20250301_Armstrong by Florida State University College of Music

A Liminal Space: Piano Music by Women

The interbellum Twentieth century offers one of the most fascinating ecosystems of piano music, yet it is dominated by works like the sonatas of Berg and Scriabin, the préludes of Debussy, the character pieces of Prokofiev and Barber—all established repertoire, played and heard every season. This lecture-recital is an act of advocacy, positing an “alternative” cross-section of repertoire – rarely-heard “outcast” works written by women between the two World Wars – as worthy contributions to a more equitable, inclusive piano literature. Varvara Gaigerova’s incandescent Piano Sonata and Four Sketches are breathtaking, emotional testaments to an artist who is totally unknown (and whose bravery has also gone unrecognized and uncelebrated as one of those subversive individuals “rehabilitated” by the Soviet regime). Ilse Fromm-Michaels’s Sonate für Klavier is her masterpiece for the instrument, and arguably one of the greatest works of its kind to come out of Europe in the first half of the Twentieth century. Like the Four Sketches, it was written under duress in a time of war, and by someone who was later persecuted by the Social Democratic Party of Germany because of her Jewish husband.

Jean Coulthard is one of Canada’s greatest composers; her cycle of thirteen Preludes spans her career, but many come from that ecosystem of WW1/WW2-era music, and are fascinating, important works, as is the cycle of piano preludes by Henriëtte Bosmans. As a queer Dutch-Jewish female composer during the Second World War, she experienced a brutal “unperson-ing” during her artistic activities then, and deserves much wider recognition now.

These women’s lives were filled with tragedy and hardship; yet, in some of the most fraught circumstances imaginable, they created expressively lucid, overwhelmingly beautiful piano music. The works presented here take only small steps into the cartography of the landscapes of their music, neglected for far too long.

PROGRAM

Prélude No. 1, Moderato assai (1917) Henriëtte Bosmans (1895–1952)

Prelude No. 5, Dirge (1939) Jean Coulthard (1908–2000)

Prélude No. 2, Lento assai (1917) Henriëtte Bosmans

Prelude No. 8, Song (1939) Jean Coulthard

Four Sketches (1926) Varvara Gaigerova

I. Andante sostenuto (1903–1944)

II. Agitato

III. Lento

IV. Appassionato

Piano Sonata in E minor, Op. 1 (1925) Varvara Gaigerova — Pause —

Piano Sonata, Op. 6 (1918) Ilse Fromm-Michaels

I. Markig (1888–1986)

II. Sehr langsam. Frei im Zeitmaß

III. Lebhaft, aber nicht schnell

Nocturne (1926) Katherine Parker (1886–1971)

To Ensure An Enjoyable Concert Experience For All…

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Bosmans: Prélude No. 1; Prelude No. 2

Coulthard: Prelude No. 5; Prelude No. 8

The cycle of piano preludes by Dutch composer Henriëtte Bosmans is one of her first compositions. An accomplished concert pianist, she is known to have performed this work at a solo recital in 1918 alongside other enormous, virtuoso works (by Reger, Franck, and others) to great acclaim. Her biographer Helen Metzelaar notes that “the title ‘prelude’ brings to mind Chopin and this composer is certainly a source of inspiration for her”; it may be possible for some listeners to detect the chromaticism of Chopin’s A minor prelude in Bosmans’ No. 1, or the granitic chordal writing of Chopin’s C minor in Bosmans’ No. 2; yet, Bosmans’ pieces remain distinctive and pianistically-ingenious, deserving of far more attention than they have received.

Across the Atlantic Ocean, Canadian composer Jean Coulthard had her eyes “set on the stars,” despite being, from her early years, preoccupied with supporting her family due to the death of both her parents in succession; her biographer David Gordon Duke notes “it was no small thing that a young woman, working in a distant and small city in the Canadian West, should think she was destined to a life of musical creation—even though there wasn’t a single professional composer, male or female, in the city or province where she lived.” In her earliest compositions ventures she too drew inspiration from Romantic sources, and the preludes on this program are in a decidedly “NeoRomantic” vein, very closely related to those of Bosmans. Yet both these preludes bear the unmistakable touch of Coulthard, illustrating a “duality” she commented on throughout her career: that contrast of “sparkling lyricism and brooding introspection” (Duke). One finds brooding introspection in Dirge, while lyricism blossoms beautifully in Song.

Gaigerova: Four Sketches and Piano Sonata in E minor

Varvara Gaigerova is an all-but-forgotten name in the musical sphere, and particularly outside of Russia, where it is only in recent years that her music has begun to experience a re-introduction onto concert stages. As with other incandescent female artists—such as Lili Boulanger or Vítězslava Kaprálová—one senses that the musical ecosystem we have inherited might have been vibrantly, even astonishingly different, had Gaigerova not met her premature death (at the age of 40) in the aftermath of the starvation, forbidding cold, and desperate atmosphere of Moscow during Hitler’s siege warfare.

