Yefim Bronfman, piano, December 7, 2016

Robert Blocker, Dean

horowitz piano series

Yefim Bronfman

Boris Berman, Artistic Director December 7, 2016 • Morse Recital Hall

Horowitz Piano Series

Yefim Bronfman December 7, 2016 • Morse Recital Hall

Béla Bartók 1881–1945

Suite for Piano, Op. 14 I. Allegretto II. Scherzo III. Allegro molto IV. Sostenuto

Robert Schumann 1810–1856

Humoreske in B-flat major, Op. 20 I. Einfach II. Sehr rasch und leicht III. Hastig IV. Einfach und zart V. Intermezzo VI. Innig VII. Sehr lebhaft VIII. Finale intermission

Claude Debussy 1862–1918

Suite bergamasque, L.75 I. Prélude II. Menuet III. Clair de lune IV. Passepied

Igor Stravinsky 1882–1971

Three Movements from Petrushka (1921) I. Russian Dance II. In Petrushka’s Cell III. The Shrove-tide Fair

As a courtesy to the performers and audience, silence electronic devices.

Please do not leave the hall during selections. Photography or recording of any kind is prohibited.

Artist Profile · Notes on the Program

Yefim Bronfman, piano Internationally recognized as one of today’s most acclaimed and admired pianists, Yefim Bronfman stands among a handful of artists regularly sought by festivals, orchestras, conductors, and recital series. His commanding technique, power, and exceptional lyrical gifts are consistently acknowledged by the press and audiences alike.

At the center of this season is a residency with the Staatskapelle Dresden, which includes all the Beethoven concerti conducted by Christian Thielemann in Dresden and on tour in Europe. Mr. Bronfman will also be performing Bartók concerti with the London Symphony Orchestra and Valery Gergiev in Edinburgh, London, Vienna, Luxembourg, and New York. Recital performances will capture audiences with the cycles of the daunting complete Prokofiev sonatas over three programs in Berlin, New York’s Carnegie Hall, and Cal Performances, Berkeley.

As a regular guest, Mr. Bronfman will return to the Vienna, New York, and Los Angeles philharmonics, and the Mariinsky, Cleveland, and Philadelphia orchestras, as well as the symphonies of Boston, Montreal, Toronto, San Francisco, and Seattle. Following the success of their first U.S. tour last spring, Mr. Bronfman will rejoin AnneSophie Mutter and Lynn Harrell in May for a European tour that takes them from Madrid to Berlin, Moscow, and Milan.

Mr. Bronfman was awarded the Avery Fisher Prize in 1991, and the Jean Gimbel Lane Prize in piano performance from Northwestern University in 2010. He has been nominated for three Grammy®

Awards, one of which he won with EsaPekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic for their recording of the three Bartók piano concerti. Born in Tashkent in the Soviet Union on April 10, 1958, Yefim Bronfman immigrated to Israel with his family in 1973. béla Bartók Suite for Piano, Op. 14 Béla Bartók is often characterized as an “ethnomusicologist” — and rightly so.

He was one of the first composers to travel various countrysides with a recording device, collecting the music of peasants, farmers, and gypsies. Less commonly, he is considered an “innovator of piano writing” like his predecessor Franz Liszt or his contemporary Claude Debussy. His Suite for Piano, Op. 14, shows us a composer who was deeply consumed by folk music and equally curious about the sonic possibilities of the instrument. After his research trips, nearly all of his works were touched in one way or another by the elements of folk music: modality, irregular meters and rhythms, simple melodies, and non-western scale patterns. Although the Suite does not quote any folk music directly, Eastern European and North African influences course through the writing. In a 1944 interview, Bartók reflected on the Suite he had completed in 1916, saying, “The Suite Op. 14 has no folk tunes. It is based entirely on original themes of my own invention. When this work was composed I had in mind the refining of piano technique, the changing of piano technique, into a more transparent style. A style more of bone and muscle opposing the heavy chordal style of the late, latter romantic

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period, that is, unessential ornaments like broken chords and other figures are omitted and it is more a simpler style.”

The Suite was conceived in five movements, one of which he later removed from the set. The first three movements are rhythmically driven, smug, and indelibly touched by folk melodies; the last is soft and dreamlike.

—Julia Clancy Robert Schumann Humoreske in B-flat major, Op. 20 A love of written language never left Robert Schumann, and the composer’s love of literature unquestionably shaped his musical identity. The son of a bookseller and publisher, Schumann grew up reading and writing. A favorite wordsmith of his was Jean Paul — the pseudonym of the inventive German writer Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, chosen in honor of Rousseau — whose unconventional mix of humor and pathos coincided perfectly with the changing artistic trends of German Romanticism, yet, like Schumann, never quite fit in with even these conventions. Schumann’s literary conceptions of Florestan and Eusebius, the dual personae of his own character, were likely inspired by themes in the writings of Jean Paul, who first coined the term Doppelgänger, an early literary incarnation of the psychological ego and id. Unsurprisingly, the writer and his style found their way into Schumann’s music, and perhaps their clearest intersection is in the Humoreske, a collection of strung-together miniatures of a variety of moods and psychological states. The work occupies an interesting place as the culmination of what may be called Schumann’s early “experimental years.”

