10 minute read
ZOLTÁN FEJÉRVÁRI
PRELUDE 2 PM
Musical Prelude by young artists from the San Diego Youth Symphony
ZOLTÁN FEJÉRVÁRI, piano
SUNDAY, JANUARY 16, 2022 · 3 PM
THE BAKER-BAUM CONCERT HALL J.S. BACH French Suite No. 5 in G Major, BWV 816
(1685-1750) Allemande Courante Sarabande Gavotte Bourrée Loure Gigue
RAVEL Le tombeau de Couperin
(1875-1937) Prélude Fugue Forlane Rigaudon Menuet Toccata
INTERMISSION
Support for this program generously provided by:
Oakmont Signature Living
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. CHOPIN Preludes, Opus 28 (1810-1849) No. 1 in C Major: Agitato No. 17 in A-flat Major: Allegretto No. 2 in A Minor: Lento No. 18 in F Minor: Allegro molto No. 3 in G Major: Vivace No. 19 in E-flat Major: Vivace No. 4 in E Minor: Largo No. 5 in D Major: Allegro molto No. 6 in B Minor: Lento assai No. 7 in A Major: Andantino No. 8 in F-sharp Minor: Molto agitato No. 9 in E Major: Largo No. 10 in C-sharp Minor: Allegro molto No. 11 in B Major: Vivace No. 12 in G-sharp Minor: Presto No. 13 in F-sharp Major: Lento No. 14 in E-flat Minor: Allegro No. 15 in D-flat Major: Sostenuto No. 16 in B-flat Minor: Presto con fuoco
Born March 21, 1685, Eisenach, Germany Died July 28, 1750, Leipzig Composed: 1722 Approximate Duration: 17 minutes
In May 1720, Bach—then music director at the Cöthen court—accompanied his prince to Carlsbad, where Leopold was taking the waters, and returned to Cöthen in July to discover that his wife had died while he was gone. Bach, then 35 years old, waited nearly eighteen months to marry again, and his choice was a good one. In December 1721 he married the twenty-year-old Anna Magdalena Wilcken, daughter of a court trumpeter and herself an accomplished musician— she would bear Bach thirteen children and survive him by a decade. In the first years of their marriage, Bach composed for her a Clavierbüchlein (“little keyboard book”), just as he had written a similar volume several years earlier for his son Wilhelm Friedemann. Composed for her instruction or perhaps simply for her pleasure, this was a collection of short keyboard pieces that were certainly first performed within the Bach household. In Anna Magdalena’s Clavierbüchlein are early versions of five of the six works that would later be published as Bach’s French Suites (the sixth apparently dates from shortly after the family’s move to Leipzig in 1723).
Let it be said right from the start: the name French Suite is misleading, and while it has become inseparably a part of this music, Bach never heard that name. For him, these were simply sets of short keyboard suites that he wrote for his young wife. There is nothing consciously—or even unconsciously—French about them, just as there is nothing recognizably English about Bach’s English Suites: in both cases, these nicknames were attached to the music after the composer’s death. The French Suites (inevitably, we have to use that name) are in the standard four-movement suite sequence—allemande, courante, sarabande, and gigue—into which Bach introduces a variety of dance movements, always between the sarabande and gigue. All movements are in binary form. In contrast to the English Suites, which are largescale works stretching out to nearly half an hour, the French Suites seem tiny. This is small-scaled, intimate music, and these suites—even with their six to eight movements—last only about a dozen minutes each.
The Allemande of the Suite No. 5 in G Major makes some very attractive modulations, as moments of shade pass over the sunny G-major surface of this dance. There follow a quick Courante (somewhat reminiscent of the Two-Part Inventions Bach was composing in these same years), and a graceful, light Sarabande. The interpolated movements— three of them in this suite—are a Gavotte (which has become
ZOLTÁN FEJÉRVÁRI - PROGRAM NOTES so popular that it is sometimes performed separately), an athletic Bourrée, and a Loure marked by swirls and cascades of sound, almost arpeggiated chords. The concluding Gigue, a fugue, is the most difficult movement in the suite; it races impetuously along its unusual 12/16 meter.
Le tombeau de Couperin MAURICE RAVEL
Born March 7, 1875, Ciboure, Basses-Pyrennes, France Died December 28, 1937, Paris Composed: 1914-17 Approximate Duration: 26 minutes
Two events combined to help produce Le tombeau de Couperin, Ravel’s last large-scale work for piano. In the second decade of the twentieth century, well before the beginning of the neo-classical movement, Ravel found himself increasingly drawn to the music of France’s past. He embarked on a lengthy study of eighteenth-century French keyboard music, going so far as to transcribe one of the keyboard pieces of Francois Couperin, and he planned to write a collection of his own piano pieces in the manner of the eighteenth-century French clavecinists. His working title for this piece was Suite française. The other force was less benign. In the summer of 1914, World War I exploded across Europe, and—after the guns destroyed the old certainties that summer—Western Civilization would never be the same. Ravel was one of the few composers in history to serve in the military. Driven by patriotism and a sense of the moment, he enlisted in the French army and—at age 40—drove ambulances carrying wounded back from the front. For a nature as sensitive as Ravel’s, the experience was devastating, and—to compound his misery—his mother died while he was gone. Under these conditions, what had begun as the Suite française evolved into something quite different. During the years 1914-17 Ravel composed a suite of six movements for piano and dedicated each movement to a different friend who had been killed in the war. He gave the piece a title that reflects both its homage to the past and the dark moment of its creation: Le tombeau de Couperin, or “The Tomb of Couperin.” Ravel creates a consciously antiquarian sound in this music: each of the six movements is in a baroque form, and Ravel sets out to make the modern piano mimic the jangling, plangent sound of the harpsichord. A bittersweet flavor runs throughout Le tombeau: several of the movements may be in dance forms, but here they dance with a gravity that springs from war and loss. Marguerite Long gave the first performance in Paris on April 11, 1919, five months to the day after the Armistice that brought the war to its close. Later that year Ravel orchestrated four of the movements, and Le tombeau de Couperin has become more familiar in this orchestral version than in its original form.