Throughout her life, Gaigerova was not unfamiliar with war—she began formal musical study at the Moscow Conservatory in 1914, only to leave in 1917 because of “difficult living situations during the (Russian Revolution)”— in the aftermath of this civil war, Gaigerova was caught in the scythe-like sweep of Soviet agricultural collectivization, and forcibly relocated to Kazakhstan for years. It may have been in part due to this experience that Gaigerova seems to have cemented a fascination with “the minority nationalities of the Soviet Union”; not only did she do the field

work of transcribing songs “from groups such as the Uzbek, Tatar, Bashkir, Buryat, Kazakh, and Kirghiz,” she also composed significant works for “orchestras of traditional instruments” (E. Nelson). She was able to move back to Moscow in 1940: “during the war years, V. Gaigerova took part in more than 700 concerts (...) She traveled to the Bolshoi Theater on foot from Khimki (22 km), returned home late in the evening to her sick mother, and, in the most difficult conditions of cold and lack of facilities, worked at night” (E. Lushnikova). In three years’ time of enduring these conditions, she was dead.

“Feelings of sadness and loneliness are characteristic of V. Gaigerova’s romantically-contemplative nature and often become the background mood of her music” (E. Lushnikova).

The Four Sketches are a glimpse into the expressive world of this richly-gifted artist; an expressive world which is thoroughly “Russian,” and in which we encounter “tragic coloring” (A. Shevtsova), as well as volcanic outbursts of passion, eerie desolation, and voluptuous, twilit landscapes. The first piece (Andante sostenuto) echoes the tragic despondency of other pieces in e-flat minor—one thinks of Brahms’s Op. 118, No. 6, or Rachmaninov’s Op. 39, No. 5. The music suddenly grows restless, and there is an enormous climax which serves only to precipitate a return of the opening theme, an affirmation of e-flat minor, enchained in helixes of chromatic thirds. The second piece well earns its expressive indication “Agitato”—a kind of etude in double 4ths, it again adopts an ABA structure, with a more rhapsodic inner episode, and the most exultant climax in the whole set. The third piece (Lento) seems to illustrate a twilit walk across icy tundra, where every chromatic step leads further away from the opening tonality. Fittingly, this piece ends in a harmonically-ambiguous way – as does the fourth piece (Appassionato), which presents the most technically-hazardous moments in the set. A smoldering, Scriabinesque creation, its hell-bent opening is displaced by a more luminous middle section with a weave of rhythmically-opulent textures, almost seeming to reflect the deep, patina-enveiled sapphires and golds of Orthodox iconography. The piece concludes in the tragic atmosphere of its opening, but one senses that “not all the dust has yet settled.”

One year prior to composition of the Four Sketches, Gaigerova completed what seems to be her only piano solo sonata. Like other examples from the Russian repertoire, she chose a single-movement structure for this work (one thinks of the first sonatas of Prokofiev and Feinberg, and the several single-movement sonatas of Scriabin). The piece, however, arguably outstrips some of those examples; lasting around 8.5 minutes, its sonata-type structure is fascinating and innovative – having something of the “sonata-fantasy” about it. The work opens “in medias res,” parachuting the listener into an unpredictable, stormy landscape: its principal theme, a rocket in e minor, is the only distinctive, recognizable element. This gives way to a placid “garden of lyricism” – its stillness is arresting, and seems somehow the more fragile for it. The theme’s beauty, like a Spring rivulet growing into a river, becomes passionate in a manner reminiscent of Tchaikovksy; gradually, as if by becoming too unbuttoned, “wolves are let in the door” – Gaigerova’s music never stays tranquil for long! Yet, there is a third theme in this exposition – an exhilarating “heroic” theme in chords, with trenchant octaves beneath. Those interested in sonata form will find some similarities to Chopin’s approach in what Gaigerova does here (it is a truncated sonata, with the opening theme missing in the recapitulation), but the symmetry of the form is entirely original. In an architectural choice which balances the structure, Gaigerova also creates one of the most effective and powerful moments in the sonata – this is her extension of the third “Heroic” theme in the recapitulation, which plummets into the bass, eventually maxing out the keyboard’s physical limits for the only time in the sonata, and bring this youthful work to its passionate, triumphant conclusion.

