienna home of his friend Franz von Schober to his brother Ferdinand’s house in the suburbs, following the advice of his doctor; unfortunately, this may have actually worsened his condition. However, up until the last weeks of his life in November 1828, he continued to compose an extraordinary amount of music, including such masterpieces as the three last sonatas.

Schubert probably began sketching the sonatas sometime around the spring months of 1828; the final versions were written in September. The final sonata was completed on September 26, and two days later, Schubert played from the sonata trilogy at an evening gathering in Vienna.In a letter to Probst (one of his publishers), dated October 2, 1828, Schubert mentioned the sonatas amongst other works he had recently completed and wished to publish.However, Probst was not interested in the sonatas,and by November 19, Schubert was dead.In the following year, Schubert’s brother Ferdinand sold the sonatas’ autographs  to another publisher, Anton Diabelli, who would only publish them about ten years later, in 1838 or 1839.Schubert had intended the sonatas to be dedicated to Hummel , whom he greatly admired. Hummel was a leading pianist, a pupil of Mozart , and a pioneering composer of the Romantic style  (like Schubert himself).However, by the time the sonatas were published in 1839, Hummel was dead, and Diabelli, the new publisher, decided to dedicate them instead to composer Robert Schumann , who had praised many of Schubert’s works in his critical writings.

Sonata in C minor, D. 958

Allegro ;Adagio;Menuetto:Allegro – Trio ;Allegro

Franz Schubert

The three “piano pieces” D.946, were completed in May 1828, the year Schubert died, and follow the far more well-known and popular Impromptus D.899 and D.935, which Schubert composed the previous year. Like the Impromptus, the Drei Klavierstücke express in microcosm so much of Schubert’s unique soundworld and musical personality – daring and unusual harmonies, beautiful songful melodies, and episodes of profound poignancy or intimacy. Throughout these three pieces, we hear the extraordinarily broad scope of his creativity and emotional landscape.

“He has sounds to express the most delicate feelings, of thoughts, indeed even for the events and conditions of human life.” – Robert Schumann

Untitled and unpublished in Schubert’s lifetime, it was Johannes Brahms who anonymously edited and published the Drei Klavierstücke in 1868 and gave the works their collective title. The second of the triptych is a five-part rondo. It opens in E-flat major, which connects it to the previous piece, though it is not known whether Schubert conceived the three pieces to be linked. An elegant barcarolle, the A section has an aria-like melody coloured by harmonic shifts between major and minor.

The Barcarolle in F sharp major op 60 , by Chopin was composed between autumn of 1845 and summer 1846, three years before his death. This is one of Chopin’s last major compositions, along with his Polonaise – Fantasie op 61. In the final years of his short life, Chopin reached a new plateau of creative achievement. His sketches from these years suggest that the agony of composition, the resistance it set up, wrested from him only music of an exceptional, transcendent quality. And nowhere is this clearer than in the three great extended works of 1845–6: the Barcarolle Op 60, Polonaise-Fantasie Op 61 and Cello Sonata Op 65

In the summer of 1845, alongside new mazurkas and songs, the Barcarolle was written . Perhaps by coincidence, perhaps by design, the last of the three Mazurkas, Op. 59, composed in the key of F sharp minor, ends with a switch to the bright F sharp major. And it is in that same F sharp major – a rare key in Chopin – that the Barcarolle begins. It is also in shades of F sharp major (as the work’s main key) that the Barcarolle’s musical narrative proceeds, departing from it and returning to it again.

We do not know when and in what circumstances the idea for this music was conceived. Chopin never visited Venice. He had but a fleeting encounter with Italian landscapes and atmosphere on a boat trip from Marseilles to Genoa. A storm at sea was perhaps more likely to have impressed itself onto his memory of that fatiguing expedition than any image of the city. It is assumed that Chopin could have been given the idea of composing a barcarolle, as well as a prototype for its shape and character, by works in that genre which functioned in the current musical repertoire, especially in opera, and above all in Rossini and Auber. All the operatic barcarolles by those composers were well known to Chopin. He could not possibly have forgotten the barcarolles from Guilllaume Tell, La muette de Portici or Fra Diavolo.

The barcarolle genre was becoming increasingly popular in vocal and pianistic lyricism. We know that Chopin gave his pupils Mendelssohn’s Lieder ohne Worten to play. The sixth number in the first book of the Songs without Words bears the title ‘Venezianisches Gondellied’ Venetian boat song. This could certainly have been a path for Chopin into the convention of the nineteenth-century barcarolle. Yet in Chopin’s Barcarolle there are no references to either the historical tradition of the songs of the Venetian gondoliers (as do appear in Liszt’s ‘Venezia e Napoli’) or the banal idiom of the opera-salon barcarolle of the day, which would soon reach its pinnacle with the Barcarolle from Offenbach’s Les contes d’Hoffmann. In Chopin’s Barcarolle, beneath the cloak of the generic convention, we find music that encapsulates his supreme pianistic experience and the musical maturity that he had attained during this rather reflective phase, and at the same time music that echoes his experience of the whole Mediterranean south of Europe: the Italian songs of Lina Freppa, Bellini’s bel canto, the passionate Spanish songs of Pauline Viardot, which Chopin listened to in rapture, and the wild, but incredibly beautiful landscape of Majorca.

