N INET Y-THI R D SEASON Sunday, February 25, 2024, at 3:00
Piano Series PIERRE-LAURENT AIMARD MOZART
Fantasy in C Minor, K. 475
C.P.E. BACH
Fantasy in C Major, Wq 59, No. 6
BEETHOVEN
Fantasy in G Minor, Op. 77
BENJAMIN
Fantasy on Iambic Rhythm
INTERMISSION
MOZART
Fantasy in D Minor, K. 397
SWEELINCK
Fantasia chromatica, SwWV 258
CHOPIN
Polonaise-Fantasy in A-flat Major, Op. 61
IVES
The Celestial Railroad
This program is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.
COMMENTS by Richard E. Rodda WOLFGANG MOZART Born January 27, 1756; Salzburg, Austria Died December 5, 1791; Vienna, Austria
Fantasy in C Minor, K. 475 COMPOSED
1784
As Mozart reached his full maturity in the years after arriving in Vienna in 1781, his most expressive manner of writing, whose chief evidences are the use of minor modes, chromaticism, rich counterpoint and thorough thematic development, appeared in his compositions with increasing frequency. Such musical speech had regularly been evident in the slow movements of his piano concertos, but in 1785 he dared to compose an entire work (Concerto no. 20 in D minor, K. 466) in a minor key. At that same time, perhaps the most productive period of his life (twelve of his last fourteen piano concertos were written between 1784 and 1786), Mozart created a series of three piano works cast in
the tragic key of C minor—the Sonata, K. 457 (completed on October 14, 1784); Fantasy, K. 475 (May 20, 1785); and Piano Concerto no. 24, K. 491 (April 1786). The C minor fantasy consists of five large structural paragraphs played continuously—a portentous opening adagio brought back at the end to round out the work; an unsettled allegro; a cautious andantino; a tempestuous più allegro; and the closing adagio. Mozart authority Alfred Einstein believed that this tiny anthology of inchoate movements . . . gives us the truest picture of Mozart’s mighty powers of improvisation—his ability to indulge in the greatest freedom and boldness of imagination, the most extreme contrast of ideas, the most uninhibited variety of lyric and virtuoso elements, while yet preserving structural logic.
t h i s pa g e : Wolfgang Mozart, silverpoint portrait by Dora Stock (1760–1832), taken during a visit to Dresden in 1789 | o p p o s i t e pa g e : Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, ca. 1784
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CARL PHILIPP EMANUEL BACH Born March 8, 1714; Weimar, Germany Died December 14, 1788; Hamburg, Germany
Fantasy in C Major, Wq 59, No. 6 COMPOSED
1779–84
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Johann Sebastian’s fifth child, gained fame with his contemporaries as a composer in the most advanced style of the time, a keyboard player of unsurpassed ability, and the author of an important treatise on contemporary performance style, as well as a man of wit, broad education, and winning personality. Emanuel could hardly have avoided the musical atmosphere of the Bach household as a boy, and he learned the art directly from Johann Sebastian. After three years as a student at Leipzig University, he enrolled in 1734 to study law at the University of Frankfurt an der Oder, where he earned a meager living giving keyboard lessons and composing and leading works for special occasions. In 1738, leaving behind the legal profession but immeasurably enriched by the excellent general education it had brought him, he joined the musical establishment of Frederick the Great of Prussia in Potsdam, near Berlin. Many of his greatest keyboard works, notably the Prussian and Württemberg sonatas, date from the years in Berlin, as does the Essay on the True
Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments, an indispensable source for understanding eighteenth-century performance practice. Emanuel Bach was not completely happy in Berlin. Though he found the atmosphere of the court stimulating and valued his circle of cultured friends, including the poet Lessing, he left when Georg Philipp Telemann, director of music for the city churches of Hamburg and Emanuel’s godfather, died during the summer of 1767, and Bach was appointed to take his place. In Hamburg, Bach’s position, in which he was responsible for the music in five churches, was similar to his father’s in Leipzig. As in Berlin, he collected a circle of respected and well-educated poets, dramatists, philosophers, clergymen, and musicians as close friends and was renowned for his hospitality and the sparkling quality of his conversation. He died in Hamburg in 1788. Bach’s music was known and admired throughout northern Europe, especially for its quality of Empfindsamkeit (sentimentality), which he himself explained succinctly: “It appears to me that it is the special province of music to move the heart.” Emanuel Bach’s works are consistently of interest—they are composed with masterly skill, true individuality, and, often, deep inspiration. CS O.O RG
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Emanuel Bach published thirteen volumes of solo keyboard works between 1742 and 1787, the last six collections of sonatas, fantasies, and rondos “für Kenner und Liebhaber” (for connoisseurs and amateurs) intended for professional musicians and scholars, as well as the burgeoning market of home music-makers. The Fantasy in C major, included in the penultimate volume, is a study of the way Bach built a logical, satisfying musical structure around his idiosyncratic style. The opening gesture comprises a rocket shot through the work’s home chord followed by a
comment of two soft, pert notes as if to say, “That’s nice.” The motif, developed, recurs amid figuration grown from the opening rocket chord and leads to a central section that is remarkable for its adventurous, wide-ranging harmony and its introspective mood, a perfect example of the expressive potency of Bach’s Empfindsamkeit. The rest of the piece is built around permutations of these two ideas—the rocket chord and the introspective episode—treated in a serious manner, making this fantasy one of the most darkly colored C major compositions in the piano repertory.
