Sean Kennard, piano, October 10, 2019

Robert Blocker, Dean

doctor of musical arts degree recital

Sean Kennard, piano Thursday, October 10, 2019 | 7:30 pm | Morse Recital Hall in Sprague Memorial Hall

Claude Debussy 1862–1918

12 Études, L. 136 Livre I I. Pour les cinq doigts (d’après Monsieur Czerny) II. Pour les tierces III. Pour les quartes IV. Pour les sixtes V. Pour les octaves VI. Pour les huit doigts Livre II VII. Pour les degrés chromatiques VIII. Pour les agréments IX. Pour les notes répétées X. Pour les sonorités opposées XI. Pour les arpèges composés XII. Pour les accords

intermission

This performance is in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Musical Arts degree.

As a courtesy to others, please silence all devices. Photography and recording of any kind is strictly prohibited. Please do not leave the hall during musical selections. Thank you.

Program, cont.

Alban Berg 1885–1935

Piano Sonata in B minor, Op. 1

Maurice Ravel 1875–1937

Valses nobles et sentimentales, M. 61 I. Modéré, très franc II. Assez lent, avec une expression intense III. Modéré IV. Assez animé V. Presque lent, dans un sentiment intime VI. Vif VII. Moins vif VIII. Épilogue. Lent

Sergei Prokofiev 1891–1953

Piano Sonata No. 3 in A minor, Op. 28, “From Old Notebooks”

Artist Profile Sean Kennard, piano American pianist Sean Kennard has won top prizes in international competitions including the Queen Elisabeth, Vina del Mar (Dr. Luis Sigall), Vendome, Sendai, and Hilton Head.

The Washington Post praised Kennard’s “powerful and involved music making,” describing him as “a strong luminous pianist.” His 2011 debut album received a rave review in American Record Guide, which called it “a hidden gem… perfect blend of lyricism and romantic passion… huge romantic sound, and bold melodic vision.” Fanfare wrote of his “penetrating sense of structure… full of life and sparkle,” and pianist Richard Goode called him “an extraordinary pianist, one of the most gifted I have ever heard… a most natural and unaffected performer, who conveys a calm authority even while whipping up a storm.”

He has released albums on Delos, Naxos, and Centaur, and has appeared as soloist with orchestras around the world including the Prague Radio Symphony, Yomiuri Nippon Symphony, National Orchestra of Belgium, Chamber Orchestra of Frankfurt, Morocco Philharmonic, Chile Symphony, and many others. He joined the faculty of Stetson University’s School of Music as head of the piano area in 2017.

Program Notes

by Sean Kennard 12 Études debussy All the works chosen for this program possess dates of composition that fall during the ten years between 1907 and 1917. Besides showcasing a fascinating selection of musical work leading up to and encompassing the First World War, this recital program also aspires to reveal the stunning diversity possible during this volatile yet artistically rich time, even among works composed nearly contemporaneously.

Greatly affected by the beginning of the First World War, Debussy composed little during the year of 1914. Fortunately for us, the war led him to study the works of Chopin, notably the Etudes Op. 10 and Op. 25, which likely inspired the idea of composing his own set of etudes. Since German scores had become unavailable for obvious reasons, Debussy’s publisher Durand contracted French composers (including Saint-Saëns and Faure) to create a new, French edition of classic repertoire. Debussy became responsible for the complete works of Chopin, finishing the project in early 1915.

Filled with new ideas, he spent the summer of 1915 composing, in his own words, “like a madman, or rather like a man long deprived of work.” In three months he had finished En blanc et noir for two pianos, the first two of a projected six sonatas for various instruments, and the twelve Etudes.

The musical language of these late works shares much in common. For instance, the weirdly humorous chromatic staccato

passages of the etude “for repeated notes” parallel similar sections played pizzicato in the witty scherzando movements of both the 1915 cello sonata and the violin sonata of 1917.

The Etudes begin in C major with “for the five fingers: after Monsieur Czerny”— a nod (or perhaps a playful jab) at the tradition of technical exercises for the piano. With a spoof on a bored student hitting wrong notes before succumbing to a fantastic daydream based on the first five notes of the scale, Debussy’s opening etude continues the wry, lighthearted tone of his own foreword to the set. Therein he explained his deliberate choice to forego fingering suggestions, citing the “inexplicable phenomenon [when editors pile multiple alternate fingerings atop each other], whereby the fingers unaccountably multiply.” He relates the story of the young Mozart using his large nose as an extra digit, and alludes to “our old [harpsichord] Masters” who “never indicated any fingering.” Francois Couperin arguably sits foremost among the Baroque French harpsichordists to which he referred, and Debussy originally planned to make him the dedicatee of the set. After consideration, however, he dedicated the Etudes to Chopin rather than Couperin, instead acknowledging the French harpsichord style in the eighth etude, “for ornaments,” which he described as a “Barcarolle on a slightly Italian sea.”

