NINETY-THIRD SEASON
Sunday, June 2, 2024, at 3:00
Piano Series
BRUCE LIU
HAYDN
CHOPIN
KAPUSTIN
INTERMISSION
RAMEAU
Sonata in B Minor, Hob. XVI:32
Allegro moderato
Menuet
Finale: Presto
Sonata No. 2 in B-flat Minor, Op. 35
Grave—Doppio movimento
Scherzo
Marche funèbre
Presto
Variations, Op. 41
PROKOFIEV
Selections from Pièces de clavecin and Nouvelles suites de pièces de clavecin
Les tendres plaints (Pièces de clavecin)
Les cyclopes (Pièces de clavecin)
Menuets I and II (Nouvelles suites)
Les sauvages (Nouvelles suites)
La poule (Nouvelles suites)
Gavotte et Doubles (Nouvelles suites)
Sonata No. 7 in B-flat Major, Op. 83
Allegro inquieto
Andante caloroso
Precipitato
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association acknowledges support from the Illinois Arts Council.
COMMENTS by Richard E. RoddaJOSEPH HAYDN
Born March 31, 1732; Rohrau, Lower Austria
Died May 31, 1809; Vienna, Austria
Sonata in B Minor, Hob. XVI:32
COMPOSED 1776
Haydn once said of himself that he was “not a bad piano player,” but though he was not a virtuoso on the instrument of the stature of his friend Wolfgang Mozart, he was a competent and busy keyboard performer and composer throughout his career. Haydn began playing the clavier as a child, and he studied the clavichord, harpsichord, and organ with fine teachers at the Imperial Choir School in Vienna. After leaving the school in 1749, he taught clavichord and harpsichord, served as organist in a couple of minor Viennese posts, and mastered the art of accompaniment. He was nearly penniless in those early days, living in an attic in an undesirable quarter of the city, and he resorted to his clavier as a source of comfort, as he later told his biographer Albert Dies:
The severe loneliness of the place, the lack of anything to divert the idle spirit, and my quite needy
situation led me to contemplations which were often so grave that I found it necessary to take refuge at my worm-eaten clavier . . . to play away my melancholy.
Haydn’s appointment in 1758 as kapellmeister for Count Morzin (he gave the countess clavier lessons) and two years later to the musical staff of the Esterházy family ameliorated his situation and greatly expanded the possibilities for his keyboard activities. He participated almost daily in chamber or solo performances at the Esterházy palaces, occasionally acted as soloist in concertos, and served as keyboardist for vocal concerts and such special occasions as the visit of Empress Maria Theresa in 1773. After he was appointed director of the Esterházy musical establishment in 1766, he also participated as organist in many sacred and ceremonial events. With the completion of the family’s opera house in 1776, Haydn’s chief function as a keyboardist was as continuo player and conductor from the keyboard, a function he also fulfilled in the performances of his symphonies. Even as late as his London visits in
this page: Joseph Haydn, portrait ca. 1785. Christian Ludwig Seehas (1753–1802) | opposite page: View of the gardens at Schloss Esterházy in Eisenstadt, Austria, 1807—where Haydn was employed as kapellmeister—by Albert Christoph Dies (1755–1822), who also was an early biographer of the composer
1791 and 1794, Haydn still “presided at the pianoforte” for the presentations of his rapturously received symphonies, according to the eminent eighteenth-century British music scholar Charles Burney. Haydn largely gave up playing during the years of retirement that followed his English tours, but he derived pleasure from having guests perform for him. He sold his harpsichord in 1808, a year before he died, but kept a clavichord, the species of keyboard instrument on which he had learned to play as a child, and he regularly entertained himself with Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser, the Austrian anthem he had written and included in his Quartet in C major, op. 76, no. 3 (Emperor), until just five days before his death.