One peculiar, extraordinary moment comes at the point which Chopin defines with the words dolce sfogato and precedes with a lead-in filled with hushed mystery. That enigmatic, unfathomed dolce sfogato then starts to develop and bloom.

In his Notes on Chopin, André Gide went into raptures: ‘Sfogato, he wrote; has any other musician ever used this word, would he have ever had the desire, the need, to indicate the airing, the breath of breeze, which, interrupting the rhythm, contrary to all hope, comes freshening and perfuming the middle of his barcarolle?’

https://christopheraxworthymusiccommentary.com/2022/02/16/shunta-morimoto-a-star-shining-brightly-at-st-marys-the-uk-debut-of-a-master/

https://christopheraxworthymusiccommentary.com/2021/11/23/shunta-morimoto-takes-rome-by-storm/

https://christopheraxworthymusiccommentary.com/2023/03/23/shunta-morimoto-takes-london-by-storm-i-have-a-dream-a-poet-speaks-through-music/

Two superb young pianists Jacopo Feresin and Francesco Grano in a duel much as Liszt and Thalberg were to do in Princess Belgioso’s salon in Paris.’Thalberg is the greatest pianist of all but Liszt is unique’.

And so we were reminded of them today in Velletri in the very hills where Liszt would have travelled on his Années de Pélerinage with the Countess d’Agoult.

Here we were treated to a duel between two young musicians taking turns to be soloist and then orchestra and finally united both at the same instrument on the Erard.
Jacopo played on an 1879 Erard similar to the ones that Liszt preferred and Francesco played a 1998 Pleyel,the preferred make of Chopin.
Both demonstrated their mastery,musicianship and intelligence with concertos by Beethoven and Rachmaninov and a peace making duet by Grieg after being feted equally for their artistry and passionate commitment.

I was very interested to see how Jacopo would open the Beethoven and how he would play the chords in the slow movement .Also how he would approach the embellishments in the development of the first movement when Beethoven due to the limitations of the Erard piano at the time was forced to take another path! Jacopo is a very intelligent and highly prepared young musician and although he spread the opening and the chords in the slow movement it was done so discreetly and with the style that the instrument of 1879 would understand.

I had heard Jacopo playing the Beethoven concerto for Roma 3 University : https://christopheraxworthymusiccommentary.com/2021/07/15/summer-harmonies-at-teatro-palladium-for-roma-tre-orchestra/

Modern instruments and the later Erard have more notes than those of Beethoven’s day but I think Jacopo allowed Beethoven the last word there. His playing was very expressive with dynamic drive and poetry nowhere more than in Beethoven’s cadenza where his poetic ending was perfectly in tune with Francesco’s orchestra and was really an expression of great artistry from them both.The grandiose Furies of the Andante were replied to by the beseeching questioning of Orpheus, in a dialogue between the two pianist that was poignantly moving for the differing timbres of the two instruments.Nowhere was their superb musicianship more evident than in the Rondò where their superb duo playing was of extraordinary vitality and character.It was interesting to note how Jacopo managed the long pedals that Beethoven indicates but also note some rather strange embellishments that he added to Beethoven’s much simpler efforts !

After a short break in which the artistic director outlined many of the things about the concertos that are described so fully in his catalogue that year after year he produces with tireless passion and scholarship.It was interesting to note the link between Beethoven and Rachmaninov which I am sure Brendel and Schiff must have overlooked! Czerny was Beethoven’s pupil and he was also the teacher of Franz Liszt (he took him as a child to play to Beethoven who famously gave him a kiss of approval.) Siloti was a pupil of Liszt and he was the teacher of Rachmaninov! So the combination of Beethoven with Rachmaninov makes perfect sense.
This series now in its 12th edition has finally been recognised by the Regione Lazio which subsidises a series of 25 concerts within its bounderies.

I had heard Francesco Grano in Mozart K 456 for Roma 3 University :https://christopheraxworthymusiccommentary.com/2021/02/09/roma-3-orchestra-the-mozart-project/

The Rachmaninov unleashed a youthful spirit in both players who proceeded to give exhilarating performances of subtle beauty and breathtaking athleticism in a display of real duo playing .Beethoven had more obviously been for a soloist and a reduction of orchestra for piano.In the Rachmaninov they were equal partners and it seemed like a work written for two virtuoso pianists.

