LUCAS & ARTHUR JUSSEN, pianos

LUCAS & ARTHUR JUSSEN, pianos

THURSDAY, JANUARY 25, 2024 · 7:30 PM THE BAKER-BAUM CONCERT HALL

PRELUDE 6:30 PM

Lecture by Kristi Brown Montesano

Support for this program provided by:

Elizabeth Gabriel Taft

La Jolla Music Society’s 2023–24 season is supported by 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, Cafe Coyote, Rancho Coyote, Giuseppe's, Ace Parking, Brenda Baker and Steve Baum, Raffaella and John Belanich, Gordon Brodfuehrer, Mary Ellen Clark, Bert and Julie Cornelison, Elaine Galinson and Herbert Solomon, Joan and Irwin Jacobs, Angelina and Fred Kleinbub, Dorothea Laub, Vivian Lim and Joseph Wong, Jeanette Stevens, Debra Turner, Sue and Peter Wagener, and Bebe and Marvin Zigman.

MOZART Sonata in D Major for Two Pianos, K. 448 (1756–1791)

Allegro con spirito

Andante

Allegro molto

Lucas Jussen, Arthur Jussen, pianos

SCHUBERT Fantasy in F Minor for Piano Four-Hands, D.940 (1797–1828)

Allegretto molto moderato

Largo

Allegro vivace

Tempo I

Lucas Jussen, Arthur Jussen, piano

INTERMISSION

HANNA KULENTY VAN . . . (b. 1961)

Arthur Jussen, Lucas Jussen, piano

STRAVINSKY The Rite of Spring for Two Pianos (1882–1971) The Adoration of the Earth

The Sacrifice

Lucas Jussen, Arthur Jussen, pianos

This presentation marks Lucas and Arthur Jussen’s La Jolla Music Society debuts.

Program notes by Eric Bromberger

Sonata in D Major for Two Pianos, K.448

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

Born January 27, 1756, Salzburg

Died December 5, 1791, Vienna

Composed: 1781

Approximate Duration: 24 minutes

Mozart wrote almost no music for two pianos, and for obvious reasons. He lived and worked in an era before the solo piano recital, and virtually the entire market for piano music was domestic. In the final decades of the eighteenth century, there were enough homes with a keyboard instrument to make such music profitable, but there were almost none with two instruments. It would take an unusual set of circumstances for a composer to write music for two pianos, and such a set of unusual circumstances led to the creation of the Sonata in D Major.

When Mozart made his break from the Archbishop of Salzburg and moved to Vienna in the summer of 1781, he needed to establish himself in his new city. There were three ways a musician could do that—as teacher, as composer, and as performer—and Mozart did all three: he took students, he published music, and he gave concerts. One figure in Vienna was involved with him in all three of these. Josepha von Aurnhammer was one of Mozart’s first piano students in his adopted city. She was quite a good pianist, and while he discouraged her romantic interest in him, Mozart was happy to have her as a student and a colleague: he often performed with her, he dedicated to her the set of six violin sonatas he published soon after his arrival in Vienna, and he wrote the Sonata in D Major for the two of them to play together, completing it in November 1781. (The Köchel number 448, by the way, is misleadingly high and suggests a later date of composition; the revised catalog number is K.375a.)

The Sonata in D Major is Mozart’s only work in this form. It is also terrific music, and Alfred Einstein is almost rhapsodic about it, saying that “the art with which the two parts are made completely equal, the play of the dialogue, the delicacy and refinement of the figuration, the feeling for sonority in the combination and exploitation of the different registers of the two instruments—all these things exhibit such mastery that this apparently ‘superficial’ and entertaining work is at the same time one of the most profound and most mature of all Mozart’s compositions.”

movements: the hammered octaves in the development of the first movement are particularly impressive.

There is a real pleasure about this music. One feels that Mozart must have enjoyed writing and enjoyed playing it (he and Josepha are known to have given frequent performances). It is easy to understand why.

