13 minute read
DANIIL TRIFONOV
PRELUDE 6:30 PM
Lecture by Kristi Brown Montesano
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2022 · 7:30 PM
THE BAKER-BAUM CONCERT HALL
TCHAIKOVSKY Children’s Album, Opus 39 (1840–1893) Morning Prayer: Andante Winter Morning: Allegro Playing Hobby-Horses: Presto Mama: Moderato March of the Wooden Soldiers: Moderato The Sick Doll: Moderato The Doll’s Funeral: Adagio Waltz: Allegro assai The New Doll: Allegro Mazurka: Allegro non troppo, Tempo di mazurka Russian Song: Allegro The Accordion Player: Adagio Kamarinskaya: Vivace Polka: Moderato. Tempo di Polka Italian Song: Moderato assai Old French Song: Molto moderato German Song: Molto moderato Neapolitan Song: Andante Nanny’s Story: Moderato The Sorcerer: Presto Sweet Dreams: Moderato Lark Song: Moderato The Organ-Grinder Sings: Andante In Church: Moderato
SCHUMANN Fantasy in C Major, Opus 17 (1810–1856) Durchaus phantastisch und leidenschaftlich vorzutragen Mässig. Durchaus energisch Langsam getragen. Durchweg leise zu halten
INTERMISSION
MOZART Fantasy in C Minor, K.475
(1756–1791)
La Jolla Music Society’s 2022–23 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, Teresa and Harry Hixson, Joan and Irwin Jacobs, Dorothea Laub, Jeanette Stevens, Debra Turner, and Bebe and Marvin Zigman. RAVEL Gaspard de la nuit
(1875–1937) Ondine Le gibet Scarbo
SCRIABIN Piano Sonata No. 5 in F-sharp Major, Opus 53 (1872–1915) Daniil Trifonov, piano
Children’s Album, Opus 39 PETER ILYCH TCHAIKOVSKY
Born May 7, 1840, Votkinsk, Russia Died November 6, 1893, St. Petersburg Composed: 1878 Approximate Duration: 26 minutes
We tend to think of composers as intensely serious creators, bent on producing High Art for the ages, but many great composers—Bach, Schumann, Debussy, Ravel, and Bartók among them—have been happy to compose music expressly for children. This music may be for children’s education or simply for their pleasure, but much of it is so good that it lives on, to be heard in concert halls full of adults.
Tchaikovsky loved children, and he too felt pulled to compose for them. In May 1878 he wrote to his patroness Madame Nedezhna von Meck: “A while ago I thought that it would not be a bad idea to make a small contribution to the stock of children’s musical literature, which is very modest. I want to create a series of little individual pieces just for children, and with an attractive title, like Schumann’s” (he was thinking here of works like Schumann’s Kinderszenen and Album für die Jugend). Over the following month, Tchaikovsky composed a set of twenty-four very brief pieces (many last less than a minute) and titled it Children’s Album.
This all sounds very innocent (and it is), but we should remember that this was also the most difficult moment in Tchaikovsky’s life. The year before, he had been maneuvered into marrying one of his students, a deranged young woman named Antonina Milyukova, and the marriage had been an instant disaster. Tchaikovsky abandoned his bride within days, suffered a nervous breakdown, and fled to Switzerland, where he would slowly recover over the next year. He returned to Russia in April 1878, but, unwilling to face his friends and colleagues in Moscow, he went instead to the family estate in Kamenka in the Ukraine. It was there that Tchaikovsky composed Children’s Album, and perhaps this evocation of childhood memories offered the composer some relief from the problems he was facing in the world of adults.
Tchaikovsky gave Children’s Album a subtitle that makes its identity and heritage clear: “24 pièces faciles, à la Schumann.” Many of these “easy pieces” have titles that evoke the world of childhood, and some are based on folk tunes. None needs detailed description, and audiences (of any age) can sit back and enjoy Tchaikovsky’s excursion into the world of childhood, in all its pleasures and all its innocence.
DANIIL TRIFONOV - PROGRAM NOTES Fantasy in C Major, Opus 17 ROBERT SCHUMANN
Born June 8, 1810, Zwickau, Germany Died July 29, 1856, Endenich, Germany Composed: 1836 Approximate Duration: 28 minutes
In 1835, the 25-year-old Robert Schumann learned of plans to create a Beethoven monument in Bonn and—fired with enthusiasm for the project—resolved to compose a piano sonata and donate all receipts from it to support the monument. He wrote to his publisher, suggesting an elaborate publication in which the score would be bound in black and trimmed with gold, and he proposed a monumental inscription for that cover:
Ruins. Trophies. Palms. Grand Piano Sonata For Beethoven’s Monument
Yet when Schumann began composing this music the following year, his plans had changed considerably. He had fallen in love with the young piano virtuosa Clara Wieck, and her father exploded: Friedrich Wieck did everything in his power to keep the lovers apart, forbidding them to see each other and forcing them to return each other’s letters. The dejected Schumann composed a three-movement sonata-like piece that was clearly fired by his thwarted love: he later told Clara that the first movement was “the most passionate thing I have ever composed—a deep lament for you.” Yet the score, published under the neutral title Fantasy in 1839, contains enough references to Beethoven (quotations from the song cycle An die ferne Geliebte at the end of the first movement and from the Seventh Symphony in the last) to suggest that some of Schumann’s original plans for a Beethoven sonata remained in this music. And finally, to complicate matters even further, Schumann dedicated the score not to Clara but to Franz Liszt, who would become one of its great champions.