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Born December 16, 1770; Bonn, Germany Died March 26, 1827; Vienna, Austria
Fantasy in G Minor, Op. 77 COMPOSED
1809
Beethoven first acquired his reputation as a pianist after arriving in Vienna in 1792 as a flamboyant young man of untamed spirit, particularly noted for the power and invention of his improvisations. The passionate, untamed quality of his performances made him a celebrity with public and musicians alike soon after he settled
in Vienna in 1792, drawing from the prominent Czech composer Václav Tomášek the admission that “his grand style of playing had an extraordinary effect on me. I felt so shaken that for several days, I could not bring myself to touch the piano.” Given the revising, polishing, and perfecting to which Beethoven subjected his finished works for piano, there are few musical windows from which the modern listener may glimpse the nature of his extemporaneous playing. The chief one is the remarkable
t h i s pa g e : Ludwig van Beethoven, portrait in oil by Joseph Willibrord Mähler (1778–1860), 1804. Archive for Art and History, Berlin, Germany | o p p o s i t e pa g e : George Benjamin, photo by Matthew Lloyd
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Fantasy in G minor, op. 77. Beethoven apparently composed the work at the Hungarian estate of the Brunswick family in October 1809, though he may have tried it out at his gargantuan concert on the previous December 22 at which the Fifth and Sixth symphonies, Fourth Piano Concerto (in which he was also the soloist), the concert aria Ah! Perfido, three numbers from the Mass in C major, and Choral Fantasy were all premiered. Carl Czerny said that the Fantasy in G minor was representative of Beethoven’s improvisations, which Ferdinand Ries, another of the composer’s students, noted “were the most extraordinary things that one could
hear. No artist that I ever heard came at all near the height that Beethoven attained. The wealth of ideas that forced themselves on him, the caprices to which he surrendered himself, the variety of treatment, the difficulties, were inexhaustible.” The nearly violent contrasts of the Fantasy, its presentation of musical thoughts seemingly already in progress, its impassioned outbursts, its lyricism, its searching harmonies—all must have been characteristic of Beethoven’s most impulsive music-making. The Fantasy is a privileged glimpse into the mind and working methods of the man who changed forever the art of music.
