George Li - March 31 & April 1

A bracing, fearless account… Mr. Li’s playing combined youthful ‘‘ abandon with utter command. – The New York Times ’’

GEORGE LI PIANO

Thursday, March 31, 2022 I 7:30 p.m. Kimbell Art Museum

SCHUMANN Arabeske in C Major, op. 18 SCHUMANN Fantasie in C Major, op. 17 Durchaus fantastisch und leidenschaftlich vorzutragen Mäßig. Durchaus energisch Langsam getragen. Durchweg leise zu halten

intermission

QIGANG CHEN Instants d’un opéra de Pékin LISZT Sonata in B Minor

Friday, April 1, 2022 I 8:00 p.m. The Post at River East

Selections to be announced from the stage.

GEORGE LI piano

Praised by The Washington Post for combining “staggering technical prowess, a sense of command and depth of expression,” pianist George Li possesses an effortless grace, poised authority, and brilliant virtuosity far beyond his years. Since winning the silver medal at the 2015 International Tchaikovsky Competition, Li has rapidly established a major international reputation and performs regularly with some of the world’s leading orchestras and conductors.

Recent and upcoming concerto highlights include performances with the Los Angeles, New York, London, Rotterdam, Oslo, and St. Petersburg Philharmonics; the San Francisco, Tokyo, Frankfurt Radio, Sydney, and Montreal Symphonies; as well as the Philharmonia, DSO Berlin, and Orchestre National de Lyon. He frequently appears with Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra.

In recital, Li performs at venues including Carnegie Hall, Davies Hall in San Francisco, the Mariinsky Theatre, Elbphilharmonie, Munich’s Gasteig, the Louvre, Seoul Arts Center, Tokyo’s Asahi Hall and Musashino Hall, NCPA Beijing, Shanghai Poly Theater, and Amici della Musica Firenze, as well as appearances at major festivals including the Edinburgh International Festival, Verbier Festival, Ravinia Festival, Festival de Pâques in Aix-en-Provence Festival, and Montreux Festival.

Li is an exclusive Warner Classics recording artist, with his debut recital album released in October 2017, which was recorded live from the Mariinsky. His second recording for the label features Liszt solo works and Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1, which was recorded live with Vasily Petrenko and the London Philharmonic, and was released in October 2019.

Could there be two more different musical giants than Robert Schumann and Franz Liszt? Yet their works, united in this program, invite us to revel in the full breadth of Romanticism as expressed through the piano.

Arabeske in C Major, op. 18

Robert Schumann (1810–1856)

From his earliest pieces, Robert Schumann chose to create small musical portraits— compositions called “character pieces.” Among these, his Arabeske (1839) remains a favorite of pianists and audiences.

In this period of his life, Schumann was focused on painting specific scenes through the piano’s sound, as evidenced by two masterful cycles (Carnaval and Kreisleriana) that preceded his publication of Arabeske. The term itself is borrowed from the 16th-century French word for “Moorish or Arabic ornamental design.” It became the name for a primary pose in ballet in the 1830s, just as the vocabulary of en pointe dancing developed.

Applied to music, arabesque usually implies a graceful piece, often decorated with figuration and pleasant to the ear. Here, though, Schumann’s penchant for hesitations in the tempo and expressions of longing through repetition of passages and elastic cadences add depth to the work.

Fantasie in C Major, op. 17

Robert Schumann (1810–1856)

Any piece labeled a “fantasy” invites us to follow a journey through a free flow of ideas. Fantasies became popular in the Renaissance, especially for keyboard and lute. Later, when composers of Bach’s generation wrote a fantasy, formal conventions shaped the piece, but its improvisational nature nonetheless flourished, as did its technical demands. Still, 19th-century composers needed to take the keyboard fantasy, extend and elevate it, in order to create a major form.

Schumann’s Fantasie, op. 17 is a demanding piece that requires its virtuosity to be subsumed into the narrative. In performance, the pianist becomes a poet reciting epic lines shaped by flashes of emotion, calls to action, and moments of tenderness. Schumann wrote the first movement in 1836 under the title “Ruines” in response to his frustration at being separated from Clara Wieck, the brilliantly talented young pianist whom he hoped to marry. He then added two more movements, one called “Triumphal Arch” with the idea of raising money for a monument to Beethoven in that composer’s birth city of Bonn, and a third movement entitled “Constellation.”

All titles were removed, though, when the work was published in 1839. Schumann dedicated his fantasy to Franz Liszt, an honor that pleased the Hungarian virtuoso.

Instants d’un opéra de Pékin

Qigang Chen (b. 1951)

This program allows us an opportunity to hear a ravishingly beautiful piece by the much-heralded composer Qigang Chen. Chen, born in Shanghai in 1951, has made his home in France since 1984, but his story is far more complicated. Chen survived the violence and hardships of the Cultural Revolution that began in 1966. His mother and his father, Head of the Academy of Art in Peking, were interned in a concentration camp when he was a young teenager. Later he too would be sent to such a camp along with fellow students of his music academy. When the political culture shifted, Chen was allowed to study again and, in fact, prevailed in a grueling competition that opened the chance to study in Paris.