If the inspiration for this music is in doubt, its greatness is not: the Fantasy in C Major is one of Schumann’s finest compositions, wholly original in form, extremely difficult to perform, and haunting in its emotional effect. Schumann was right to call this music a Fantasy—it may seem like a piano sonata on first appearance, but it refuses to conform exactly to the rules of sonata form. The first movement, marked “Fantastic and passionate throughout,” begins with an impassioned falling figure that Schumann associated with Clara. In the quiet middle section, which Schumann marks “In the manner of a legend,” the music moves to C minor; yet the conclusion does not recapitulate the opening material in the correct key—the music returns to C major only after the reference to Beethoven’s song from An die ferne Geliebte.
The second movement is a vigorous march full of dotted rhythms; Schumann marks it “Energetic throughout.” Curiously, Clara—the inspiration for the first movement—
liked this movement the best; she wrote to Schumann: “The march strikes me as a victory march of warriors returning from battle, and in the Ab section I think of the young girls from the village, all dressed in white, each with a garland in her hand crowning the warriors kneeling before them.” Schumann concludes with a surprise: the last movement is at a slow tempo—it unfolds expressively, and not until the final bars does Schumann allow this music to arrive—gently and magically—in the home key of C major.
The Fantasy in C Major is one of Schumann’s finest works, yet within years of its composition, Schumann himself was hard on this music, calling it “immature and unfinished . . . mostly reflections of my turbulent earlier life.” By this time, he was happily married to Clara and may have identified the Fantasy with a painful period in his life, yet it is precisely for its turbulence, its pain, and its longing that we value this music today.
Fantasy in C Minor, K.475 WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
Born January 27, 1756, Salzburg Died December 5, 1791, Vienna Composed: 1785 Approximate Duration: 12 minutes
Mozart completed the Fantasy in C Minor for solo piano in Vienna on May 20, 1785, and published it jointly with his Piano Sonata in C Minor, composed the previous October. Mozart’s choice of key and the startling expressive range of these two pieces have reminded many listeners of Beethoven, who was then still a teenager in Bonn: the explosive and sharply contrasted drama of these pieces seems to foreshadow the sort of music the younger composer would write over the next two decades.
Mozart intended that the fantasy and the sonata could be performed separately, and the Fantasy in C Minor is often played by itself, as it is on this concert—it can stand as an independent work rather than simply functioning as a prelude to the sonata. The Fantasy opens with a powerful Adagio. The piano’s opening figure—in octaves—sets the pattern for the entire work: even within the space of one measure, Mozart has already made sharp dynamic contrasts and moved through unexpected tonalities. Such expressive freedom shows up even more violently at the Allegro, where the music rushes ahead ominously. There is a dark urgency to this music, with its powerful accents, clipped phrases, and sudden changes of mood. A brief, gentle Andantino leads to a return of faster tempos, and Mozart rounds off this varied work with a return to the music from the very beginning. Again, there are the same changes of mood, the same contrasts of dynamics, the same ornate swells of sound, before the powerful rush up the scale to the concluding C-minor chord. Gaspard de la nuit MAURICE RAVEL
Born March 7, 1875, Ciboure, Basses-Pyrenées Died December 28, 1937, Paris Composed: 1908 Approximate Duration: 22 minutes
Maurice Ravel had a lifelong fascination with magic and the macabre, and they shaped his music in different ways. While still a student at the Paris Conservatory, he fell in love with a curious book written sixty years earlier: Gaspard de la nuit, a collection of prose-poems by Aloysius Bertrand (1807–1841). Bertrand said that these spooky tales from the middle ages were “after the manner of Callot and Rembrandt” (it was an engraving by Callot—“The Huntsman’s Funeral”—that inspired the third movement of Mahler’s First Symphony), and Bertrand gave these tales a further whiff of brimstone by claiming that the manuscript had been delivered to him by a stranger: Gaspard himself, simply an alias for Satan.
Ravel composed his Gaspard de la nuit—a set of three pieces that blend magic, nightmare, and the grotesque—in 1908, at exactly the same time as he was writing his collection of luminous fairyland pieces for children, Ma mère l’oye. Ravel’s completed work descends from a curiously mixed artistic ancestry: Bertrand’s prose-poems were originally inspired by the visual arts (paintings, etchings, and woodcuts), and in turn—his imagination enlivened by Bertrand’s literary images—Ravel composed what he called “three poems for piano.” This heterogeneous background makes itself felt in the music, for at its best Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit blends word, image, and sound.
