Yulianna Avdeeva

What’s in a Name?

Piano Works from Three Centuries

Harry Haskell

The traditional-sounding titles of the four works on tonight’s program mask a variety of innovative approaches to musical form. Both Dmitri Shostakovich and Franz Liszt rejected the thematically diverse, multimovement layout of the classical sonata in favor of tightly organized, singlemovement structures that reflected composers’ increasing taste for organicism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Johann Sebastian Bach supplemented the conventional instrumental dance suite of his day—typically built around a core sequence of allemande, courante, sarabande, and gigue —with a variety of other popular and courtly dances, as well as movements of a less dance-like character. Two hundred years later, Nikos Skalkottas poured new wine into old bottles by using the neoclassical suite as a familiar, historically evocative container for his radically unfamiliar music.

A Work of Extraordinary Ferocity

Born in 1906, Shostakovich came of age in the 1920s, during the brief halcyon period of the workers’ state. Throughout his life, the highly strung composer would play an elaborate game of feint and attack with the Communist Party’s cultural apparatchiks, cannily balancing his more abrasive, cutting-edge music with a stream of reassuringly patriotic and artistically conservative works. Composed in 1926, the acerbically dissonant Piano Sonata No. 1 followed close on the heels of Shostakovich’s popular First Symphony, which had transformed the teenage composer into something of an international celebrity. If, as contemporaries reported (but Shostakovich later denied), the sonata was originally titled “October,” the allusion to the Russian Revolution may have been calculated to deflect criticism of the music’s aggressively modernist idiom. According to his son Maxim, Shostakovich suppressed the title when he realized that the good times associated with Lenin’s New Economic Policy wouldn’t last—only to revive it the following year in connection with his bombastic Second Symphony.

Cast in an unbroken 15-minute span, the Sonata is a virtuoso work of extraordinary ferocity: after Shostakovich played it for his fellow students at the Leningrad Conservatory, traces of blood were reportedly found on the keys. One listener, the future musicologist Daniel Zhitomirsky, described Shostakovich as an “unusually severe and utterly concentrated” performer who “seemed to hypnotise us with his seriousness. He did not simply play, but gave the impression that he was practising witchcraft.” By turns apocalyptic and sarcastic, playful and savage, the Sonata is a study in extremes—of moods, dynamics, registers, textures, and sonorities. “The energy of this sonata is hyperbolically hard and soulless,” Zhitomirsky observed. In it, Shostakovich “made a dash to tear himself ruthlessly away from the old romanticism, including that of Scriabin: he was taking the path of a new, more rigid style without any softening beauties.” A few weeks later Shostakovich tried the Sonata out on an appreciative Sergei Prokofiev, who recognized it as a close cousin to his own high-octane, single- movement First Piano Sonata of 1909.

Suites Baroque and Modern

Bach showed a serious and sustained interest in the suite throughout his career. It was characteristic of his methodical approach to composition that he used the form both as an organizational device and as a pedagogical tool. His systematic mindset is most clearly shown in his fourpart Clavierübung (“Keyboard Practice”). This composite work is not a set of exercises, as the title suggests, but a wide-ranging survey of mid–18th century keyboard styles, genres, and forms. Published in four installments between 1731 and 1741, it gave Bach an opportunity to display his prowess as composer and performer alike. The first volume, which Bach self-published as his Opus 1, consisted of six Partitas (sometimes called German Suites) for single-manual harpsichord. Part 2—written, like the “Goldberg” Variations that comprise the fourth volume, for a harpsichord with two keyboards—comprises a bravura “Concerto after the Italian Taste” (the so-called Italian Concerto) and a more suavely ornate “Overture in the French Style.” Part 3 is a compendium of chorales and other pieces for organ.

A suite in all but name, BWV 831 has no fewer than 11 movements (counting the pairs of Gavottes, Passepieds, and Bourrées). Almost all are set in B minor, starting with an expansive “French overture”—a slow, majestic introduction, replete with flourishes, followed by a lively fugue and closing with a more ornate version of the opening section. A vigorous Courante provides light relief, and from then on the emphasis is on dance movements: the two Gavottes, with their characteristic long-short-short upbeat figure, and two Passepieds in triple meter, both sets moving from minor to major and back again; a gracious Sarabande; two briskly four-square Bourrées; and a high-stepping Gigue, characterized by a jerky dotted figure in 6/8 time. Bach’s listeners would have expected the suite to end there, but he had one more trick up his sleeve: a genial character piece featuring echo effects that were possible only on a harpsichord with two keyboards and corresponding ranks of strings.