Fromm-Michaels: Piano Sonata, Op. 6

Like Varvara Gaigerova, Ilse Fromm-Michaels was a casualty of war: “one of the artists whose work and life were drastically affected or even destroyed by the reprisals of National Socialism [...] She had already built a brilliant career as a performing and creative musician but it was violently broken down by the measures of the Nazi regime” (G. Distler-Brendel). Fromm-Michaels was born in Hamburg to a mathematician and a school principal in 1888, and showed musical promise early – already at the age of 13 she relocated to Berlin to pursue serious musical studies (living with an aunt). Here she worked with Pfitzner for a period, and became friends with a young conductor named Otto Klemperer, later moving to conclude her study in Cologne. Even before she had emerged from this formal period of training, she was a formidable artist with a burgeoning concert career laid out before her – her vast repertoire encompassed concertos by Rachmaninov, Reger, and Busoni (the last work alone being enough to illuminate her stature as pianist). Her ability was recognized by Max Reger, whose prohibitively complex Bach Variations she learned in 3 weeks—an anecdote which also points up her devotion to new music (among other such activities are her performance of Pierrot lunaire under Schoenberg’s baton).

This career was “brilliant but unfortunately brief” (F. Rothenberg); Fromm-Michaels was married to a Jewish man, a district judge, who was forced in 1933 to “voluntarily retire”; because of her marriage, she was forbidden from engaging in any public artistic activities. Additionally, “her contacts in the Third Reich were very limited because there were not many non-Jews who had the moral courage to continue or even establish new relationships with Jews. Those affected became closer.” Fromm-Michaels watched as her husband became progressively more and more ill, as relatives emigrated or attempted to, and as others were arrested and taken to concentration camps: the situation was one of “isolation, fear and uncertainty. Fromm-Michaels was under enormous stress due to the threat to her husband and her son (...), the pressure to teach as much as possible, and the de facto ban on work” (C. Friedel). Yet, she continued to work and teach in private—her home became a secret sanctuary for others who were the targets of the Nazi regime. Gisela Distler-Brendel notes “I, the daughter of a mixed marriage who was also not allowed to study at university, was a student of Ilse Fromm-Michaels. I experienced the unforgettable, music-filled atmosphere in her house.”

An exploration of Fromm-Michaels’s music demonstrates again a singular, beautiful and powerful artistic voice; this music’s absence from concert stages and music pedagogy makes the sting of “canon” prejudice exponential. Her first great keyboard masterpiece is the monumental Sonata, Op. 6, in which “one senses her horror at the First World War” (B. Dorn). The first movement (Markig) commences with granitic octave batteries which restlessly move from key-to-key before finally arriving in a dark-lit c-sharp minor. The music unctuously glides to c minor, and the first of many barrages of double notes precipitate the refulgent second theme – an exquisite snow-globe of lyricism in an otherwise storm-tossed landscape. The development is filled with hair-raisingly jagged re-imaginings of the theme, some with more than a hint of sulfur, but the volcanic floes eventually come to a full stop at a harmonized restatement of the opening octave contour, and the recapitulation unfolds in a truncated form which still encloses the almost sacredly tender second theme. Rather than providing relief, the second movement (Sehr langsam, Frei im Zeitmaß) refocuses the “horror” of the first movement as a stringent funeral march. The dotted rhythms associated with this idea gradually loosen and recede into the background, to make way for a contrastingly lyrical but non-committal theme in thirds. Fromm-Michaels gently achieves the parallel major (C major) by the end of this movement, which organically welcomes the last movement’s f minor tonality. This breathless movement (Lebhaft, aber nicht schnell) contains the most hazardous – and explosive – moments in the whole sonata; beginning with an undulating, restless theme with a conspicuous slide of chromatic triads at its centre, the music quickly reaches an almost over-extended, blistering chordal theme set in the extremes of the keyboard’s range (easily living up to Fromm-Michaels expressive indication massig). The movement’s middle episode is something of a contrapuntal briar-patch, but provides a brief

rhythmic oasis; once emerging from this resting point, the music seems to proceed on a controlled, slow-burning fuse. Fromm-Michaels holds her one “FFFF” in reserve until the music’s most white-hot moment, when the hardwon dominant has finally been established; yet, the most harrowing moment is still to come: an epic keyboard-wide climax replete with double-note textures – the aural effect being a true “cathedral of sound.”

At the conclusion of World War Two, the artistic and wider world Fromm-Michaels had known was forever changed; her husband died in 1946, and from 1949, she stopped composing: “her creative powers were broken” (G. DistlerBrendel). Yet, it is not just the interruption of her career, but the combined “general neglect of women artists which (has denied) Fromm-Michaels the respect and attention she deserves. Her death on January 22, 1986, at age 97, ended a long career devoted to music, first as a performer and composer, and in her later years, as a teacher” (F. Rothenberg). It is time the music of this remarkable and inspiring woman was widely and regularly heard.