GEORGE BENJAMIN Born January 31, 1960; London, England
Fantasy on Iambic Rhythm COMPOSED
1985
George Benjamin began playing piano at age seven and started composing two years later. He had just turned twenty when he first gained notice with his orchestral evocation of a desert thunderstorm, Ringed by the Flat Horizon, which premiered in Cambridge in March 1980 and was heard again the following August at a BBC Proms concert. After some lessons with
Peter Gellhorn, he went to the Paris Conservatory in 1976 to study composition with Olivier Messiaen and piano with Messiaen’s wife, Yvonne Loriod; from 1978 to 1982, he was a student of Alexander Goehr at King’s College, Cambridge. After A Mind of Winter (a setting of Wallace Stevens’s “The Snowman” for soprano and orchestra) and At First Light were successfully introduced in the early 1980s, Benjamin slowed the frantic pace of his career, and his next significant work, Antara for chamber orchestra and electronics (commissioned by IRCAM for the tenth CS O.O RG
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anniversary of the Pompidou Centre in Paris), did not appear until 1987. He has since composed steadily (if deliberately) and established himself among today’s leading musical figures. Benjamin has held teaching posts at London’s Royal College of Music (where he was the first Prince Consort Professor of Composition), King’s College, London (from 2001, as Henry Purcell Professor of Composition, succeeding Sir Harrison Birtwistle), and the Tanglewood Summer School, traveled widely to lecture, conduct his and other composers’ works in Europe and America (including Debussy’s Pelleas and Melisande at the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels), and participate in contemporary music festivals in Austria, France, England, and the United States. He was composer-in-residence for the Berlin Philharmonic during the 2000–01 and 2018–19 seasons, artistic consultant to the BBC’s three-year retrospective of twentieth-century music, supervisor of the London Symphony Orchestra’s retrospective of eleven of his works during its 2002–03 season, and music director of California’s Ojai Festival in 2010. In 2000 Benjamin became the youngest member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts; the following year, he was awarded the Deutsche
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Symphonie Orchester’s inaugural Schoenberg Prize for Composition. Recordings of his music have received Gramophone magazine’s Contemporary Record of the Year Award, Grand Prix du Disque, Koussevitzky International Critics Award, and Edison Prize. He has received the Golden Lion Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Venice Biennale and Ernst von Siemens Music Prize and has been made a Chevalier and Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters, an honorary fellow of King’s College, London, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Royal College of Music, Royal Academy of Music and Royal Philharmonic Society, and a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Benjamin wrote that the Fantasy on Iambic Rhythm . . . takes iambic rhythm (short– long) as its starting point. Various contrasted types of music evolve from this rhythmic “cell” and are transformed and juxtaposed throughout a wide range of moods, often at great speed. A slow, gentle melody interrupts at a climactic moment and spreads resonantly across the complete range of the piano before the final build toward a jubilant conclusion.
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WOLFGANG MOZART
Fantasy in D Minor, K. 397 COMPOSED
1782
In 1782, one year after he had bolted from Salzburg to take up life as a freelance composer and pianist in Vienna, Mozart developed a new admiration for the music of Bach, Handel, and other masters of the early eighteenth century. He had been exposed to the works of such Italian baroque composers as Leo, Caldara, Durante, and Alessandro Scarlatti in Salzburg, where their scores were performed and studied, but his interest in Bach grew from his association with Baron Gottfried van Swieten in Vienna. Van Swieten, who is also remembered as the librettist for Haydn’s oratorios The Creation and The Seasons, produced a weekly series of concerts in Vienna devoted to “ancient music” and hired the best available musicians, including Mozart, to perform and arrange the
compositions for those events. (Among other projects for van Swieten, Mozart scored Handel’s Messiah for classical orchestra.) Mozart, one of history’s greatest adepts at absorbing musical styles, learned much about the fine workings of baroque music from his close involvement with the compositions of Bach and Handel. In addition to the enriched contrapuntal textures that increasingly figured in his compositions, Mozart also discovered from Bach’s preludes, fantasies, and toccatas how to fix the evanescence of improvisation into a finished work. He tried out just such a passage of musing, seemingly spontaneous broken chords to begin the Fantasy in D minor and followed that music with a plaintive, chromatically inflected melody. Repetitions of this sad song are twice interrupted by a sweeping cadenza-like episode before the Fantasy takes a small breath and trots off with a melody of opera buffa jocularity.
a b o v e : Wolfgang Mozart, detail from the Mozart family portrait by Johann Nepomuk della Croce (1736–1819), 1780
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JAN PIETERSZOON SWEELINCK Born May 1562; Deventer, Holland Died October 16, 1621; Amsterdam, Holland
Fantasia chromatica, SwWV 258 Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck was one of the outstanding figures in the history of Dutch music—the principal conservatory in Amsterdam is named in his honor. Sweelinck was born in Deventer into a long paternal line of organists and moved to Amsterdam with the family when his father was appointed organist at the Oude Kerk two or three years later. Amsterdam became his home for the rest of his life. Sweelinck’s academic training was supervised by Jacob Burck, pastor of the Oude Kerk, and his musical studies by his father, and by the age of fifteen, Jan had become organist at the St. Nicholas Church. In 1580 he was appointed organist at the Oude Kerk (the position his father held until his death in 1573), though his performances were restricted to preludes and postludes to the services since the Dutch then favored a species of Calvinist Protestantism that forbid
instrumental music during the liturgy. Sweelinck quickly established himself as a master of the keyboard (Amsterdam’s city fathers regularly impressed out-of-town guests by bringing them to his performances), a leading composer of vocal and instrumental music, and a revered teacher who inspired for himself the honorific “Orpheus of Amsterdam.” Sweelinck lived an uneventful, well-regulated life and seems to have left Amsterdam only to inspect organs in other Dutch towns. He died on October 16, 1621, and was buried in the Oude Kerk. The Fantasia chromatica, one of Sweelinck’s best-known and most-admired works, is based on a continuously repeating motif that descends by half steps through an interval of a fourth. This short phrase courses through all the voices, at first successively and more contrapuntally intertwined, sometimes elongated, sometimes compressed, as the piece progresses, to provide the substrate for increasingly elaborate figurations.
