Eric Lu

ERIC LU, piano

PRELUDE 2:30 PM Webinar lecture by Eric Bromberger

This performance will be available to stream on-demand until December 1, 2020.

Support for this program generously provided by Gordon Brodfuehrer Jeanette Stevens

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2020 · 3 PM THE BAKER-BAUM CONCERT HALL

MOZART (1756-1791)

SCHUBERT (1797-1828) Piano Sonata No. 13 in B-flat Major, K.333

Allegro

Andante cantabile

Allegretto grazioso

Piano Sonata in A Major, D.959

Allegro

Andante

Scherzo: Allegro vivace

Rondo: Allegretto

Alisa Weilerstein

This performance marks Eric Lu’s La Jolla Music Society debut.

Piano Sonata in B-flat Major, K.333 WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART Born January 27, 1756, Salzburg Died December 5, 1791, Vienna Composed: 1783 Approximate Duration: 18 minutes

Mozart published the Sonata in B-flat Major in Vienna in 1784, when he was 28. It was part of a set of three sonatas that formed one of his first publications in his newlyadopted home, and for many years this sonata was thought to have been composed during Mozart’s visit to Paris five years earlier, in 1778. During that visit Mozart had renewed his acquaintance with Johann Christian Bach, the youngest son of Johann Sebastian. The two had first met in London in 1764 when Bach was 29 and Mozart was 8; they had played duets then with Mozart seated in Bach’s lap, and the two retained a musical respect and affection. Some critics were quick to detect the influence of Johann Christian Bach on this sonata, and they came to believe that Mozart had composed it during that visit Paris. More recent evidence has shown that this sonata is a later work, and it now appears that it was actually written in November 1783, when Mozart was on his way back to Vienna after taking his new wife to Salzburg to meet his father.

But in fact J.C. Bach did have a strong influence on this sonata. The opening theme of the Sonata in B-flat Major bears an extremely close similarity to the opening of J.C. Bach’s Piano Sonata in G Major, Opus 17, No. 4, which Bach had shown to Mozart in Paris five years earlier. J.C. Bach composed in the galant style fashionable in mid-century Paris, a style that emphasized attractive melodies, clear textures, and an absence of contrapuntal complexities. Mozart had little use for the musical life of Paris, but he did admire Johann Christian, and the close similarity between these themes may be a gesture of admiration by Mozart for J.C. Bach’s keyboard writing. Mozart’s opening Allegro, very much in galant style, is graceful and smooth: even its big chords suddenly melt away into relaxed music, and the brief agitation at the beginning of the development does not really roil the waters.

The marking for the second movement, Andante cantabile, is noteworthy because Mozart specified cantabile only when he wanted an unusually lyric performance. He moves to E-flat major here and marks the opening idea espressivo, but the really interesting part of this sonata comes at the beginning of the second half, where this theme is taken through some daring modulations—there is a wildness to the harmonic freedom here, even in music otherwise so gentle, and Mozart concludes by bringing back his opening material, now richly embellished.

But the most striking movement of all may be the last. This Allegretto grazioso, a rondo, opens with a poised central theme—and then come the surprises. The episodes are so beautifully worked out that each becomes an interlude with its own distinct character, and along the way even the rondo theme itself begins to evolve. Near the end comes the biggest surprise of all: with a great flourish the music arrives at a pause, and then Mozart writes out an impressive cadenza for the pianist, as if this movement were the finale of a piano concerto. What had been a gentle piano sonata suddenly erupts into powerful keyboard virtuosity, full of hammered chords and blazing 64th-note runs before the excitement subsides and the cadenza makes its way to a delicate close—we almost expect to hear the sound of an orchestra rejoining the piano at this point. Mozart rounds matters off with yet one more infinitely graceful evolution of his rondo theme.

Piano Sonata in A Major, D.959 FRANZ SCHUBERT Born January 31, 1797, Vienna Died November 19, 1828, Vienna Composed: 1828 Approximate Duration: 40 minutes

Schubert’s final year was dreadful. Ill for years, he went into steady decline in 1828 and died in November at age 31. Yet from those last months came a steady stream of masterpieces, and few of the achievements of that miraculous—and agonizing—year seem more remarkable than the composition of three large-scale piano sonatas in the month of September, barely eight weeks before his death. In the years following Schubert’s death, many of the works from this final year were recognized as the masterpieces they are, but the three piano sonatas made their way much more slowly. When they appeared in 1838, a decade after Schubert’s death, the publisher dedicated them to Schumann, one of Schubert’s greatest admirers, but even Schumann confessed mystification, noting with a kind of dismayed condescension that “Always musical and rich in songlike themes, these pieces ripple on, page after page . . .” Even as late as 1949, Schubert’s adoring biographer Robert Haven Schauffler could rate them “considerably below the level of the last symphonies and quartets, the String Quintet,

and the best songs.” It took Artur Schnabel’s championing these sonatas to rescue them from obscurity. The last of them, in fact, has today become one of the most familiar of all piano sonatas, with over forty recordings available.

Nevertheless, these sonatas remain a refined taste, and some of the problem may lie in the fact that our notion of a piano sonata has been so conditioned by Beethoven that Schubert’s late sonatas—which conform neither structurally nor emotionally to the Beethoven model—can seem mystifying. Certainly the opening Allegro of the Sonata in A Major seems to be in a sort of sonata form, with a sharply declarative opening theme-group and a more flowing second subject marked pianissimo, but the development does not do the things that a Beethoven development has taught us to expect: instead, it grows almost entirely out of a wisp of a phrase from the second theme group and then proceeds to go its own way. Alfred Einstein both describes and defends Schubert’s method: “in place of a development proper Schubert spins a dreamy, ballad-like web of sound, the very existence of which is its own best justification.” Schubert rounds this long movement off with an impressive—and very quiet—coda derived from the opening material.

The really stunning movement in this sonata is the Andantino. Structurally, this is in ternary form, but what music lies within this simple form! It opens with a wistful little melody that treads along its steady 3/8 meter and spins an air of painful melancholy. It is moving music, but the simplicity of this opening in no way prepares us for what happens at the center of this movement, where the pace moves ahead gradually and the movement suddenly explodes into furious, tormented music that rips violently across the keyboard. This turbulence passes, and the opening music—subtly embellished—resumes. Now its steady, subdued pace seems all the more moving for having regained control.

The sprightly Scherzo whips along on flashing, dancing chords, with much of its sparkling character coming from the right hand’s being set in the piano’s ringing high register. The final movement seems consciously to call up echoes of the past. Many have noted the similarity between this rondo-finale and the one that Beethoven wrote to close out his Sonata in G Major, Opus 31, No. 1, there are echoes of Schubert’s own song Im Frühling in the pianist’s left hand, and Schubert borrowed the main theme of this movement from his own Piano Sonata in A Minor, composed in 1817. Schubert’s rondo is built on only two themes, and—unusually—they begin to develop as this movement proceeds. But matters never become too serious, and the impression this movement creates is of relaxed and exalted music-making. Schubert provides a measure of structural completeness by rounding off the sonata with a Presto coda that recalls the opening of the first movement.