From his earliest clavichord divertimentos to his last set of three piano sonatas written in London, Haydn composed more than sixty solo keyboard sonatas, mostly for students, friends, and amateurs, though some were intended for performing virtuosos. The set of six sonatas published in Vienna in 1776 (H. XVI:27–32) appeared at the time that Haydn’s fame was spreading throughout Europe and were meant to satisfy the demand among musical amateurs for his works. They were also among the first of his keyboard compositions with dynamic markings, an indication that they were written for
the increasingly popular fortepiano rather than for the waning harpsichord, which could play at only one dynamic level. These sonatas are all in three movements, crisply constructed in their forms, without extreme demands of technique, and pleasing in content. The B minor sonata (H. XVI:32) is imbued with the heightened, proto-romantic expression of the Empfindsamer Stil (Sentimental Style) that Haydn had learned from his study of the keyboard works of C.P.E. Bach. The opening sonata-form movement is built from a main theme that balances a stark marching motif with a wistful strain and a bustling subsidiary section in a brighter key. The lean, dignified menuet (in B major) is contrasted in mode and nature by the movement’s restless central trio (B minor). The finale moves with a compressed rhythmic power whose aggressiveness looks forward to the music of Haydn’s obstreperous future pupil, Ludwig van Beethoven.
CHOPIN
Born February 22, 1810; Żelazowa-Wola, Poland
Died October 17, 1849; Paris, France
Sonata No. 2 in B-flat Minor, Op. 35
COMPOSED 1837–39
Early in 1837, Chopin fell victim to the influenza epidemic sweeping Paris. He spent several miserable weeks in bed with a high fever and a bloody cough, and his spirits were further dampened by a letter from Countess Teresa Wodzińska, on whose daughter Maria he had long had marital designs. The countess hinted that the family might meet Chopin in Germany that summer, but the plans were left frustratingly tentative. Chopin was further unsettled that spring by insistent pleas from George Sand, whom he had first met at a party given by Franz Liszt a few months before, to visit her at her country house at Nohant. He agreed, then reneged, and finally decided to accompany the pianist, publisher, and sometime composer Camille Pleyel on a business trip to London. Chopin enjoyed taking in the sites around southern England, and he created a sensation at a reception sponsored by the piano maker Broadwood but found England gloomy and a bit too
well-ordered for his taste. By July, he was back in Paris, where he received a letter from Countess Wodzińska confirming that she and Maria would not be seeing him that year; his hopes of marrying the girl vanished. Emotionally emptied by this turn of events but not yet ready to let George Sand into his life, Chopin found solace in composing, and in November, he wrote a stark marche funèbre (funeral march) that may have embodied not just his shattered marriage hopes but also his continuing distress over the failed uprising against occupying imperial Russia that had erupted in Warsaw seven years before. Two years later, the funeral march served as the catalyst, third movement, and expressive heart of the B-flat minor sonata. The sonata’s four movements circumscribe an enormous variety of moods and techniques. Polish musicologist Józef Chomiński concluded that Chopin’s intent in the sonata was less to create a tightly knit nineteent-century realization of the classical form than to have it serve as a synthesis-in-four-movements of his earlier achievements as a keyboard composer: the opening movement, after a tiny introductory gesture, fills its sonata
this page: Chopin, watercolor and ink drawing by fiancée Maria Wodzińska (1819–1896), 1836. National Museum, Warsaw, Poland | opposite page: Nikolai Kapustin, photo by Peter Anderson, Schott-Music
form with a main theme built from a leaping motif and a grand subsidiary melody that would not have been out of place in a ballade; the scherzo, related in its periodic structure to Chopin’s dance pieces and in its style and structure to his scherzos, uses as its central portion a dreamy song in the manner of a nocturne; the funeral march, indebted in
NIKOLAI KAPUSTIN
mood and technique to the slow movement of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, also enfolds a delicate nocturne-like cantilena in its central section; and the finale, written entirely in octaves with not a single chordal harmony until the very last measure, resembles the etudes and preludes in its epigrammatic brevity and uncontrasted motific material.
