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CLIBURN AT THE KIMBELL: VIRTUOSOS
KENNY BROBERG 2017 SILVER MEDALIST I PIANO NOVEMBER 8, 2018 I 7:30 PM KIMBELL ART MUSEUM RENZO PIANO PAVILION PERFORMANCE SPONSORED BY PERFORMANCE SPONSORED BY
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The Board of Directors of the Cliburn salutes with gratitude the generosity of
Meadows Foundation* Black Mountain Oil and Gas Marty Leonard
for supporting this performance of
KENNY BROBERG
*Made possible by a generous gift to the Cliburn Endowment.
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CLIBURN AT THE KIMBELL: VIRTUOSOS Kimbell Art Museum Renzo Piano Pavilion Thursday, November 8, 2018 7:30 pm
KENNY BROBERG 2017 SILVER MEDALIST PIANO
César Franck - Harold Bauer
Prélude, Fugue et Variation, op. 18
Nikolai Medtner
Sonata in E Minor, op. 25, no. 2, (“Night Wind”)
Introduzione: Andante – Allegro Allegro molto sfrenatamente Intermission
Claude Debussy
Children’s Corner Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum Jimbo’s Lullaby Serenade for the Doll The Snow is Dancing The Little Shepherd Golliwogg’s Cakewalk
Marc-André Hamelin
Toccata on “L’homme armé”
George Gershwin
Three Preludes
Steinway & Sons is the official piano of the Cliburn. This concert is being recorded. Please silence all electronic devices.
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KENNY BROBERG
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PIANO
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A native of Minneapolis, pianist Kenny Broberg won the silver medal at the 2017 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition with performances marked by “an imaginative shaping of themes, revelation of inner voices, and an unfailing sense of momentum” (Texas Classical Review ). He continues to build a reputation for fresh interpretations, distinguished by a “bright, pearly tone quality” and “a clean, pellucid beauty” in his sound (Star Tribune ). Also a prizewinner of the Hastings, Sydney, Seattle, and New Orleans International Piano Competitions, Kenny has previously performed as soloist with the Royal Philharmonic, Minnesota, Sydney Symphony, Seattle Symphony, Dallas Chamber, Fort Worth Symphony, and the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestras, among others, working with conductors Ludovic Morlot, Leonard Slatkin, Nicholas Milton, Nicholas McGegan, Carlos Miguel Prieto, and Stilian Kirov. During the 2017–2018 season, he made his subscription concert debut with the Minnesota Orchestra—stepping in for André Watts days before the performance—which was declared “a highly auspicious debut, marked by poise [and] technical brilliance” (Star Tribune ). Other recent highlights include residencies at the Methow Chamber, Strings, and Sunriver Music Festivals, and recitals in Houston, Denver, and Minneapolis, and in Italy and the United Kingdom. In the 2018–2019 season, Kenny performs at the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal’s Festival Virée Classique and makes his return to London with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Recital and orchestra engagements take him to Minneapolis, Kansas City, Madison, Montreal, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and other cities across North America, and he makes his debut performances in Asia, with appearances in Shanghai and across Japan. He has been featured on NPR, WQXR, APM’s Performance Today, MPR, and ABC (Australia) radio, and several of his performances at the 2016 Sydney International Piano Competition were included on CDs released on the Universal Music Australia label. His solo debut album was released digitally in August 2017 on the Decca Gold label, featuring one of his signature works, the Barber Piano Sonata, as well as works by Bach, Schubert, Chopin, and Franck. The first musician in his family, Kenny started piano lessons at age 6, when he was first fascinated by his mother’s upright—a wedding gift from her parents. He studied for nine years with Dr. Joseph Zins before entering the University of Houston’s Moores School of Music, where he earned a Bachelor of Music degree with Nancy Weems in 2016. He currently resides in Parkville, Missouri, under the guidance of 2001 Cliburn Gold Medalist Stanislav Ioudenitch at Park University. Alongside his teachers, he is influenced by the recordings of Alfred Cortot, William Kapell, and Claudio Arrau. A hockey and baseball athlete in high school, he still enjoys watching and playing sports, in addition to listening to jazz and reading.
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PROGRAM NOTES
BY KRISTIAN LIN
Prélude, Fugue, et Variation, op. 18 César Franck b. December 10, 1822, Liège, Belgium d. November 8, 1890, Paris, France arranged by Harold Bauer (1873–1951) Franck originally wrote this piece for the organ, specifically the new one that was made for the newly consecrated church of Sainte-Clotilde in 1859, where he had just been appointed the titulaire, or tenured organist. In this and other organ works, you can readily hear his devotion to Bach, whose music he often played at services. This music has Bach’s structural rigor and high seriousness tempered by religious humility. However, Franck’s delicacy and attention to tone and color are irreducibly French, and his harmonies are unmistakably 19th-century. This transcription for piano is by the English pianist Harold Bauer, whose work is skillful enough to fool you into thinking that it was written for that instrument instead of the organ. The piano may lack the organ’s sonority and power, but its crystalline sound can lend this piece a piercing quality in the proper hands. The plaintive prelude is followed by a sparse fugue and then concludes with a variation reminiscent of the Baroque masters.
Composed in 1862 for organ; arranged for piano in 1910. Approximately 10 minutes
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PROGRAM NOTES
BY KRISTIAN LIN (CONTINUED)
Sonata in E Minor, op. 25, no. 2, (“Night Wind”) Nikolai Medtner b. January 5, 1880, Moscow, Russia d. November 13, 1951, London, United Kingdom Why moan, why wail you, wind of night With such despair, such frenzied madness? Why is your voice now full of might Now piteous and tinged with sadness?
