Igor Levit, piano FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2018 • 8PM Jackson Hall, UC Davis Sponsored by
Chaconne in D Minor (after Partita No. 2 for Solo Violin, BWV 1004) Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) arr. Brahms Fantasia after J.S. Bach, BV 253 Ferruccio Busoni (1866–1924)
Geistervariationen (“Ghost Variations”), or Theme and Variations Robert Schumann in E-flat Major for Piano, WoO 24 (1810–1856) INTERMISSION
“Solemn March to the Holy Grail” from Parsifal, S. 450 Richard Wagner (1813–1883) arr. Liszt Fantasy and Fugue on the chorale “Ad nos, ad salutarem undam” Franz Liszt (1811–1886)
The artists and fellow audience members appreciate silence during the performance. Please be sure that you have switched off cellular devices. Videotaping, photographing and audio recording are strictly forbidden.
PROGRAM NOTES
Chaconne in D Minor (after Partita No. 2 for Solo Violin, BWV 1004) (1717–1720) JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH (Born March 21, 1685 in Eisenach, Germany Died July 28, 1750 in Leipzig) Arranged (1877) for Piano Left Hand by Johannes Brahms (Born May 7, 1833 in Hamburg Died April 3, 1897 in Vienna) Johannes Brahms revered Bach’s music (he was an advisor for the first complete edition of that master’s work), and he held the Chaconne from the Partita No. 2 in D minor for Solo Violin in special regard. In 1877, he arranged the piece for piano left hand and sent a copy of the manuscript and the following explanation to Clara Schumann: “The Chaconne is, in my opinion, one of the most wonderful and most incomprehensible pieces of music.... There is only one way in which I can secure undiluted joy from the piece, though on a small and only approximate scale, and that is when I play it with the left hand alone.... The same difficulty, the nature of the technique, the rendering of the arpeggios, everything conspires to make me—feel like a violinist!” Brahms published his arrangement of the Chaconne for left hand in 1877. Of the Chaconne, Bach scholar Philipp Spitta wrote, “From the grave majesty of the beginning to the 32nd notes which rush up and down like the very demons; from the tremulous arpeggios that hang almost motionless, like veiling clouds above a dark ravine ... to the devotional beauty of the D major section, where the evening sun sets in a peaceful valley: the spirit of the master urges the instrument to incredible utterances. This Chaconne is a triumph of spirit over matter such as even Bach never repeated in a more brilliant manner.” Fantasia after J.S. Bach, BV 253 (1909) FERRUCCIO BUSONI (Born April 1, 1866 in Empoli, Italy Died July 27, 1924 in Berlin) Ferruccio Busoni was perhaps the most cosmopolitan musician of the early 20th century. The son of an Italian virtuoso clarinetist father and a German pianist mother (he was fluent in both Italian and German from infancy), Busoni was born in 1866 near Florence, raised in Austria, studied in Leipzig, taught in Helsinki (where his students included Jean Sibelius) and Moscow (where he married the daughter of a Swedish sculptor) and Bologna and Weimar and Boston and New York, toured extensively in Europe and America, and chose Berlin as his residence. Such internationalism, coupled with his probing intellectualism, gave Busoni a breadth of vision as composer, conductor and pianist that few musicians of his time could match.
On May 12, 1909, Busoni’s father, Ferdinando, died after a protracted illness. Busoni’s feelings had been conflicted since boyhood about Ferdinando, whom he described as “a simple virtuoso on the clarinet who liked to play fantasias on Il Trovatore and The Carnival of Venice; he was a man of incomplete musical education, an Italian and a cultivator of bel canto.” Ferdinando quickly recognized his son’s exceptional musical gifts and he drilled the boy ruthlessly to develop them. “For four hours a day he would sit by me at the pianoforte,” Busoni recalled, “with an eye on every note and every finger. There was no escape and no interruption except for his explosions of temper, which were violent in the extreme.” Balancing this harsh treatment, however, was Ferdinando’s devotion to the boy’s training and his surprisingly refined musical tastes, most notably his love of Bach. “I have to thank my father for the good fortune that he kept me strictly to the study of Bach in my childhood,” Busoni recalled in the last year of his life. “How did such a man in his ambition for his son’s career come to hit upon the very thing that was exactly right? I can only compare it to a mysterious revelation. He educated me in this way to be a ‘German’ musician and showed me the path that I never entirely deserted, though at the same time I never cast off the Latin qualities given to me by nature.” It was fitting that Busoni should incorporate the music of Bach into the memorial he composed for his father in June 1909, which embeds passages borrowed from three of Bach’s organ works in original music of austere and profoundly solemn character. The Fantasia after Bach opens with Busoni’s evocation of the free preludial style of arpeggios and figurations that provided the gateway to innumerable Baroque keyboard pieces. The phrases of Bach’s harmonization of Christ, du bist der helle Tag (“Christ, Thou Art the Shining Day”) from the Chorale Prelude, BWV 766, are then quoted, separated by what Busoni’s biographer Antony Beaumont identified as a three-chord “death motif” found in this and other of the composer’s works; the following episode transcribes one of Bach’s variations on the melody. An imitative treatment of Gottes Sohn ist kommen (“The Son of God Has Come”) from BWV 703, whose first phrase is identical with the familiar Christmas song In dulci jubilo (know in English as “Good Christian Men, Rejoice”), provides a bright episode at the work’s center. A mounting climax is abruptly broken off, however, and the variations on Christ, du bist der helle Tag are resumed in free paraphrase. The third Bach quotation—the Advent hymn Lob sei dem allmächtigen Gott (BWV 602, “Praised Be Almighty God”)—is woven into the rich contrapuntal texture. A reminiscence of earlier passages leads to the tranquil coda, which evokes distant bells in music that is marked both Riconciliato (“Reconciled”) and Pax Ej! (“Peace Forever!”). Busoni first played his Fantasia after Bach in London on October 16, 1909. His mother had died just two weeks before. His musical epitaph for her was the deeply moving Berceuse élégiaque.