Nikos Skalkottas’s modernist take on the Baroque suite dates from 1941 and reflects his enthusiasm for 18th-century musical forms, genres, and procedures—an interest shared by Hindemith, Stravinsky, and other “neoclassical” composers of the interwar period. After more than a decade spent in Berlin, the increasingly reclusive composer had returned in 1933 to Athens, where he eked out a living as a rank-in-file orchestra violinist. Yet despite his self-imposed isolation from the modernist mainstream, and the almost total lack of opportunities to hear his music performed, Skalkottas continued to compose works for posterity in the idiosyncratic atonal and twelve-note idioms that he had forged under Arnold Schoenberg’s tutelage at the Preussische Akademie der Künste in Berlin. The third of his four suites for solo piano combines a classical dance (minuet) with a set of variations on a Greek folk melody, a character piece (funeral march), and a propulsive, toccatalike finale.

The two outer movements are most characteristically neoclassical in their emphasis on lucid textures and linear counterpoint. However, neither harmonically nor rhythmically does Skalkottas allow the music to fall into a groove; for example, he gently disrupts the minuet’s lilting 3/4 pulse by interpolating measures in other meters. The two middle movements are somewhat freer in their evocations of historical models. Skalkottas didn’t identify the “popular Greek theme” on which he based his four short variations, but one scholar speculates that it commemorates Antonis Katsantonis, an early martyr of the Greek independence movement who was tortured and executed by the Ottoman Turks in 1809. The dolorous tune is presented in a simple harmonization before being subjected to a series of increasingly fanciful, and mostly seamless, permutations, paving the way for the solemn, dirge-like tread of the Marcia funebra (or funebre, as it would read in correct Italian).

A Revolutionary Masterpiece A peerless virtuoso famed for his “transcendental” keyboard technique, Liszt took Europe by storm as a young man. As audiences in city after city succumbed to “Lisztomania,” the Hungarian’s name became synonymous with pianistic prowess and showmanship. In 1848, at the height of his fame, he virtually retired from the concert stage and devoted the rest of his life to composing, conducting, and proselytizing (with his future son-in-law, Richard Wagner) for the “Music of the Future.” In his piano music, symphonic tone poems, and vocal works, Liszt experimented with forms, harmonies, and sonorities that anticipated the musical language of impressionism and modernism.

In 1848, Liszt accepted an invitation to become court Kapellmeister to the Grand Duke of Weimar. There, over the next 13 years, he composed his great Faust Symphony and a series of what he called “symphonic poems,” which epitomized the Romantic urge to synthesize music, literature, and other art forms. Unlike Brahms and Mendelssohn, who continued to write multimovement works in the mold of Mozart and Beethoven, Liszt came to believe that classical sonata form was outmoded. In its place he erected long, single-movement musical structures based on the cyclical transformations of a small number of themes or motives. Among the first fruits of this endeavor was the Sonata in B minor, one of the 19th century’s most revolutionary masterpieces. Although it was completed in early 1853, the work was so ahead of its time that four years passed before Liszt’s pupil Hans von Bülow gave the premiere in Berlin.

An uninterrupted musical panorama stretching across a full half-hour, the B-minor Sonata falls into discrete sections that correspond roughly to those of traditional sonata form: exposition, development, recapitulation, and coda. Within the first 15 bars, Liszt presents three of the main ideas on which the Sonata will be built: a lugubrious descending scale, an energetically bounding melody, and an ominously rumbling repeated-note figure. A contrasting lyrical theme, in resplendent D major, serves as the framework for the sonata’s middle “slow movement,” marked Andante sostenuto. This in turn is followed by a lively, fugue-like section, based, as in a conventional recapitulation, on themes heard earlier. Resisting his initial temptation to go out with a bang, Liszt brings the Sonata to a close with a tender reminiscence of the Andante.