Fantasy in F Minor for Piano Four-Hands, D.940

FRANZ SCHUBERT

Born January 31, 1797, Vienna

Died November 19, 1828, Vienna

Composed: 1828

Approximate Duration: 18 minutes

The Fantasy in F Minor for Piano Four-Hands is one of the creations of Schubert’s miraculous final year of life, which saw a nearly unbroken rush of masterpieces. Schubert wrote most of the Fantasy in January 1828 but ran into problems and set the work aside for several months, returning to complete it in April. He and his friend Eduard von Bauernfeld gave the first performance on May 9 of that year, six months before the composer’s death at age thirty-one.

Music for piano four-hands is a very particular genre, now unfortunately much out of fashion. In early nineteenth-century Vienna, however, there was a growing market for music that could be played in the home, where there might be only one piano but several pianists, usually amateur musicians. Such music often had an intentionally “social” appeal—it was not especially difficult, and it tended to be pleasing rather than profound. Much of Schubert’s four-hand piano music was intended for just such “home” performers (he often wrote music for his students to play together), but the Fantasy in F Minor is altogether different: this work demands first-class performers and contains some of the most wrenching and focused music Schubert ever wrote. Schubert scholar John Reed has gone so far as it call it “a work which in its structural organisation, economy of form, and emotional depth represents his art at its peak.”

The title “fantasia” suggests a certain looseness of form, but the Fantasy in F Minor is extraordinary for its conciseness. Lasting barely a quarter of an hour, it is in one continuous flow of music that breaks into four clear movements. The very beginning, Allegretto molto moderato, is haunting. Over murmuring accompaniment, the higher voice lays out the wistful first theme, whose halting rhythms and chirping grace notes have caused many to believe that this theme had its origins in Hungarian folk music. Schubert repeats this theme continually—the effect is almost hypnotic—and suddenly the music has slipped effortlessly from F minor into F major. The second subject, based on firm dotted rhythms, is treated at length before the music drives directly into the powerful Largo, which is given an almost baroque luxuriance by its trills and double (and triple) dotting. This in turn moves directly into the Allegro vivace, a sparkling scherzo that feels like a very fast waltz; its trio section (marked con delicatezza) ripples along happily in D major. The writing for the first pianist here goes so high that much of this section is in the bell-like upper register of the piano—the music rings and shimmers as it races across the keyboard. The final section (Schubert marks it simply Tempo I) brings back music from the very beginning, but quickly the wistful opening melody is jostled aside by a vigorous fugue derived from the second subject of the opening section. On tremendous chords and contrapuntal complexity the Fantasy drives to its climax, only to fall away to the quiet close.

Schubert dedicated this music to the Countess Caroline Esterhazy, who ten years before, as a girl of fifteen, had been one of his piano students. Evidence suggests that Schubert was—from a distance—always thereafter in love with her: to a friend he described her as “a certain attractive star.” Given the intensity of this music, it is easy to believe that his love for her remained undiminished in the final year of his life.

VAN . .

HANNA KULENTY

Born March 18, 1961, Bialystok, Poland

Composed: 2014

Approximate Duration: 7 minutes

Polish composer Hanna Kulenty had her initial training in Warsaw, then went on to individual study with Dutch composer Louis Andriessen; she now divides her time between Warsaw and Arnhem in the Netherlands. Kulenty’s early works were influenced by minimalism, but she later developed an approach to composition that she described as “arch” form, in which different layers or textures of music occur at the same time; she refined this into an expressive technique that she has called “European trance music.” Kulenty has lectured and taught in Germany, the Netherlands, the United States, Canada, Spain, and other countries, and she has been an extremely prolific composer, writing works for the stage, orchestra, chamber ensembles, and film. Her opera The Mother of Black-Winged Dreams was premiered in Munich in 1996 and has been revived frequently since then, and her string quartets have been performed by the Kronos and Arditti String Quartets. She has written concertos for a variety of instruments, including flute, violin, viola, two cellos, saxophone, trumpet, and others.

In a note in the score, the composer explains the genesis of her work heard on this concert: “VAN . . . was written in 2014 at the request of the Netherlands Embassy in Warsaw on the occasion of the State Visit of King Willem-Alexander and Queen Máxima” (WillemAlexander, born in 1967, is king of the Netherlands).