t h i s pa g e : Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck | o p p o s i t e pa g e : Frédéric Chopin, detail from an unfinished double portrait with George Sand by Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), 1838
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FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN Born February 22, 1810; Żelazowa Wola, Poland Died October 17, 1849; Paris, France
Polonaise-Fantasy in A-flat Major, Op. 61 COMPOSED
1845–46
The PolonaiseFantasy in A-flat major, the last of Chopin’s works in that form and his final large creation for piano, was begun in 1845 and completed during the following summer at Nohant, George Sand’s country villa near Châteauroux in the province of Berry. The liaison between the sensitive composer and the flamboyant writer had been deteriorating for the previous two years, and the serialized publication during the spring of 1846 of her novel Lucrezia Floriani, with its not-always-flattering portrayal of Chopin, exacerbated their differences. When Chopin left Nohant in November for what proved to be the last time, his creative life was essentially over. During his three remaining years, the withdrawal of Sand’s inspiration and comfort and his steadily declining health allowed him to create only three mazurkas, three waltzes, a cello sonata, and (perhaps) one song. Chopin’s limitations to compose during his last years is particularly unfortunate in view of the greatly
expanded harmonic and formal vistas indicated by the Polonaise-Fantasy. “Over this work lies the same historic glow of bright, unfulfilled promise that lights Schubert’s great Symphony in C major,” wrote Herbert Weinstock. The Polonaise-Fantasy moves considerably beyond the dance idioms of Chopin’s earlier works in the form to become a sort of contemplative exploration of their characteristic rhythms and gestures, what Alan Rich called “a personal fantasizing on the essence of Polish-ness into which elements of the polonaise are woven.” The work’s unorthodox structure and bold harmonic and tonal audacities caused Chopin to hesitate over its precise designation (he told a friend during its composition that the piece was “something I don’t know how to name”) and even such a staunch champion of his music as Franz Liszt was puzzled by its “feverish and restless anxiety, [its] sudden alarms, disturbed rest, stifled sighs.” The daring originality of the Polonaise-Fantasy has been better understood in more recent times, and the work is now regarded as one of Chopin’s finest creations, the unrealized harbinger of a unique strand of romanticism stilled at its inception by his too-early death.
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CHARLES IVES Born October 20, 1874; Danbury, Connecticut Died May 19, 1954; New York City
The Celestial Railroad COMPOSED
around 1916
Though Ives was one of the great musical modernists of the early twentieth century, the philosophical core of his work was unquestionably old-fashioned: that art could not only powerfully affect the heart, intellect, and spirit but it could also address mankind’s most profound concerns, beliefs that were formed and reinforced by his readings of Emerson, Browning, Arnold, Hawthorne, Whitman, Whittier, Beecher, and the other American transcendentalists. Between 1908 and 1913, Ives planned a series of overtures inspired by those writers that he titled Men of Literature, but only the Browning piece reached its final form in that guise. The overtures after Walt Whitman, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Henry Ward Beecher never went much beyond the planning stage. The Matthew Arnold Overture was written (for chorus and orchestra) in 1912 but then lost. By the time Ives started sketching out Emerson and Hawthorne, they had turned into projected piano concertos, though he a b o v e : Charles Ives, ca. 1917
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brought neither one to a performable state in that form. (David G. Porter has made a “reconstruction” of the Emerson Concerto, which was premiered by Alan Feinberg and the Cleveland Orchestra in 1998.) Emerson was eventually worked up as the first movement of the Concord Sonata, and Hawthorne spawned three separate pieces sometime around 1916: the second movement of the Concord Sonata, the second movement of the Fourth Symphony, and a piano fantasy titled The Celestial Railroad. The literary seed from which these three musical siblings grew (and which gave its title to the piano fantasy) was Hawthorne’s 1842 short story “The Celestial Railroad,” which begins: Not a great while ago, passing through the gate of dreams, I visited that region of the earth in which lies the famous City of Destruction. It interested me much to learn that by the public spirit of some of the inhabitants, a railroad has recently been established between this popular and flourishing town and the Celestial City. The story is a satire of the longedfor comfort and growing materialism