Born November 22, 1937; Gorlovka, Donetsk Province, Ukraine Died July 2, 2020; Moscow, Russia
Variations, Op. 41
COMPOSED 1984
The fusion of jazz and classical styles that was seeded in 1924 by Gershwin’s epochal Rhapsody in Blue is usually thought to be a Western phenomenon, but Russian composer and pianist Nikolai Kapustin proved that such a cross-genre musical view has had a far wider influence. Kapustin began playing piano at age seven and composing at thirteen. He attended the Moscow Conservatory as a piano student of the eminent Alexander Goldenweiser, who grounded him thoroughly in the Russian classical traditions. Kapustin studied jazz along with the classics while in school, and he made his formal debut in 1957 at the Sixth International Festival of Youth
and Students in Moscow, playing his own Concertino, op. 1, which he called “a very jazzy piece.” For the next three decades, he performed, toured, and recorded with several leading Russian big bands and light-music orchestras as well as with his own quintet while composing in a manner that he described as “a fusion between classical forms and a jazzy idiom.”
After the mid-1980s, when he gave up playing in public, Kapustin lived modestly in a Moscow flat, composed steadily, traveled little but frequently, and recorded his own music. His works—fifteen piano sonatas; concertos for piano, trumpet, saxophone, double bass, cello, and violin; orchestra and big band pieces; chamber music; and many compositions for solo piano—were almost unknown outside Russia until British pianist Steven Osborne released a recording of the first two sonatas and
several preludes from Preludes in Jazz Style in 2000; Marc-André Hamelin’s 2004 CD was the first of an increasing number of subsequent recordings now available in the West, several of them by Kapustin himself. Eckart Runge, cellist of Germany’s Artemis String Quartet, which performed Kapustin’s 1989 String Quartet internationally, noted that the composer wrote in an “alluring, somewhat disturbing, and uniquely genuine musical language: a complex, virtuosic blend of rhythmic and harmonic elements of jazz, blues, soul, rock, and popular music with an almost contradictory conservatism in the choice of classical forms, suffused with
JEAN-PHILIPPE RAMEAU
Baptized September 25, 1683; Dijon, France
Died September 12, 1764; Paris, France
expression ranging from lighthearted to biting humor as well as a deep, dark Russian ambience.”
The Variations of 1984 is a distillation of Kapustin’s creative style encompassing a virtual catalog of jazz influences and artists—swing, bebop, boogie-woogie, jazz waltz, blues, ballad, Ellington, Basie, Art Tatum, Erroll Garner. It is, however, also a rigorous example of the ancient variations form, this one based on a thirty-two bar theme in D-flat major with six variations, which is notated to the last detail but has a remarkable improvisatory feel that requires from the pianist both virtuosity and stylistic sensibility.
Selections from Pièces de clavecin and Nouvelles suites de pièces de clavecin
Though Jean-Philippe Rameau, France’s leading musical figure of the mid-eighteenth century, was chiefly famed for his contributions to the operatic theater and to musical theory, he also published collections of harpsichord works in 1706 (Premier livre de pièces de clavecin), 1724 (Pièces de clavecin), 1728 (Nouvelles suites de pièces de
clavecin), and 1741 (Cinq pièces extraites de pièces de clavecin). These anthologies included the two principal harpsichord types of the day: dances and so-called genre pieces, which bore titles connoting some extra-musical association.
Rameau borrowed Les tendres plaintes (The Tender Sighs), a rondeau structured around the returns of the suave refrain theme given at the outset, for his opera Zoroastre of 1745, where he used it to portray a character he described as being “overcome with grief.”
Les cyclopes (1724) refers not to the fearsome Polyphemus, the one-eyed monster who trapped Odysseus and his men in a cave and had a few of them for dinner, but to the earlier metal-working giants who forged thunderbolts for Zeus in Vulcan’s fiery domain, thought by the ancients to lie beneath Sicily’s volcanic Mount Etna. Vulcan and the Cyclopes provided spectacular scenic possibilities onstage, and they appeared in Lully’s operas Psyché (1678) and Persée (1682) and other French and Italian operas of the time. Rameau himself included a forging scene for Vulcan and the Cyclops in his opera-ballet Les surprises de l’amour (1757) in which these mythological personages sang the words: Let flames surround us. Strike, forge new shafts; let this cave resound with a hundred repeated blows
The paired menuets in the Nouvelles suites, one in G major, one in G minor, are examples of the dance type that had been a favorite of the French aristocracy since it first gained popularity at the court of Louis XIV in the 1660s.