Geistervariationen (“Ghost Variations”), or Theme and Variations in E-flat Major for Piano, WoO 24 (1854) ROBERT SCHUMANN (Born June 8, 1810 in Zwickau, Germany Died July 29, 1856 in Endenich, near Bonn)
“Solemn March to the Holy Grail” from Parsifal, S. 450 (1877–1882) RICHARD WAGNER (Born May 22, 1813 in Leipzig Died February 13, 1883 in Venice)
“Angels,” Robert told Clara at their home in Düsseldorf on February 12, 1854, angels were performing for him “music more wonderfully beautiful and played by more exquisite instruments than ever sounded on earth.” But, sometimes, a single pitch, relentless and piercing, which lingered from the spirits’ visit expanded into hideous sounds, and twisted itself into a “very strong and tormenting auditory disturbance.” The hallucinations came and went over the next few days, exacting “exquisite suffering” upon both husband and wife, Robert confessed to his diary. During the night of February 17–18, the angels returned and sang to him a simple diatonic melody, almost a chorale, which he leaped from bed to record. The following morning Clara observed “a frightful change. The angels’ voices transformed themselves into the voices of demons, with horrible music. They told him that they wanted to cast him into hell, and he screamed in pain as the embodiments of hyenas and tigers rushed forward to seize him.” He still had lucid moments. On February 22, he was able to write a few letters, again make entries in his diary, and even compose some variations on the angels’ theme. As his psychosis worsened, however, Schumann began speaking about his fear of harming Clara or the children—she was then well advanced on her eighth pregnancy—and he asked to be taken to hospital. Clara, not yet ready to agree to that proposal, hovered constantly at Robert’s bedside except for a few minutes on Monday, February 27, when she went to confer with his physician. During that brief interval, Schumann dressed himself, walked through the front gate to the city bridge, and tossed himself into the Rhine in a suicide attempt. Two fishermen dragged him out, and led him home through the crowds of masked revelers prowling the city for the pre-Lenten carnival. Clara, exhausted and terrified, was taken to the home of a friend, replaced by two male attendants who looked constantly after Schumann. His mind cleared for a few hours later that day. He wrote two letters and made a copy of the new Theme and Variations in E-flat (the “Ghost Variations” as the piece came to be known), and assented to the decision to place him in a private institution at Endenich, near Bonn, eight hours away by coach. Johannes Brahms, a devoted friend of the Schumanns since they met the previous September, arrived on March 3. He was there to help Clara when Robert was taken away the next day. Brahms and a few others visited him at Endenich, but Clara did not see her beloved husband again until July 28, 1856, the day before he died, two and a half years later. She jealously guarded the manuscript of the “Ghost Variations” for the rest of her life, though she did allow Brahms to keep the copy Robert made and to use the theme for his own set of Variations in E-flat major for Piano Duet (Op. 23) in 1861. Schumann’s Variations, his last creative thought, was not published until 1939.