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of American life that uses characters and settings drawn from John Bunyan’s Puritan epic Pilgrim’s Progress. In his study of Ives, Jan Swafford summarized Hawthorne’s tale and its moral: Yankee know-how has replaced the grueling journey of Bunyan’s Pilgrims with a comfortable railroad line to paradise, with a pleasant stopover in Vanity Fair [equated by Ives with New York City]. From the windows of the train, passengers observe old-fashioned Pilgrims struggling through the swamp on foot and greet the sight with laughter. Unfortunately, as the narrator learns in the final scene, modern travelers are fated to miss their connection over the river of death. As the cold waters close around him, the narrator awakes “with a shiver and a heartquake,” and realizes it was a dream. Ives described the pieces rooted in The Celestial Railroad as “in a comedy vein,” but in the human rather than the vaudeville sense, and a program note
written by Henry Bellamann (based on conversations with the composer) for Eugene Goossens’s performance in 1927 of the Fourth Symphony’s first and second movements applies to both the orchestral and piano versions of the music: It is not a scherzo in the accepted sense of the word, but rather a comedy—in which an exciting, easy, and worldly progress through life is contrasted with the trials of the Pilgrims in their journey through the swamps and rough country. The occasional slow episodes—Pilgrims’ hymns—are constantly crowded out and overwhelmed by the former. The dream, or fantasy, ends with an interruption of reality—the Fourth of July in Concord—brass bands, drum corps, etc.
Richard E. Rodda, a former faculty member at Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Institute of Music, provides program notes for many American orchestras, concert series, and festivals.
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PROFILES Pierre-Laurent Aimard Piano Pierre-Laurent Aimard is widely acclaimed as an authority in music of our time while also recognized for shedding fresh light on music of the past. His international schedule of creatively conceived concerts, broadcasts, and recordings is complemented by a career-long commitment to teaching and giving concert lectures and workshops worldwide. Pierre-Laurent Aimard has collaborated with many leading composers, including Helmut Lachenmann, Elliott Carter, Harrison Birtwistle, György Kurtág, Pierre Boulez, and Olivier Messiaen. During the 2023–24 season, he celebrates the music of György Ligeti with projects throughout Europe, North America, Japan, and China. Guest concerto appearances include the Czech Philharmonic, Staatskapelle Dresden, Teatro alla Scala Milan, Orchestre National de France, Danish National Symphony Orchestra, and New York Philharmonic. Aimard’s extensive recital touring takes him to Southbank Centre London, Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, Musikverein Wien, Philharmonie Luxembourg, and Concertgebouw Amsterdam, as well as Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Francisco. At Paris’s Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, he collaborates with French actor Denis Podalydès for an exploration of Imre Kertész’s P H OTO BY J U L I A W E S E LY
novel Fateless with music by Ligeti, Kurtág, Schoenberg, and Cage. Aimard also continues his association with long-standing chamber music partners, most notably Tamara Stefanovich at the Tonhalle Zürich and Madrid’s Centro Nacional de Difusión Musical, and jazz pianist Michael Wollny at Frankfurt Alte Oper. Upcoming world premieres include Clara Iannotta’s Piano Concerto for the Acht Brucken Festival in Cologne and the Portuguese premiere of Klaus Ospald’s Se da contra las piedras la libertad, a work co-commissioned by Casa da Musica, Porto, and Cologne’s WDR Symphony Orchestra. His discography includes the complete cycle of Bartók’s piano concertos, Visions with Tamara Stefanovich, Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata & Eroica Variations, and Messiaen’s magnum opus Catalogue d’oiseaux, which garnered multiple awards including the prestigious German Record Critics’ Award. Aimard’s multiple awards include the prestigious International Ernst von Siemens Music Prize in 2017 in recognition of a life devoted to the service of music and the Leonie Sonning Music Prize in 2022, Denmark’s most prominent music award. A member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, Aimard has held professorships at Cologne University and Collège de France, Paris. In the spring of 2020, he relaunched a major online resource, Explore the Score, in collaboration with the Ruhr Piano Festival, which centers on the performance and teaching of Ligeti’s piano music.