The opening Prélude is full of busy energy, whirling along a constant murmur of sixteenth-notes. Against this rush of quiet motion Ravel sets what are essentially fragments of themes, full of mordents, turns, and other decorations characteristic of eighteenth-century music. The Fugue, at a moderate tempo, is quite subdued. Its subject, only three measures long, is of narrow compass (most of this fugue is written with both hands in the treble clef), and Ravel extends it quietly (the dynamic never rises above mezzo-forte) before the music fades delicately into silence. A forlane was originally a lively dance believed to be of Italian creation, and Ravel’s Forlane dances with somber dignity along a springing 6/8 meter. Nominally in E minor, this music is riddled with accidentals, and its pungent harmonies echo the clang of the harpsichord.
A rigaudon was a lively folk-dance in duple meter and short phrases, thought to be originally from Provence. Ravel’s Rigaudon—marked Very fast—bursts to life on a bright flourish in C major, followed instantly by the propulsive dance. Its central episode slips into C minor, but the opening section soon returns in all its energy and the movement races to its close on the opening flourish. The Menuet is built on a long and expressive main theme. Ravel marks the center section Musette (an old dance accompanied by bagpipe), and the sustained chorale-like theme here echoes some of that antique sound.
The concluding Toccata is easily the most brilliant, and most difficult, movement in the suite—and the one that moves farthest away from an atmosphere of mourning. As its name implies, a toccata is intended to demonstrate a player’s touch, and this Toccata whips along its 2/4 meter on the steady pound of repeated notes. Against this driving energy, Ravel sets a dancing opening theme and a more wistful second subject, but the steady rhythms finally drive the Toccata to an exciting close, which—if it does not banish the air of stately mourning that surrounds Le tombeau de Couperin—at least rounds it off in brilliant fashion.
Preludes, Opus 28 FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN
Born February 22, 1810,
˙ Zelazowa Wola, Poland Died October 17, 1849, Paris Composed: 1836-39 Approximate Duration: 36 minutes
As a small boy in Poland, Chopin fell in love with the keyboard music of Bach. Like Beethoven before him (and Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich after him), Chopin was particularly drawn to The Well-Tempered Clavier, Bach’s two sets of 24 preludes and fugues in all the major and minor keys of the chromatic scale. Haunted by Bach’s achievement, Chopin wished to try something similar, and in 1836, shortly after completing his Etudes, Opus 25, he began to compose a series of short preludes, but it would take him three years to complete the entire set of 24. In the fall of 1838, Chopin sailed with George Sand to Mallorca, taking with him a number of Bach scores. On the island, living in an abandoned monastery high in a mountain village that was alternately bathed in Mediterranean sunlight and torn by freezing rainstorms, he completed the Preludes in January 1839; they were published in Paris later that year.
While some have heard echoes of Bach in the Preludes, this is very much the music of Chopin. And while these preludes do proceed through all the major and minor keys, Chopin does not write accompanying fugues, as Bach did: these are not preludes to anything larger, but are complete works in themselves. The entire set of 24 preludes lasts about 45 minutes, so these are concise essays in all the keys, and they encompass an enormous variety of technique, ranging from very easy preludes (played by every amateur pianist on the planet) to numbingly difficult ones, playable by only the most gifted performers. They cover an unusual expressive range as well, from the cheerful sunlight of some to the uneasy darkness of others.
Each prelude exists as an independent work and may be played separately, or the entire cycle may be played at once, revealing a full world of sharply contrasted moods and music. Rather than describing each prelude in detail, it may be best to let listeners discover each for themselves. Some of the best-known preludes are of course those accessible to non-professionals. These include No. 20 in C Minor, inevitably nicknamed “Funeral March” (Chopin despised all such subjective titles and the effort to attach programs to pieces he wished to have considered solely as music). Also in this category are the graceful No. 7 in A Major (only sixteen measures long) and No. 4 in E Minor, which—however overfamiliar it has become—remains some of the most expressive music ever written. At the other extreme are such preludes as No. 8 in F-sharp Minor, with its nervous, driven quality, and No. 24 in D Minor, full of bravura brilliance. Many have noted Chopin’s unusual use of repeated chords or notes throughout the set: the tolling sound of these chords is used for quite different expressive purposes in No. 15 in D-flat Major (nicknamed the “Raindrop” by George Sand, to Chopin’s exasperation), in No. 17 in A-flat Major, and in many others.
One of the particular pleasures of a performance of the complete Preludes is not just to hear each individual prelude, some of which pass by in a matter of seconds, but to experience the totality of the world Chopin creates in this set. It is a world of the most dazzling variety, by turns cheerful, dark, lyric, dramatic, friendly, and terrifying, all superbly disciplined within the tight compass of the 24 keys. Bach would have found much of this music strange, but he would instantly have understood Chopin’s achievement in it.