Arranged (1882) by Franz Liszt (Born October 22, 1811 in Doborján, Hungary [now Raiding, Austria] Died July 31, 1886 in Bayreuth, Germany) Franz Liszt was a prolific arranger of orchestral and other works for piano—his transcriptions and arrangements include at least 180 separate items. With the exception of the Fantasy on “Rienzi,” Liszt’s piano reworkings of excerpts from Wagner’s operas are straightforward transcriptions rather than virtuoso elaborations of their themes. Parsifal, Wagner’s final opera, concerns the knights of the temple of Monsalvat, who guard the Holy Grail, the cup from which Christ drank at the Last Supper, and the spear that pierced his side at the crucifixion. The story of the opera revolves around Parsifal, a man without guile who, through his learning of compassion, renunciation of worldly passions, and purity of faith, brings salvation to the knights. Soon after the opera premiered, Liszt made a piano arrangement of the Solemn March to the Holy Grail, which accompanies the entry of the knights into the hall of their castle in Act I. Leslie Howard, who recorded Liszt’s complete piano music for Hyperion, wrote, “Liszt does not really follow Wagner at all closely. It is as if he were recalling the march in a dream. Liszt’s harmony is a lot less comforting than Wagner’s, and there is no positive conclusion. As in so many of Liszt’s later works, there remains only a desolate silence.” Fantasy and Fugue on the chorale “Ad nos, ad salutarem undam” (1850) FRANZ LISZT Arranged (1897) for piano by Ferruccio Busoni Liszt was famed as a pianist but he also had an abiding interest in the organ. He created nearly 50 pieces for the instrument, including transcriptions of works by Arcadelt, Lassus, Bach, Mozart, Chopin, Nicolai, Verdi and Wagner or his own music. Among his original organ compositions is the Fantasy and Fugue on the chorale “Ad nos, ad salutarem undam” (“Come to Us, Waves of Salvation”), based on a chorale melody from Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Le Prophète, premiered at the Paris Opéra in 1850. The Fantasy and Fugue on “Ad nos” was among the early realizations of his process of “thematic transformation,” in which a single core theme is manipulated through a wide variety of moods, tempos and rhythms to create the various “movements” of a continuous large-scale composition; Liszt perfected the method in his tone poems and piano concertos during the following years. The work opens with an extended Fantasy of varied moods on the chorale’s first phrase. An unadorned statement of the complete chorale melody begins an Adagio section that explores the theme’s introspective possibilities. A brilliant, cadenza-like passage leads to the Fugue, a muscular and inventive movement that may well have originated in Liszt’s own improvising. A long, flamboyant coda of almost unfettered energy propels the work to its triumphant conclusion. ©2018 Dr. Richard E. Rodda
Photo by Robbie Lawrence
ABOUT THE ARTIST
IGOR LEVIT PIANO Igor Levit is the 2018 Gilmore Artist and Royal Philharmonic Society’s Instrumentalist of the Year. In October 2018 Sony Classical released Levit’s highly anticipated fourth album for the label, Life, featuring works by Bach, Busoni, Bill Evans, Liszt, Wagner, Rzewski and Schumann. Levit is touring the program this season, amongst others (and in addition to his Mondavi Center debut), at New York’s Carnegie Hall, at San Francisco Performances, the Lucerne Piano Festival, Lisbon’s Gulbenkian Foundation and at the Berlin Philharmonie. Further recital appearances see him perform in Vienna, Hamburg, Munich, Antwerp, Liège and Dresden. Spring 2019 will mark his Paris and Tokyo recital debuts followed by three recital evenings at Wigmore Hall. After his debuts with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at Ravinia Festival and the Vienna Philharmonic at the Salzburg Festival in summer 2018, orchestral debuts in the 2018–19 season include appearances with the Orchestre de Paris, Orchestre National de France, Filarmonica della Scala and Leipzig’s Gewandhausorchester. He returns to the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks and Pittsburgh Symphony, and joins the Vienna Philharmonic on tour which also comprises his highly anticipated New York orchestral debut at Carnegie Hall in March 2019.
Born in Nizhni Nowgorod in 1987, Levit moved to Germany with his family at age 8. He completed his piano studies at Hannover Academy of Music, Theatre and Media in 2009 with the highest academic and performance scores in the history of the institute. Levit has studied under the tutelage of Karl-Heinz Kämmerling, Matti Raekallio, Bernd Goetze, Lajos Rovatkay and Hans Leygraf. As the youngest participant in the 2005 Arthur Rubinstein Competition in Tel Aviv, Levit won the Silver Prize, as well as the Prize for Best Performer of Chamber Music, the Audience Favorite Prize and the Prize for Best Performer of Contemporary Music. In Berlin, where he makes his home, Levit is playing on a Steinway D Grand Piano kindly given to him by the Trustees of Independent Opera at Sadler’s Wells.
World Management: Classic Concerts Management GmbH Exclusive Manager: Kristin Schuster kristin.schuster@ccm-international.de
Highlights of past seasons included debuts with the Royal Concertgebouw Orkest, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, Berliner Philharmoniker, Staatskapelle Dresden, Cleveland Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra as well as the 2017 opening night of the prestigious BBC Proms alongside the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Edward Gardner and a tour of Asia with the Bavarian State Orchestra conducted by Kirill Petrenko. An exclusive recording artist for Sony Classical, Levit’s debut disc of the five last Beethoven Sonatas won the 2014 BBC Music Magazine Newcomer of the Year award and the Royal Philharmonic Society’s 2014 Young Artist Award. In October 2015, Sony Classical released Levit’s third solo album in cooperation with the Festival Heidelberger Frühling featuring Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations and Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated!, which has been awarded the Recording of the Year and Instrumental Award at the 2016 Gramophone Classical Music Awards.
We mourn the passing of our dear friend and supporter
Eldridge Moores 1938–2018