There he had the extraordinary good fortune not only to study with Oliver Messiaen, but to be intensely mentored by Messiaen as the master’s only, and final, student. This mentorship included living under Messiaen’s roof for more than four years. Messiaen helped soothe the psychological damage done by the ideological and physical punishments Chen had endured in China and guided the young composer in unleashing his enormous creativity.

Chen quickly evolved as one of the most celebrated and frequently performed composers of our time. He has been decorated with accolades from both France and China, including serving as music director for the 2008 Beijing Olympics (writing music for the opening ceremonies). His compositions incorporate the forms and musical vocabulary of both East and West. Many of his symphonic works, concerti, and songs employ standard classical forms and forces, while others—often with French titles—are cast in ancient Chinese tonalities and modalities shaped by the delicious sounds of honored Chinese instruments like the erhu, pipa, and banhu.

This episodic work, written in 2000, conveys the color and action of the 200-year old institution known as the Peking Opera. A performance art strictly regulated by traditional conventions and performed through singing, reciting, acting, acrobatics, and martial arts, the Peking Opera exists throughout China, although principally in Beijing (Peking), Tainji, and Shanghai. In this gorgeous work, Chan seeks to represent the energy and color of the Peking Opera. Thus, the piece utilizes a myriad of musical effects including the whole-tone and pentatonic scales, angular passages created by octave displacement, cascades of sound sweeping over

pedal points, harmonic clusters running throughout the gamut of the piano, and many parallel intervals. Chen incorporates jazzy elements too. Not surprising for a contemporary work, particularly one penned by a student of Messiaen, Instants d’un opéra de Pékin is metrically complex, yet always aurally clear. Finally, the listener may be surprised by the way Chen brings this robust work to its conclusion.

Sonata in B Minor Franz Liszt (1811–1886)

By the 1840s, Liszt had wearied of his exhausting life as a concert pianist, traveling extreme distances across Europe and beyond (including Moscow and Constantinople). Always on the road and dedicated to supporting his three children by Princess Marie d’Agoult in Paris, he felt unable to follow his creative impulses.

Inside Liszt’s mind a new vision was unfolding. He had become fascinated by the possibilities of an orchestral work structured as a narrative to convey a specific subject or story. Called a symphonic poem (tone poem), this concept was in its nascent stages and struck 19th-century ears as more radical than our ears (conditioned by film scores) can perceive. Partly, the tone poem threatened to push classical form off the table. In addition, the tone poem seemed excessively driven by emotion, rather than learned skill.

But Liszt had a burning desire to express himself by composing intense, expressive orchestral music. In a radical turn decried by many, he decided to abandon the stage, take a position as Kapellmeister in the modest but cultured court at Weimar, and devote himself to composition. Here his creative frenzy produced a series of innovative tone poems that caused Weimar’s orchestral musicians to balk.

The Sonata in B Minor originates from this same impulse. Cast in four movements played in a continuous flow, the sonata has a structure that parodies standard sonata-allegro form. Yet its movements are separate, expanded, and knitted together through a set of themes (motives) that undergo continuous alteration in a process called thematic transformation.

This concept was not new, pioneered by Beethoven and used masterfully by Franz Schubert in his Wanderer’s Fantasy. But the sheer expanse of Liszt’s Sonata pushed thematic transformation to a deeper level. The opening figuration alone—a descending line played sotto voce (in a whispered manner)—sparked many subsequent ideas, as did the contrasting marcato passage that follows it. The sonata’s most sumptuous theme in D major appears early and generates many of

the work’s triumphant passages. The Sonata also contains an unexpected, difficult fugue integrated in a manner reminiscent of the composer Liszt most admired: Ludwig van Beethoven.

For the pianist, the Liszt Sonata presents a huge mountain to climb. Studying it, not to mention performing it, can be the work of a lifetime. Following the overall difficult years in Weimar, Liszt moved to an entirely new life in Rome and an even more serious stage of composition. There he composed shimmeringly beautiful sacred music, shades of which, atmospherically, are already present in passages of the B-Minor Sonata.

Scholars and critics still pour over the possible meanings of this sonata: is it a portrait of characters in Goethe’s Faust, German literature’s masterpiece that Liszt developed into a huge tone poem? Is it a retelling of Milton’s Paradise Lost or the Fall of Man in Garden of Eden? Could it be autobiographical? Or might it simply present new melodic, harmonic, and coloristic possibilities, enriched by the legendary pianistic virtuosity of its composer?

The work was dedicated to Robert Schumann in a reciprocal move to honor Schumann’s dedication of his Fantasy to Liszt. Alas, by the time a copy of the score reached Leipzig, Schumann was incapacitated and living in an institution. In one of music history’s great ironies, Clara Wieck Schumann, a masterful pianist who safeguarded her husband’s legacy, famously found Liszt’s B-Minor Sonata to be “blind noise” and, in fact, “awful.” Clara’s instincts generally were impeccable, but any blindness here was entirely hers.

©Dr. Carol Reynolds www.professorcarol.com