9 minute read
BEHZOD ABDURAIMOV
PRELUDE 2 PM
Lecture by Kristi Brown Montesano
Sources of Inspiration
What are the aims, ideas, and circumstances that galvanize a composer to create a particular work? This presentation investigates this question through a wide-ranging program that spans from Scarlatti’s baroque keyboard sonatas to Romantic-age programmatic works by Schumann and Liszt to Rachmaninoff’s last solo piano work, Variations on a Theme of Corelli.
BEHZOD ABDURAIMOV, piano
SUNDAY, MAY 15, 2022 • 3 PM
THE BAKER-BAUM CONCERT HALL SCARLATTI Sonata in B Minor, K.27
(1685-1757) Sonata in D Major, K.96
SCHUMANN Kreisleriana, Opus 16
(1810-1856) Ausserst bewegt Sehr innig und nicht zu rasch Sehr aufgeregt Sehr langsam Sehr lebhaft Sehr langsam Sehr rasch Schnell und spielend
INTERMISSION
LISZT
(1811-1886)
Bénédiction de Dieu dans la Solitude from Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, S.173/3 RACHMANINOFF Variations on a Theme of Corelli, Opus 42
(1873-1943)
La Jolla Music Society’s 2021-22 Season is supported by The Conrad Prebys Foundation, The City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture, Banc of California, The Lodge at Torrey Pines, ProtoStar Foundation, Vail Memorial Fund, ResMed Foundation, Bright Events Rentals, Ace Parking, Brenda Baker and Steve Baum, Raffaella and John Belanich, Gordon Brodfuehrer, Mary Ellen Clark, Joy Frieman, Joan and Irwin Jacobs, Dorothea Laub, Jeanette Stevens, Debra Turner, Bebe and Marvin Zigman.
Sonata in B Minor, K.27 Sonata in D Major, K.96 DOMENICO SCARLATTI
Born October 26, 1685, Naples Died July 23, 1757, Madrid Composed: 1738, 1746 Approximate Duration: 8 minutes
In a famous remark, Haydn once said that his isolation at Esterhazy had forced him to “become original.” Such a comment might describe another composer who worked far from established music centers: Domenico Scarlatti. Trained as a keyboard player, Scarlatti held positions in Naples, Florence, Venice, Rome, and Palermo before making in 1719 the long trip to Lisbon, where he served as court harpsichordist to the King of Portugal. When the Princess Maria Barbara married the Spanish Crown Prince in 1729, Scarlatti followed her to Madrid, where he spent the final three decades of his life. And it was there in Madrid, far from the cultured courts he had known as a young man, that Scarlatti “became original.”
Though his primary responsibility was to write vocal music for the court, Scarlatti is remembered today for his 550 keyboard sonatas, most of them written over the final decade of his life. Scarlatti called these pieces esercizi (“exercises”), and while they are not actually in sonata form, they look ahead to that form as it would develop across the remainder of the century. They are in one movement, but in binary form, built on themes of contrasting tonalities. Scarlatti would have played them on the harpsichord (or gravicembalo, as it was known in Spain), and these sonatas are remarkable for the brilliance of the keyboard technique he demands: they require fast runs, hand-crossing, arpeggios across the range of the keyboard, great cascades of sound, and rapid repetition of notes. The sonatas are quite brief—usually between three and five minutes—but in these short spans Scarlatti creates miniature worlds full of drama, excitement, color, and beauty.
This recital opens with two of these sonatas. The Sonata in B Minor (marked Allegro) is distinctive for keeping the accompaniment in the middle, with the melodic line above and below it. This requires some modest hand-crossings before the sonata trails off to its conclusion in the keyboard’s deepest register. The wonderful Sonata in D Major almost boils over with energy. Scarlatti marks it Allegrissimo, and we seem to hear the sound of hunting horns in the right hand as the music races along its 3/8 meter. Quickly those horn calls make their way into the left hand, and now the right accompanies with busy trills and repeated notes. Scarlatti develops these ideas in the second half of the sonata, which offers some pungent dissonances and spirited hand-crossings along the way.
Born June 8, 1810, Zwickau, Germany Died July 29, 1856, Endenich, Germany Composed: 1838 Approximate Duration: 30 minutes
Few composers have been as well-read as Robert Schumann, who found inspiration in a range of writers, from Shakespeare to Goethe to Jean Paul to Byron. One of the strongest literary influences on Schumann was the work of the German writer E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822), author of novels and fantastic tales. Hoffmann named one of his sets of fantastic stories Fantasiestücke, and Schumann borrowed that title for several of his own works, but it was Hoffmann’s fictional character Johannes Kreisler who seems to have struck Schumann most strongly. A musician and critic (like Schumann himself), Kreisler was a perfect example of the literary concept known as Zerrisenheit: the artist-hero who is torn apart by the conflict between his idealized sense of order and the claims of the world he must live in; one of Hoffmann’s original working titles, in fact, appears to have been Lucid Intervals of an Insane Musician. Schumann, one of the most mentally tormented of all composers, saw in Johannes Kreisler a spiritual brother, and he borrowed that name for this collection of eight piano pieces, which he specifically called “fantasies.”
