Cd booklet 8 by Klassiek.nl

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DMITRI LEVKOVICH

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Sergej Rachmaninoff Prelude Op. 3 No. 2 10 Preludes Op. 23 13 Preludes Op. 32 DMITRI LEVKOVICH, piano

Canadian pianist and composer Dmitri Levkovich was born in the Ukraine. Both of his parents are pianists. His father is a renowned composer. With his mother’s help, Dmitri started playing piano at the age of three. He continued his education at the Lysenko music school for gifted children in Kiev, Ukraine. After a series of emigrations, the family settled in Toronto, Canada. Dmitri’s first professional degree was in composition, from the Curtis Institute of Music. His compositions have been performed by orchestras in the United States and in Europe. The focus of his compositions is described in Philadelphia’s Broad Street Review: »…the musicians could completely immerse themselves in the heartfelt melodies and big emotional surges of Levkovich’s slow movement.« After not practicing piano for a number of years due to studies in composition, his comeback to piano was not easy. »It was a real challenge to follow my dream of becoming a piano soloist at a relatively late age of 22,« he says. »A great motivation of mine was that later in life my experience would be useful in teaching others with a similar dream.« Dmitri’s performances have taken him all over the world. He has appeared at Carne-

DMITRI LEVKOVICH_Vita

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gie Hall, Beijing’s National Center for the Performing Arts, the Théâtre des ChampsÉlysées, the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, the Great Hall at the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, the Warsaw Philharmonic Hall, and the Mariinsky Theater’s Concert Hall in St. Petersburg. He has collaborated with the conductors Valery Gergiev, Vladimir Spivakov, Jahja Ling, and George Pehlivanian and has been featured as soloist with numerous orchestras, among them, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Utah Symphony, the China National Orchestra and the Gulbenkian Orchestra of Portugal. Many of his performances have been broadcast on television and radio stations. Dmitri has been invited to take part in numerous music festivals, including the Deer Valley Music Festival, New Contemporary Piano Faces at Mariinsky, Gergiev Festival in Rotterdam, Salzburg Whitsun Festival, International Keyboard Institute and Festival (New York City) and the Ravello Festival. Dmitri has been praised by the press as »one of the truly elect, an artist with technique, a ravishing touch, sensitivity, perspective and intelligence« (Erik Eriksson, Northeast Wisconsin Music Review). His playing has been described as »scintillating… everything was beautifully polished, fluent, and de-

fined. Lyricism was elegantly shaded and reached ecstasy… expansive in phrasing; noble and passionate« (Donald Rosenberg of the Cleveland Plain Dealer). Since entering the competition stage in 2005, Dmitri has received seventeen top prizes at international piano competitions, including the China, Cleveland, Jose Iturbi, Gina Bachauer International Artists, and Vendôme competitions. In 2009, Dmitri set record numbers when he won over 100,000 Dollars in competition prizes in only six weeks. Dmitri has often been singled out as an audience favorite by being awarded audience prizes and he has been recognized for his interpretation of Chopin’s music with Chopin prizes from a number of important piano competitions. Most recently, Dmitri won the International German Piano Award. This victory resulted in performances in Bangkok, Bratislava, Doha, Milan, Sacile, Shanghai and Tbilisi as well as at the Big Hall and Chamber Music Hall of the Berlin Philharmonic and Alte Oper Frankfurt. Furthermore this CD release of Rachmaninoff’s 24 Preludes. Dmitri feels fortunate to have had Sergei Babayan as his teacher at the Cleveland Institute of Music (B.M., M.M. and A.D). He makes his home in Manhattan, New York. ■

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Collections of pieces covering each of the twenty-four major and minor keys have a pedigree stretching back to the sixteenth century, Vincenzo Galileo father of the astronomer being one of first to publish a sequence of this type (for lute) with Bachâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s two books of Preludes and Fugues the first comprehensive sets for keyboard. As the name suggests, preludes usually prefaced other works and were often of an improvisatory nature and designed as exercises, a function they retained in those produced in the nineteenth century by Clementi, Moscheles and Czerny. Although Hummel was the first to detach the keyboard prelude from its companion piece, it was Chopin, with the Op. 28 Preludes of 1838, who created the modern pre-

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lude sequence as a series of short, selfcontained works each with a clearly defined expressive character. Rachmaninoff however did not set out with the intention of following Chopin and his successors in this respect. A piano prelude in F major of 1891 was soon recast as a duet with cello and a C sharp minor work from the same year was grouped with four unrelated pieces and published under the collective title Morceaux de Fantasie (Op. 3). This prelude has become so familiar it is impossible to imagine its effect on those who heard it for the first time in September 1892 performed by the nineteenyear-old Rachmaninoff at his first solo concert. The ternary structure it employs, embodied in a brooding downward se-

quence of chords (hinting at the Dies irae which was to become Rachmaninoffâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s musical idĂŠe fixe) alternating with slightly sinister muted chimes and a contrasting central section of restless passagework, was used by Rachmaninoff in most of his shorter piano works, the subsequent preludes in particular. He eventually grew to dislike the piece but was rarely allowed to omit it from his concert programmes (on one occasion he was forced to play it even after providing twelve encores of other works!) To add insult to injury (and the work suffered many indignities at the hands of arrangers and players including Harpo Marx who manages to destroy the piano on which he performs it in A Day at the Races) Rachmaninoff gained nothing