Parker: Nocturne

The 1926 Nocturne by Katherine Parker was written in the same time as many of the pieces above, but at the other side of the world, in Australia; yet, like these works, it has gone missing from the concert stage without a suitable reason, given its high artistic merit. A disarmingly gorgeous tune is presented in the “celestial” key of F-sharp major, yet by the piece’s end it has settled comfortably into A major; throughout, Parker pays homage to the Chopinesque “fioritura” and canvassing accompaniment expected of the genre, but there is something singular about the way her music inhabits the keyboard; while beautiful to hear, there is perhaps an extra layer of beauty that only the performer can fully appreciate.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

American pianist Asher Armstrong can be seen frequently in Canada, the US and Europe as a recitalist, chamber performer, and orchestra soloist. His performances have been noted for their “total honesty with regards to the composer and the connection to the audience... an imaginative, sensitive, powerful, wide pallette of sounds... deep and sophisticated tone quality,” “deeply expressive and sensitive spirit,” “astounding technique and originality,” “marvelous, huge sound” and for an unusually intuitive communicative power: “listening to Asher perform gives one the impression he is a ‘piano natural,’ born to play the piano.”

Asher’s first encounters with music involved the sounds of the acoustic and folk traditions of Appalachia, but studies with an enthusiastic pianist from South Africa made him fall in love with the keyboard, and he remembers early exposure to piano recitals and orchestra concerts as a highlight of his childhood. A prizewinner in many local competitions (MTNA Young Artist, Celebration of Excellence Competition, University of Maryville Concerto competition), Asher made his solo recital debut at the age of 14 in a performance of Chopin’s B-flat minor Sonata and works of Liszt, and subsequently with orchestra in a performance of the Grieg Piano Concerto.

Asher has worked with many of the leading pianists of North America and Europe, including Michael Chertock (University of Cincinnati College–Conservatory of Music), Kevin Kenner (Royal College of Music, London), Nicholas Ashton (Ian Tomlin Academy of Music, Edinburgh), Margarita Schevchenko (Cleveland Institute of Music), Tamara Poddubnaya (Prins Claus Conservatorium, Netherlands), James Giles (Northwestern University), Fay Adams (University of Tennessee), and the world-renowned Romanian concert pianist and teacher Marietta

Orlov, herself a student or the legendary Florica Musicescu (teacher of Radu Luu and Dinu Lipatti). Asher has also studied chamber and vocal repertoire with many of the leading collaborative pianists, including Sandra Rivers, Gabriel Dobner, and James Myers, among others. A graduate of the University of Tennessee (Bmus), Asher completed the Master of Music at the University of Cincinnati College–Conservatory of Music and holds a Doctor of Music Arts degree in Piano Performance from the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Music.

A passionate, committed teacher, Asher is on the Piano Faculty of the University of Toronto, and formerly served as Assistant Professor of Piano at the University of Arkansas. Asher has also taught at the Interlochen School of Arts (Interlochen, MI), the Indian Springs Academy of Music (Cincinnati, OH), and the Kingsway Conservatory of Music (Toronto, ON), and has served on faculty at a number of other community music schools. While members of Asher’s studio have included competition prizewinners and students of some of the top musical institutions (such as Eastman, NEC, McGill, Manhattan, and CCM), he teaches students of all levels and backgrounds, and believes that every student should feel confident with the results of their piano study and musical growth.

Asher maintains an active concert career: notable recent engagements include local solo recital performances at the Royal College of Music (London, UK), the Walton Arts Center and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and the University of Arkansas, as well as appearances as concerto soloist with Pax Christi Chorale and the Mozart Players of Toronto (Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy), and with the North York Concert Orchestra (Tchaikovsky’s B-flat minor Piano Concerto). Asher has frequently appeared as a recitalist, adjudicator, and masterclass clinician at many festivals, competitions, and schools (collegiate and secondary) in both Canada and the U.S. Asher is a proud member of the Royal Conservatory’s College of Examiners, serving as an Advanced Specialist, as well as a pedagogical consultant and consistent adjudicator. In his performance career, scholarly work, and in his teaching, Asher seeks to simultaneously illuminate established repertoire and to advocate for neglected repertoire. Recent projects illustrating these interests include a lecture recital on Vitezslava Kapralova give for the “From he Artist Bench” series (Francis Clark Center for Keyboard Pedagogy), as well as publications on newly published piano music of Florence Price and the last opus of Amy Beach (Piano Maganize), Chinese–Canadian composure Vincent Ho (Canandian Music Teacher), Spanish-Mexican composer Emiliana de Zubeldia (MTNA E-Journal), and many others (including substantial contributions to Cambridge University Press’ Tempo, Clavier, American Music Teacher, the European Piano Teachers Association Piano Journal, and the Kapralova Society Journal). In addition to his published work, Asher cultivates a conscientious, ongoing initiative towards inclusive programming in his own performances and in those of his students.

– music.utoronto.ca/person/asher-armstrong

20250301_Armstrong

FLORIDA

A Liminal Space: Piano

Music by Women

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Asher Armstrong, Piano

A Liminal Space: Piano Music by Women

PROGRAM

To Ensure An Enjoyable Concert Experience For All…

ABOUT THE ARTIST