Though it is called a work in B-flat, much of it occupies the darkened harmonic world of the relative minor. B-flat and G minor are, in some ways, modal manifestations of a split personality, one laughing and the other crying. Meandering between these two tonal areas shades the work with an unexpected instability and, to some degree, an ironic sense of humor. The title itself implies comedic wit, yet it more accurately refers to a sense of “mood.” Even from the very first chord of the work, Schumann places a poignant F-sharp in the right hand melody within a harmonic context in which the note yearns upwards to resolve toward G, only to step down, one pitch at a time, to the tonic B-flat, before immediately leaping upward again. The melody strives and struggles against its own harmonic predestination.

The delicate opening piece gives way to a vibrant and humorous presto episode, marked by sudden, fleeting, and drastic shifts into minor mode. The fanfare-like figures provide an ironic contrast to the brief ventures into more somber and grave melodic material. Almost in the blink of an eye, the lively central section relaxes into a brief restatement of the lyrical theme from the very beginning of the work. As of now, the listener can hardly perceive whether to hear the two opening “character pieces” as part of one larger form, or as two separate entities. The Doppelgänger is surely present.

The following piece, marked “Hastig,” is written in three staves for the piano. The two outer staves, for right and left hand, are busy with a rush of rhythmic energy.

Yet within this, in the middle stave — which the composer marks “inner voice” — Schumann buries a delicate melody

Notes on the Program

framing the key of B-flat major, like a transplanted recollection of the opening theme of the entire collection. It is present, if not always the focus. Schumann literally intends for this inner voice to remain “within,” and it is not meant to be played, but rather “kept in mind.” Ever aware of the act of performing, Schumann is engaging the pianist as much as the audience in the psychological processes at work.

At this point, Schumann’s form has become quite unhinged, and he wanders through sudden and drastic character changes so quickly that we can hardly keep up. Moments of fury give way to brief, almost elegiac moments of repose, and the fleeting sight of B-flat major becomes increasingly distant, swallowed up into the G minor mode that comes to predominate the piece.

The finale embodies instability and mercuriality. Frequent fermatas break up the melodic line, and the pianist is asked to pause, almost as though deep in thought.

This greatly contrasts the character of the melody itself which is meandering, sinuous, and wandering, almost as though it could go on indefinitely. A poignant and introspective ending of this final “resolution” movement at last grants us peace. Yet Florestan, the fiery extrovert to Eusebius’ pensive embodiment, seems to get the last word, as a brief coda almost yells in triumph. However, Schumann carefully balances the two personalities. Though Florestan speaks loudest, and last, he did not speak longest, and the introspective, melancholic nature of the work, and of Schumann’s own personality, echoes long after the “grand finale” to the Humoreske.

claude debussy Suite bergamasque, L. 75 Claude Debussy once proclaimed that “there is no school of Debussy. I do not have disciples.” His impact on music around the turn of the twentieth century is inarguably profound. Although he may have been somewhat uncomfortable with his fame and influence, Debussy was in his time considered the head of the French “new wave” of musical composition – marked by a broadened spectrum of tonality, texture, and form – that ushered in the era that would come to be known as Debussysme.

It is fame, in fact, that may have contributed to the publication of the Suite bergamasque for solo piano.

The four brief pieces comprising this suite were written in 1890, when the composer was a student, just 28 years of age, at the Conservatoire du Paris. The fact that the composer opted to publish these works fifteen years later is intriguing. In the intervening years, the popularity of the symphonic poems Prélude á l’après-midi d’un faune and La mer, as well as the masterful symbolist opera Pelléas et Mélisande, had spread like wildfire across Europe, making Debussy a household name. Around 1905, the demand for the composer’s music was quite high, and “Debussy fever” was rampant in Parisian artistic circles. Publishers were eager to capitalize on this popularity, and urged the composer to provide more music to sell, particularly in the lucrative market of solo piano works, which could be played privately in salons by connoisseurs and amateurs alike.

The composer’s artistic language had changed a great deal in the decade and a

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half since the Suite bergamasque was originally conceived – Debussy expressing some distaste for his earlier style of composition – leading the composer to significantly revise these pieces before publication. However, the question of how much of this music comes from Debussy’s student days, and how much hails from a mature composer known to many as a radical and groundbreaking artist, remains unanswered.

It is interesting that so modern and innovative a composer as Debussy would provide a suite of pieces in the style of the late Baroque. The Suite bergamasque is somewhat tongue-in-cheek in its approach to this elegant, elaborate Rococo style.