RACHMANINOFF 24 PRELUDES_David Moncur

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from its immense international popularity since copyright protection did not automatically apply to works produced in preRevolutionary Russia and he had disposed of the publication rights for forty roubles in 1893. Despite the success of the C sharp minor prelude he did not produce another until 1901 when he composed the G minor. Its jaunty Alla marcia first theme and expansively lyrical second, which has obvious affinities with the Second Piano Concerto which he had just completed, makes it the polar opposite of its doomladen predecessor. Whether Rachmaninoff was already planning a complete prelude cycle or if this was intended as another isolated work, is unknown but this time he took no steps to publish it individually. He returned to the prelude form in 1902 while working on the Variations for the Piano on a Theme by Chopin (Op. 22), which are based on Chopin’s C sharp minor prelude and may have encouraged him to further exploration of the form. Three of these (accounts vary as to their identity) were included in the concert at which he first performed the Chopin Variations in February 1903, with the remainder completed soon afterwards, one of

which, the D minor Tempo di Menuetto, being based on a sketch dating from 1899. Although these preludes show Rachmaninoff at his most brilliant and most tender, especially in the E flat major piece completed on the same day his daughter was born (14th May), he confessed that he did not enjoy the process of their composition, in which he admitted »there is neither beauty nor joy« – the need to earn money being the primary motivation. Mindful of his experience with the C sharp minor prelude, he took good care to acquire full copyright protection when they were published as Op. 23. The choice of a different key for each prelude

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reveals his intention to compose a complete cycle (or at least that he was leaving his options open to do so) and that, by creating a set of ten (rather than the more logical twelve) the early C Sharp minor prelude was to be included. Although there is no coherent key arrangement (such as the circle of fifths employed by Chopin or by rising semitone following Bach) a simple pattern is introduced by a major/minor alternation (hence the need for an even number of pieces) with some grouping by relative and parallel keys. Within the musical structure of preludes themselves there is also a symmetrical downward stepwise movement in the first

group of four, an upward one in the second with the ninth and tenth alternately rising and falling. The first and last, both Largos, are enharmonic twins (F sharp minor/G flat major) thus providing a satisfying circularity to the set. Although he included a changing selection of individual preludes from Op. 23 in his concert programmes, he never performed the entire set in public. Rachmaninoffâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s flourishing career both as performer and conductor, at home and abroad, restricted his time for composing to the off-season summer months which he usually spent at his country property in Ivanovka. It was there in the summer

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of 1910 immediately after finishing the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom that he wrote preludes in the remaining thirteen keys to complete the cycle. He accomplished this feat in two short bursts of intense creativity between August 23rd and September 10th with the manuscript versions of three of the preludes all dated that first day. However as he had already performed two of them – those in G major and G sharp minor – as encores, they had obviously been conceived much earlier and only written down in final form at that point. As with the previous set, major and minor keys alternate but here with a greater juxtaposition of parallel and relative keys. Since there was necessarily an odd number of pieces, Rachmaninoff created an overarching symmetry across the now complete sequence of twenty-four by placing the D flat major prelude last, thus mirroring the enharmonic C sharp minor written almost ten year previously and bringing the cycle full circle. The thirteenth prelude refers to its distant predecessor in several ways – its opening bars containing an almost identical downward chord sequence – albeit concealed within the rising and falling figures and against the accentual flow – which is brought out more forcefully on

its return in the closing pages, while the Menno mosso second section clearly recalls the parallel Agitato passage of the earlier work. Rachmaninoff always insisted that the C sharp minor prelude had no extra-musical meaning (he was once informed by an admirer that for her it conjured up the image of someone struggling to escape from a coffin): however when Benno Moiseiwitsch told him that the B minor prelude made him think of Alfred Böcklin’s Die Heimkehr (The Homecoming), an astonished Rachmaninoff admitted that he had in fact based the piece – which was one of his own favourites – on that mysterious painting, in which a richly-dressed man in sixteenth century (?) costume gazes down through the gathering gloom at the illuminated window of a humble cottage. Shortly after their completion Rachmaninoff gave two complete performances of the thirteen preludes (which were published as Op. 32) thereafter including only selections from the set in his programmes and although a complete volume of all twenty-four (including the C sharp minor prelude) appeared in 1911, he never performed them together in their entirety. ■

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SERGEJ RACHMANINOFF PRELUDE 1. Lento, Op. 3 No. 2 in C sharp minor 4:00 PRELUDES OPUS 23 2. Largo in F sharp minor, No. 1