Schumann wrote Kreisleriana in the spring of 1838. He was 27 years old, his efforts to marry Clara Wieck were being thwarted by the opposition of her father, and music seemed to pour out of the young composer. From January 1838 came his Novelletten, followed by the Kinderszenen in February; in March Schumann composed the Fantasy in C Major, and in April—in the space of four days—he wrote Kreisleriana. Schumann may have called these pieces “fantasies,” which implies formlessness, but they are in fact quite disciplined works. They do, however, defy easy classification: some are in ABA form, some are in simple binary form, and several have forms all their own. As a very general rule, it might be observed that the odd-numbered movements are fast and dramatic, the even slow and expressive, but even this observation is undercut by the frequent internal episodes at contrasting tempos. Particularly striking is the variety of mood and expression in this music—one moment it can be simple and lyric, the next it turns mercurial, and suddenly it is violent and extroverted. Yet this music tells no tales, paints no pictures, nor does it try to translate Hoffmann’s magical stories into music—these eight pieces are abstract music, complete in themselves. Throughout, one feels Schumann’s instinctive and idiomatic understanding of the piano, and the end of Kreisleriana is stunning: after the galloping, hammering energy of the final piece, the music grows quiet and suddenly vanishes like smoke on two barely-audible strokes of sound.
The apparent inspiration for this music was Hoffmann’s character, but Schumann chose to dedicate Kreisleriana “To His Friend Frederic Chopin.” His letters, however, make clear that the real inspiration for this music was his love for Clara Wieck—he wrote to tell her: “Play my Kreisleriana occasionally. In some passages there is to be found an utterly wild love, and your life and mine.”
Born October 22, 1811, Raiding, Hungary Died July 31, 1886, Bayreuth Composed: 1847-52 Approximate Duration: 18 minutes
Liszt wrote the set of ten pieces for piano that make up his Harmonies poétiques et religieuses between 1847 and 1852. These were the beginning of the composer’s Weimar years, the eleven-year period (1848-1859) when Liszt served as kapellmeister at the Weimar court and produced many of his greatest works, including the Faust and Dante Symphonies, the symphonic poems, and many pieces for piano, including the Hungarian Rhapsodies. The Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, Liszt’s only work on a religious theme for piano, is a massive collection, lasting (in its entirety) over 80 minutes. The ten pieces are varied, both in kind and quality. One is a transcription of a work by another composer, several are revisions of earlier pieces by Liszt himself, and some are new. Dedicated to Princess Carolyn Sayn-Wittgenstein, the composer’s mistress, the Harmonies remained one of Liszt’s favorites among his own compositions.
Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude, the third piece of the set, has been praised as one of Liszt’s finest works for piano, and many have been quick to hear in its luminous calm the same spirit that infuses the slow movements of Beethoven’s late quartets. It is preceded in the score by an excerpt from a poem by Lamartine: “Whence comes, O God, this peace that overwhelms me? Whence comes this faith with which my heart overflows?” The Bénédiction is in ternary form, and particularly noteworthy is the shimmering accompaniment in the right hand, as the quiet main theme unfolds in the left. The middle section is a gentle Andante, and in the closing section Liszt brings back all his themes.
Born April 1, 1873, Semyonovo, Russia Died March 28, 1943, Beverly Hills Composed: 1931 Approximate Duration: 19 minutes
Just as Brahms’ Variations on a Theme of Haydn are not really based on a theme by Haydn, so Rachmaninoff’s Variations on a Theme of Corelli are not really based on a theme by Corelli. The haunting melody made famous by Corelli was already several hundred years old when he used it in his violin sonata, Opus 5, No. 12, subtitled La Folia, of 1700. That tune appears to have originated in fifteenth-century Portugal. It was originally a fast dance in triple time and was danced so strenuously that the dancers seemed to have gone mad—the title folia meant “mad” or “empty-headed” (it survives in our usage as “folly”). Over time, this dance slowed down and became the famous stately theme we know today, and as a basis for variations it has attracted many composers, Vivaldi, Marais, Bach, Lully, Geminiani, and Liszt among them.
Rachmaninoff composed his set of Variations on a Theme of Corelli, his final work for solo piano, in Switzerland during the summer of 1931. Variation form seems to have been on Rachmaninoff’s mind during this period: his next work, composed three years later, was the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, a set of twenty-four variations for piano and orchestra on another quite famous theme. The Corelli Variations are extremely focused: Rachmaninoff offers twenty variations in the space of only sixteen minutes. He opens with a straightforward statement of the theme in D minor (the key in which Corelli set his variations), and the variations proceed at different tempos and in different moods; something of the range of their variety can made out from Rachmaninoff’s markings: misterioso, scherzando, agitato, cantabile. An unusual feature of this set is that three of the variations (Nos. 11, 12, and 19) are marked as optional, and Rachmaninoff himself sometimes omitted various others during performances, depending on his mood. Following Variation 13, Rachmaninoff offers an unnumbered variation that he calls Intermezzo and which functions somewhat like a cadenza in a concerto. Full of mordents, arpeggiated chords, and unmeasured runs, it effectively blurs a sense of tonality, so that Variation 14—a return to the original tune, now in the key of D-flat major—sounds chaste and pure. This and the following variation, marked dolcissimo, form a nocturne-like interlude before the vigorous final five variations. The ending is particularly effective. Rachmaninoff concludes not with a bravura display but with one further variation, which he marks simply Coda. This quiet Andante finally fades into silence on pianissimo D-minor chords.
Rachmaninoff dedicated the Variations on a Theme of Corelli to his good friend (and frequent recital partner), the violinist Fritz Kreisler.