Kulenty’s piece, scored for either piano four-hands or for two pianos, spans about seven minutes and requires two virtuoso pianists who can master the music’s rapid exchanges and evolving textures.

The Rite of Spring for Two Pianos

IGOR STRAVINSKY

Born June 17, 1882, St Petersburg, Russia

Died April 6, 1971, New York City

Composed: 1913

Approximate Duration: 33 minutes

In the spring of 1910, while completing the orchestration of The Firebird, Igor Stravinsky had the most famous dream in the history of music: “I saw in imagination a solemn pagan rite: wise elders, seated in a circle, watching a young girl dancing herself to death. They were sacrificing her to propitiate the god of spring.” This idea became The Rite of Spring, which Stravinsky began composing in the summer of 1911, immediately after the premiere of Petrushka. For help in creating a scenario that would evoke the spirit of pagan Russia, Stravinsky turned to the painter-archaeologist-geologist Nicholas Roerich, who summarized the action:

The first set should transport us to the foot of a sacred hill, in a lush plain, where Slavonic tribes are gathered together to celebrate the spring rites. In this scene there is an old witch, who predicts the future, a marriage by capture, round dances. Then comes the most solemn moment.

The wise elder is brought from the village to imprint his sacred kiss on the new-flowering earth. During this rite the crowd is seized with a mystic terror. After this uprush of terrestrial joy, the second scene sets a celestial mystery before us. Young virgins dance on the sacred hill amid enchanted rocks; they choose the victim they intend to honor. In a moment she will dance her last dance before the ancients clad in bearskins to show that the bear was man’s ancestor. Then the greybeards dedicate the victim to the god Yarilo.

This story of primitive violence and nature-worship in pagan Russia, inspired in part by Stravinsky’s boyhood memories of the thunderous break-up of the ice in St. Petersburg each spring, became a half-hour ballet in two parts, “The Adoration of the Earth” and “The Sacrifice.” In the music, Stravinsky drew on the distant past and fused it with the modern. His themes (many adapted from ancient Lithuanian wedding tunes) are brief, of narrow compass, and based on the constantly changing meters of Russian folk music, yet his harmonic language can be fiercely dissonant and “modern,” particularly in the famous repeating chord in “Dance of the Adolescents,” where he superimposes an E-flat major chord (with added seventh) on top of an F-flat major chord. Even more striking is the rhythmic imagination that animates this score: Stravinsky himself confessed that parts of the concluding “Sacrificial Dance” were so complicated that while he could play them, he could not write them down. And beyond all these, The Rite of Spring is founded on an incredible orchestral sense: from the eerie sound of the high solo bassoon at the beginning through its use of a massive percussion section and such unusual instruments as alto flute and piccolo trumpet (not to mention the eight horns, two tubas, and quadruple woodwind), this score rings with sounds never heard before. The premiere may have provoked a noisy riot, but at a more civilized level it had an even greater impact: no composer writing after May 29, 1913, would ever be the same.

Stravinsky’s teacher Rimsky-Korsakov once divided composers into two groups—those who could compose away from the piano and those who had to be at one—and he placed Stravinsky in the latter category: Stravinsky needed to hear music as he composed it. But no simple two-hand version could encompass The Rite of Spring, so Stravinsky wrote it out for piano four-hands; he published this version in 1913, the year of the premiere (the orchestral score was not published until 1921). Inevitably, the piano version loses much of what makes symphonic performances so exciting: the richly varied instrumental palette and the sheer sonic impact of a huge orchestra. But the original piano version offers unusual insights into this music. Shorn of orchestral color, the simple black-andwhite tones of the piano reveal the rhythmic and harmonic complexities of this score with crystalline clarity: here in their purest forms are Stravinsky’s wonderful simultaneous rhythms and pungent polychords. And, beyond these, the keyboard version offers the rare pleasure of watching two virtuoso pianists master the incredible difficulties of a score usually left to a hundred performers.