So goes one English translation of Fyodor Tyutchev’s 1834 poem Silentium, which Nikolai Medtner used as an epigraph when he composed his piano sonata in 1910. Medtner intended this massive work (divided into two movements instead of the traditional three) to express Tyutchev’s sublime terror in the face of a hostile, chaotic universe. Sublime terror is a reasonable reaction to this sonata, whose opening movement is predominantly written in a 15/8 time signature, a rhythm that would make a math-rock drummer cringe. Read the score and you’ll see measure after measure where Medtner squeezes 30 sixteenth notes into a single bar. It’s ridiculous, terrifying (for the pianist), and also kind of awesome. This sonata seems out of breath even at its most relaxed, yet it pushes on. There is no let-up in the second movement, which is marked “Allegro molto sfrenatamente” (“fast, very riotously”). While this movement is written in more conventional rhythms, Medtner still tosses ideas at us willy-nilly: repeated notes, hammered chords, pages littered with grace notes, melodies snaking between left and right hands. The challenges for any interpreter are steep, and simply playing through the work without the aid of a score represents a prodigious feat of memorization. More than a century after the “Night Wind” Sonata was composed, it’s still controversial. Some listeners hear an audacious masterwork with the scale and complexity of Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” Sonata or Busoni’s Fantasia contrappuntistica, while others hear an overlong, bombastic piece that sounds like the climaxes of 20 different piano sonatas smashed together. What’s certain is that in this sonata, Medtner took Russian romanticism beyond his contemporaries like Scriabin and Rachmaninov, to a place where it couldn’t go any further. Possibly that wasn’t for the best, but it is a perversely fascinating musical experience.
Composed 1910–1911. Approximately 34 minutes.
INTERMISSION
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PROGRAM NOTES
BY KRISTIAN LIN
(CONTINUED)
Children’s Corner
Claude Debussy b. August 22, 1862, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France d. March 25, 1918, Paris, France Just as professional success came late to Debussy, so too did fatherhood. After a failed marriage and several tempestuous affairs, he stole away a banker’s wife named Emma Bardac in 1903, and the resulting scandal forced the couple into hiding in England. A few years later, Debussy and his new wife returned to France with their only child Claude-Emma (or “Chou-Chou”), a toddler with an English nanny. The composer then wrote this piano suite, inspired by his own love of things English, as well as his daughter’s play with her stuffed toys, all of whom had English names—just like this suite and the items in it. This work is more about children than for them, since the technical difficulty is considerable in places. Among those is “Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum,” a parody of Muzio Clementi’s book of technical exercises, in which the pianist rushes through arpeggios before seeming to get bored and distracted. “Jimbo’s Lullaby” is inspired by a stuffed elephant (though some think it’s about Jumbo, the real-life animal who lived briefly at the Paris Zoo before being sold off to P.T. Barnum’s circus), while “Serenade for the Doll” evokes the sound of faraway wind chimes, with the pianist instructed to hold down the soft pedal for its entire duration. “The Snow Is Dancing” depicts the gentle fall of snow on a dark winter’s day, with the children trapped inside the house, and “The Little Shepherd” imitates the flute played by a boy as he tends to his flock. The last and best-known number, “Golliwogg’s Cakewalk,” draws from the syncopated rhythms of American ragtime music, taking its name from a doll that was popular in Paris that depicted black girls. (These caricatured dolls would not be acceptable today.) Debussy treated women appallingly throughout his life, but he was devoted to his Chou-Chou, and his love for her inspired him to create this whimsical and funny work.
Composed in 1906–1908. Approximately 14 minutes.
Toccata on “L’homme armé” Marc-André Hamelin b. September 5, 1961, Montreal, Canada If you attended last year’s Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, this piece will likely be stuck in your head, as this work—written for the 2017 contest—was performed by all 30 contestants. The basis for the piece is a French medieval secular song that also formed the basis of many Latin Masses by composers such as Josquin and Palestrina. The Canadian pianist-composer Marc-André Hamelin, known for not fearing any technical hurdle he encounters, takes the song and makes it into this madcap showpiece with arpeggios whirling around the main subject.
Commissioned for the Fifteenth Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. Composed in 2016. Approximately 5 minutes.
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PROGRAM NOTES
BY KRISTIAN LIN
(CONTINUED)
Three Preludes George Gershwin b. September 26, 1898, New York, NY d. July 11, 1937, Los Angeles, CA While Gershwin’s preludes aren’t on the same level as his masterworks, they deserve to be much better-known than they are. These piano pieces were originally intended to be part of a set of 24 preludes (like the ones written by Chopin and Rachmaninov), but he eventually whittled that number down to the three that we have. The first prelude is in B-flat major, beginning with a sprightly blues motif that forms the basis for the rest of the piece. The infectious stomping rhythm in the bass pulls you in from its first appearance. By contrast, the second and longest prelude in C-sharp minor features a stately rhythm and a discursive melody that work together to create a softly enveloping sound, distinguished by Gershwin’s bluesy harmonies, which provide savory notes amid the perfumed atmosphere. Gershwin called the last prelude in E-flat minor a “Spanish” piece, which may well strike you as bizarre. The main subject is a scurrying melody over syncopated bass figures, and harmonies in the middle section’s alternating chords are redolent of Scriabin, weirdly enough. The composer premiered them at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City in 1926, and they’re accomplished enough to make you wonder about what might have happened in some alternate reality where Gershwin didn’t enjoy such enormous success as a songwriter and instead produced more piano pieces such as these.
Composed in 1926. Approximately 6 minutes.
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