Each of the three pieces in Gaspard de la nuit was inspired by a particular prose-poem, and Ravel included these in the score. But Gaspard de la nuit should not be understood as the attempt to recreate each tale in music; rather, these pieces evoke the particular mood inspired by Bertrand’s prose-poems. Still—there are moments of such detailed scene-painting that one imagines Ravel must have had specific lines in mind as he wrote.
Ondine pictures the water sprite who tempts mortal man to her palace beneath the lake. Ravel’s shimmering music evokes the transparent, transitory surfaces of Bertrand’s text, the final line of which reads: “And when I told her that I was in love with a mortal woman, she began to sulk in annoyance, shed a few tears, gave a burst of laughter, and vanished in a shower of spray which ran in pale drops down my blue window-panes.” It is impossible not to hear a conscious setting of these images over the closing moments of this music, which vanishes as suddenly as the water sprite herself.
Le gibet (“The Gallows”) evokes quite a different world, and all commentators sense the influence of Poe here (during his American tour of 1928, Ravel made a point of visiting
Poe’s house in Baltimore). Bertrand’s text begins with a question: “Ah, what do I hear? Is it the night wind howling, or the hanged man sighing on the gibbet?” He considers other possibilities, all of them horrible, and finally offers the answer: “It is the bell that sounds from the walls of a town beyond the horizon, and the corpse of a hanged man that glows red in the setting sun.” Muted throughout, this piece is built on a constantly repeated B-flat, whose irregular tolling echoes the sound of that bell.
The concluding Scarbo is a portrait of some bizarre creature—part dwarf, part rogue, part clown—who seems to hover just outside clear focus. The text concludes: “But soon his body would start to turn blue, as transparent as candle wax, his face would grow pale as the light from a candleend—and suddenly he would begin to disappear.” Ravel’s music—with its torrents of sound, sudden stops, and the unexpected close—suggests different appearances of this apparition.
It should be noted that Gaspard de la nuit is music of stupefying difficulty for the performer, and this was by design: Ravel consciously set out to write a work that he said would be more difficult than Balakirev’s Islamey, one of the great tests for pianists (alert listeners may detect hints of the beginning of Islamey in Scarbo, perhaps an act of homage on the part of Ravel). In his effort to write blisteringly difficult music for the pianist, Ravel succeeded brilliantly. From the complex (and finger-twisting) chords of Ondine through the dense textures of Le gibet (written on three staves) and the consecutive seconds of Scarbo, Gaspard de la nuit presents hurtles that make simply getting the notes almost impossible. And only then can the pianist set about creating the range of tone color, dynamics, and pacing that bring this evanescent music to life.
Born January 6, 1872, Moscow Died April 27, 1915, Moscow Composed: 1907 Approximate Duration: 12 minutes
In the early years of the twentieth century, Alexander Scriabin’s life and art underwent a profound transformation. Falling first under the influence of Nietzsche and then Madame Blavatsky and theosophism, Scriabin conceived a vision in which all life strained toward mystical unity and ecstasy, and this vision transformed his own music. He had begun as a “traditional” composer, one much influenced by Chopin, but now he began to evolve a new musical language, characterized by harmonic and formal freedom and a strong interest in instrumental color. As part of his consuming philosophy, Scriabin wrote what he called a “poem of ecstasy.” This inspired one of his finest orchestral works, a tone poem also called Poem of Ecstasy, written between 1905 and 1908. During its composition, Scriabin took time off to compose his Piano Sonata No. 5, which springs from the same inspiration.
Scriabin wrote this sonata very quickly, in the space of only six days in December 1907. It is in the one-movement form that he came to prefer in his later years, and it lasts a very compact ten minutes. In the printed score, Scriabin quotes four lines from his “poem of ecstasy”:
I call you to life, O mysterious forces
Submerged in depths, obscure!
O thou creative spirit, timid of life,
To you I bring courage! Listeners should not look for a literal depiction of any of this in the music, but should rather take these lines as an indication of the spiritual longing that animated Scriabin’s creativity over the final decade of his brief life.
The sonata gets off to a striking beginning with a very brief—and violent—introduction. A sequence of low trills is broken by salvos of attacks that spiral upward and break off in silence. Out of nowhere comes a quiet transition Scriabin marks Languido (his performance markings, often quite subjective, are a clear indication of what he feels the music is “about,” but they are available to the performer and not to the audience). The main body of the sonata rushes ahead firmly at the Presto con allegrezza (“Very fast, with cheerfulness”), and soon this settles into a rather voluptuous melody marked accarezzevole (“caressingly”). This in turn is interrupted by rhythmic outbursts marked Allegro fantastico. Scriabin’s treatment of this material is very free: he recalls all his themes, varying and alternating them as they reappear, and continually moving them higher in the piano’s register. This music—of great rhythmic freedom and often scintillating color—is extraordinarily difficult for the performer. At the end, a coda marked Presto drives this sonata to a conclusion that is almost breathtaking in its suddenness.