Francesco playing without the score gave a breathtaking account of the solo part from the opening cascade of octaves to the heart rending melancholy of Rachmaninov’s mellifluous outpourings.A cadenza of nobility and sumptuous richness and sense of improvisation before the startling virtuosity of the ending.A slow movement of haunting poignancy and an ‘Allegro vivace’ that just raced from their fingertips with extraordinary brilliance and contrasted with the beauty of the central episode where the gossamer lightness of Francesco’s embellishments were streams of golden sounds entering and exiting a world of unexpected dreams.

An encore saw them both united at the Erard piano in a performance of ‘Morning’ from Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite.

Such a success was greeted by the announcement of an addition to the concert series for this duo who will perform Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue in the original two piano version in a concert that will now close the season on the 7th July.

Beethoven’s Fourth Concerto was premiered in March 1807 at a private concert of the home of Prince Franz Joseph von Lobkowitz. The Coriolan Overture and the Fourth Symphony were premiered in that same concert.However, the public premiere was not until the 22 December 1808  at Vienna’s  Theatre an der WienTheater with Beethoven again as soloist. The marathon concert saw Beethoven’s last appearance as a soloist with orchestra, as well as the premieres of the Choral Fantasy and the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies .Beethoven dedicated the concerto to his friend, student, and patron, the Archduke Rudolph

A review in the May 1809 edition of the Allegemeine musicalische Zeitung states that ” the concerto is the most admirable, singular, artistic and complex Beethoven concerto ever”.However, after its first performance, the piece was neglected until 1836, when it was revived by Felix Mendelssohn.

Beethoven’s so-called ‘middle period’, roughly the years 1802-12, is often referred to as his ‘Promethean’ phase. The masterworks of this time, we are often told, are characterised by intense striving, heaven-storming ambition, revolutionary daring in matters of form and expression. 

But as Beethoven wrote enigmatically on one of his manuscripts, ‘Sometimes the opposite is also true’; and if any work could be held to demonstrate the truth of that it’s the Fourth Piano Concerto, a work that, composed in 1805-06, enjoyed its premiere at the same huge Theater an der Wien concert on 22 December 1808 – the same event that also saw the first performances of the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies.

Rachmaninov composed his Piano Concerto No. 1 in F♯ minor, Op. 1, in 189 at age 17-18 (the first two movements were completed while he was still 17; the third movement and the orchestration were completed shortly after he had turned 18). He dedicated the work to Alexander Siloti . He revised the work thoroughly in 1917.

This was actually Rachmaninov’s second attempt at a piano concerto. In 1889 he had begun but abandoned a concerto in C minor (the same key, incidentally, in which he would later write his Second PianoConcerto ) He wrote Natalya Skalon on 26 March 1891, “I am now composing a piano concerto. Two movements are already written; the last movement is not written, but is composed; I shall probably finish the whole concerto by the summer, and then in the summer orchestrate it”He finished composing and scoring the piece on July 6 and was satisfied with what he had written.The first movement was premiered on 17 March 1892 at the Moscow Conservatory with the composer as soloist and Vasily Safonov conducting.. This may have been the only time the composer played the concerto in its original form, although Siloti, to whom it is dedicated, programmed it to play himself on several occasions.

Composition students were usually advised to base their efforts on a specific model for their first exercises in new forms. In Rachmaninoff’s case this was the Grieg Piano Concerto which was a favourite work of his and one with which he had been familiar from Siloti practicing it at the Rachmaninoff household during the spring and summer of 1890 for future concerts.Rachmaninoff adapted the entire musical structure of the outer movements to the Grieg concerto, literally building his music into it. With all his other concertos, Rachmaninoff would prove more enterprising.

Revision and current structure

The public was already familiar with the Second and Third Concertos before Rachmaninov revised the First in 1917. The First is very different from his later works; in exchange for less memorable melodies, this concerto incorporates elements of youthful vivacity and impetuosity.

The differences between the 1890–1891 original and the 1917 revision reveal a tremendous amount about the composer’s development in the intervening years. There is a considerable thinning of texture in the orchestral and piano parts and much material that made the original version diffuse and episodic is removed.

Of all the revisions Rachmaninoff made to various works, this one was perhaps the most successful. Using an acquired knowledge of harmony, orchestration, piano technique and musical form, he transformed the early composition into a concise, spirited work.Nevertheless, he was perturbed that the revised work did not become popular with the public. He said : “I have rewritten my First Concerto; it is really good now. All the youthful freshness is there, and yet it plays itself so much more easily. And nobody pays any attention. When I tell them in America that I will play the First Concerto, they do not protest, but I can see by their faces that they would prefer the Second or Third.”