The work is a reinterpretation and evocation of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French keyboard music, viewed through Debussy’s lens. Rameau and particularly Couperin, whose styles are called forth in the suite, were arguably as adventurous in their respective times as Debussy was in his own, and in this sense, the composer pays tribute to the freshness of this antiquated music in revitalizing it, and imbuing it with his own take on texture and harmony. Though the form and style of each piece are largely drawn from centuries prior, the liberation from traditional tonality is unmistakably in Debussy’s own voice.

The Baroque influence is noticeable from the outset, in the Prélude. The movement unfolds with a free flourishing right hand over a bass line that grounds it to earth, very much indebted to figured bass writing of the Baroque, although the prevalence of parallel motion would have Rameau turning in his grave. There are playful character changes throughout,

which lend the piece an improvisatory feel befitting a Baroque keyboard prelude.

The Menuet curiously mixes dense complex contrapuntal writing with a light and delicate style, embellished with grace notes and turns evoking an older style of music. However, Debussy’s playful freedom with the triple meter would make this formal courtly dance quite difficult to align with the feet. One can almost imagine the composer delighting in the idea of dancers tripping over themselves to keep in step.

The famous “Clair de lune” that follows has largely overshadowed the other movements in popularity. This piece is truly an outlier, and does not, in fact, reflect back on the Baroque style. Instead, it likely refers to the symbolist poet Paul Verlaine’s poem of the same name. Interestingly, “Clair de lune,” or “moonlight,” was a title applied in Debussy’s later revisions; it was originally called simply “Promenade sentimentale,” lacking the nocturnal imagery of the revised title. As found in his later preludes, the composer was very conscious of how his audience perceived extramusical associations in his music. Now that the title has been given to the piece, however, one almost cannot help but imagine the glistening of moonlight when hearing it. The poem may also provide the key to understanding the title of the entire suite, as Verlaine refers, in the opening stanza, to “charming masqueraders and bergamaskers ... playing the lute and dancing and almost sad beneath their fanciful disguises.”

Such sadness, however, does not permeate the levity of the closing piece, a Passepied in duple meter. This is a quick yet relaxed

Notes on the Program

dance – literally translated as “pass-foot” – likely originating in the Brittany region of northwestern France. If the Menuet may be considered a “high” or stately dance, then this jovial piece is more reflective of the “low” dances of commoners. Just as Debussy subversively mocks the formality of the Menuet, he just as cleverly elevates the “common” Passepied to a level of elegance and refinement befitting the suite.

—Patrick Campbell Jankowski igor stravinsky Three Movements from Petrushka (1921) Stravinsky’s Petrushka, despite its renown as a ballet, began its musical life as a concerto for piano and orchestra. Ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev heard early renditions of the piece in 1911, and, recognizing the work’s theatrical potential, urged the composer to orchestrate it for a ballet score. Ten years later, Arthur Rubenstein, too, found potential in the work — potential of a different kind. With a large commission and a bit of urging from Rubenstein, Stravinsky returned Petrushka to its roots as a solo piano piece. The work on tonight’s program consists of three scenes from the Ballet: “Russian Dance,” “In Petrushka’s Cell,” and “The Shrove-tide Fair.” In the “Russian Dance,” puppets dance after being brought to life by a magician. “In Petrushka’s Cell” begins as the puppet Petrushka is kicked into his room and wallows in self-pity. “The Shrove-tide Fair” depicts a bustling carnival full of gypsies, puppets, masqueraders, coachmen, and a dancing bear. When orchestral scores are placed on the chopping block to become “piano reductions,” the aim of arrangers is to preserve as much of a work’s

original orchestral character as possible, while creating a score that could conceivably fit in a pianist’s hands. Three Movements from Petrushka, arranged by Stravinsky himself, does little in the way of “reduction.”

Stravinsky’s piano version is a fullyfledged concert work that is every bit as exhilarating as its orchestral counterpart.

— Julia Clancy

UP NEXT

PROKOFIEV AT 125 DECEMBER 14, 2016 In a program hosted by faculty pianist Boris Berman in observance of the 125 th anniversary of Prokofiev’s birth, YSM student pianists perform transcriptions and arrangements of the composer’s ballets Wednesday at 7:30 pm · Morse Recital Hall Tickets $10 · Students $5 · Media Sponsor: wshu 91.1 fm

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Upcoming Events New Music for Orchestra december 8

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Christian Gerhaher, baritone december 9

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Yale School of Music Ensembles Students from Frank Morelli’s bassoon studio present their annual Bassoonarama program Sudler Recital Hall | Monday | 7:30 pm free admission

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Prokofiev at 125 december 14

Horowitz Piano Series In observance of the 125th anniversary of Prokofiev’s birth, and hosted by faculty pianist Boris Berman, YSM student pianists perform transcriptions and arrangements of the composer’s ballets Morse Recital Hall | Wednesday | 7:30 pm Tickets start at $10 • Students $5

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Yale School of Music Ensembles A program of chamber music by students from Benjamin Verdery’s guitar studio Morse Recital Hall | Thursday | 7:30 pm free admission

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