In 1725 the regions far beyond the American east coast were occupied by
European immigrants, and tensions were developing, especially between the British and the French. Many of the French settled in “Illinois Country,” a vast area in the upper Mississippi watershed controlled by the French province of Louisiana in which the immigrants had long traded with the Indian tribes. To strengthen ties with their homeland, the French settlers sent six Indian chiefs to Paris in 1725 and devised with them an exotic entertainment they presented at the Théâtre-Italien. Rameau saw the show on September 10 and was inspired to write Les sauvages (The Savages) for his Nouvelles suites. In 1735 he expanded the piece and scored it for instruments to include in his opera-ballet Les Indes galantes.
La poule (The Hen, 1728) is one of the most famous musical vignettes of the eighteenth century.
Rameau’s Gavotte (Nouvelles suites), a dance of moderate liveliness whose ancestry traces to French peasant music, includes increasingly flamboyant “doubles” or variations.
opposite page: Jean-Philippe Rameau, portrait in oil, attributed to Jacques-André-Joseph Aved (1702–1766), ca. 1728. Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon, France
SERGEI PROKOFIEV
Born April 23, 1891; Sontzovka, Russia
Died March 5, 1953; Moscow, Russia
Sonata No. 7 in B-flat Major, Op. 83
COMPOSED 1939–41
Prokofiev returned to Russia from his years in the West in 1933, and by 1939, when the Seventh Sonata was conceived, he had become the leading composer of his country with works written in what he called “a style in which one could speak of Soviet life.” Lieutenant Kijé, Peter and the Wolf, and Romeo and Juliet are among the bestknown realizations of this populist art. Many of Prokofiev’s efforts during the early years of World War II continued in the same vein, including the piano sonatas nos. 6, 7, and 8, all begun in 1939, but completed, respectively, in 1941, 1942, and 1944; inevitably, they were dubbed the War Sonatas. These three works were his first contributions to the piano sonata genre in sixteen years, and the revitalization of his interest in the form may well have been inspired by his recently conceived love affair with Mira Abramovna Mendelson. Prokofiev first met Mira during the summer of 1939 while vacationing alone at Kislovodsk in the Caucasus. She was twenty-four
at the time, just completing her student work at the Moscow Institute of Literature, and he was exactly twice her age. They first worked together on fashioning an opera libretto from Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s comedy The Duenna, but something in addition to shared literary interests further drew them together, and during the following months they became more than just friends. Prokofiev, stealing time from his wife, Lina, and his two sons, sought out situations to meet Mira, and by the spring of 1940, he had fallen in love with her. A family friend of the Prokofievs reported at that time seeing the composer walking with a young woman she did not recognize. What surprised her more than the woman’s presence, however, was the unfamiliar expression on Prokofiev’s face—happy and relaxed and lighthearted. “He had always been rather grim and serious,” she said, “but after meeting Mira, he became more affectionate and friendly. The change in him was very noticeable.” By 1941 Prokofiev had left Lina and was living with Mira, who proved to be a devoted and caring companion until the composer died twelve years later. Lina, a French national, became caught up in
this page: Sergei Prokofiev, in a portrait by Pyotr Konchalovsky (1876–1956), 1934 | opposite page: Prokofiev and Mira, 1946
Stalin’s terrible political machine, and was arrested on trumped-up charges of espionage in 1948. (A year before, the Supreme Soviet issued a retroactive decree forbidding Soviet citizens to marry foreign nationals, thus suddenly annulling the Prokofievs’ marriage. Mira and Sergei formalized their relationship with a civil ceremony on January 13, 1948.)
Lina was released, and returned to the West in 1972, always claiming to be the composer’s only legitimate wife. It was at the beginning of his new life with Mira that Prokofiev conceived his sonatas nos. 6, 7, and 8.
The Seventh Sonata was finished in May 1942 in Tbilisi, where Prokofiev was evacuated after the Germans had invaded Russia the preceding June. Sviatoslav Richter premiered the work in Moscow on January 18, 1943; two months later, Prokofiev received the Stalin Prize for the score. The sonata’s three movements, arranged in the classical succession of fast–slow–fast, progress from the anxious, unsettled Allegro inquieto, through the lyrical slow movement (to be played “with warmth,” according to the score), to the hammering motorism and emphatic B-flat tonality of the finale.
The opening movement juxtaposes two broad musical paragraphs: one, approximating a main theme, is given in pounding rhythms immediately at the outset; the other, a contrasting melody in slower tempo, springs from a motif reminiscent of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Once more, with developmental elaborations, these sections alternate, and the movement closes with a final return of the main theme to produce a five-part, symmetrical structure: A–B–A–B–A. The second movement follows a musical arch form, beginning and ending with a theme of surprising banality that utilizes some ripe, barbershop harmonies, while the middle portion rises to true passion. The finale, marked precipitato, has been called, because of its vigorous and incessant rhythmic nature, a toccata, the modern scion of the perpetual-motion pieces of the baroque that were designed to show off the keyboardist’s digital dexterity. Prokofiev couches the old, virtuoso form in his characteristic harmonic acerbity and percussive pianism to create one of the most invigorating keyboard pieces of the twentieth century.
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.
First-prize winner of the 2021 Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw, Bruce Liu has secured his reputation as one of the most exciting talents of his generation.
Highlights of his 2023–24 season include international tours with the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich and Paavo Järvi, Philharmonia Orchestra and Santtu-Matias Rouvali, and the Warsaw Philharmonic and Andrey Boreyko, as well as the Münchener Kammerorchester in a play-direct program. Furthermore, he makes anticipated debuts with the New York Philharmonic, Finnish Radio Symphony, Danish National Symphony, Gothenburg Symphony, and Singapore Symphony Orchestra. He works regularly with many of today’s most distinguished conductors, such as Gustavo Gimeno, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Gianandrea Noseda, Rafael Payare, Vasily Petrenko, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Lahav Shani, and Dalia Stasevska.
Bruce Liu has performed globally with major orchestras, including the Wiener Symphoniker, Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Rotterdam Philharmonic, Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, and NHK Symphony Orchestra.
As an active recitalist, he appears at major concert halls such as the Carnegie Hall, Wiener Konzerthaus, BOZAR Brussels, and Tokyo Opera City, and this season makes his solo recital debuts at the Concertgebouw Amsterdam, Philharmonie de Paris, Wigmore Hall London, Alte Oper Frankfurt, Kölner Philharmonie, and Chicago Symphony Center.
Having been a regular guest at the Rheingau Musik Festival since 2022, Liu will return in summer 2024 to feature in a series of wide-ranging events. In recent years, he has appeared at La Roque-d’Anthéron, Verbier, KlavierFestival Ruhr, Edinburgh International, Gstaad Menuhin, and Tanglewood Music festivals.
Liu is an exclusive recording artist with Deutsche Grammophon, and his highly anticipated debut studio album, Waves, spanning two centuries of French keyboard music, was released in November 2023. His first album, featuring the winning performances from the Chopin International Piano Competition, received international acclaim, including the Critics’ Choice, Editor’s Choice, and Best Classical Albums of 2021 from Gramophone magazine.
Bruce Liu studied with Richard Raymond and Dang Thai Son. He was born in Paris to Chinese parents and brought up in Montréal, and his phenomenal artistry has been shaped by his multicultural heritage: European refinement, North American dynamism, and the long tradition of Chinese culture.
PHOTO BY CHRISTOPH KOESTLIN