The first book progresses from five fingers to eight (employing both hands minus thumbs), exploring musical material built on various intervals along the way. The pieces in the second book use as their

subject other topics of piano technique: chromatic figuration, ornamentation, repeated notes, multiple contrasting layers of timbre and articulation, arpeggiated figuration, and leaping chords. The Etudes surely deserve a prominent position among Debussy’s greatest piano works: they represent his final venture in the solo piano realm and exemplify his late style, encompassing moods joyful, sensuous, melancholy, mysterious, whimsical, mystical, and triumphant.

Piano Sonata Berg Berg’s Piano Sonata Op. 1 succeeds in fusing heartfelt romanticism with an advanced approach to tonality (or evasion thereof).

Although one of his earliest compositions, it exemplifies these and other attributes that would continue characterizing the composer’s future works. After this, Berg would never again publish another solo piano piece. Following several incomplete drafts, he completed the piano sonata at age twenty-two, midway through his studies with Arnold Schoenberg, which lasted from 1904 until 1911. Opus 1 proved Berg’s genius for rapidly absorbing and mastering the early language of what would later be known as the 2nd Viennese School. Similarly to his teacher’s String Quartet No. 1 and Chamber Symphony Op. 9 composed within the preceding two years, Berg’s sonata achieves remarkable formal clarity despite its densely entwined counterpoint and complex harmonic language. This harmonic language, indebted to that of Schoenberg’s aforementioned pieces, combines tonally

ambiguous quartal and whole-tone structures with a highly chromatic, interweaving web of motivic relations generated largely from the opening material of the work.

The very first gesture — an upward-reaching fourth and tritone followed by a pair of descending major thirds and a chromatic appoggiatura — forms the basis for the harmonic palette of the rest of the work while simultaneously seeding the majority of future intervallic and rhythmic shapes.

Compositional virtuosity aside, Berg manages to conjure a sense of turmoil at once tragic and beautiful. He constantly fluctuates between gestures imbued with both desperation and hope, those that surge with rage and despair, and those that slowly sink into a bleak sense of resignation and numbness. Emotionally exhausted, the piece at last reconciles the questioning opening motive with a now utterly desolate B minor cadence.

Valses nobles et sentimentales Ravel Though composed, in Ravel’s own description, as “a succession of waltzes, after Schubert’s example” (referring to the 1823 sets entitled Valses nobles and Valses sentimentales, respectively), Valses nobles et sentimentales was poorly received at its anonymous premiere for Société musicale indépendante (at least in part) due to its adventurously spicy harmonic choices.

Not only are the majority of triads modified by combinations of the sevenths, ninths, elevenths, and thirteenths prevalent in

Program Notes, cont. jazz, but the proliferation of chromatic passing tones and unresolved appoggiaturas at times creates a crunchy bitonal effect, as in the middle section of the seventh waltz. The resulting dissonances are acute and ubiquitous enough to have caused some among the initial audience to ascribe the unrevealed authorship to composers ranging from Satie to Kodály. Under the surface level harmonic complexity, the waltzes are rather straightforward melodically, rhythmically, and structurally, marking Ravel’s move toward, in his own words, “a style that is simpler and clearer, in which the harmony is harder and the lines of the music are made to show up.”

These ideals epitomize his motto of advice to Ralph Vaughan Williams, who studied with Ravel for a time: to make music “complex but not complicated.”

Ravel arranged Valses nobles et sentimentales for orchestra in 1912. With earlier works such as Ma mére l’Oye, he had established this pattern: to compose a work for the piano in its original essence, and orchestrate only afterwards. However, he conceived his other major work based on the waltz, La valse, originally for orchestra, and only later arranged it for piano. Perhaps due to its orchestral genesis, it positively erupts with the “joie de vivre expressed in the dance,” as Ravel wrote to Jean Marnold.

Although La valse possesses a dizzying rhythmic sweep and ever-escalating sense of thrill absent in Valses nobles et sentimentales, the latter arguably achieves more refinement, nuance, and variety of mood. The “Épilogue” provides an apt illustration, in which he skillfully weaves in snippets of themes from the previous waltzes, reincarnated

into the wearied, dreamily reminiscent quality of the final piece. In this most elegant of collections, Ravel amply succeeds in encapsulating the waltz spirit as described in the quote by Henri de Règnier published as the score’s epigraph: “the delicious and ever-new pleasure of a useless occupation.”

Piano Sonata No. 3 in A minor Prokofiev In 1907-08, at the same time Berg was composing his Piano Sonata Op. 1, Prokofiev sketched several early sonatas while a student at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, several of which he would eventually rework and publish later. One became his first sonata, Op. 1, in 1909; two others were reborn ten years later as the third and fourth sonatas, Opp. 28 and 29 respectively. Prokofiev cast his third piano sonata as a single, concisely structured movement, just as Berg did.

But the similarities between the sonatas end there.

Immediately jolting the audience to attention with brass-like fanfares, the third sonata pulsates with rhythmic energy, swirling textures, and leaping melodies that propel the music airborne. Prokofiev’s harmonies, while colorful, adhere to traditional tonal schemes of sonata form: the introductory fanfare in the dominant moves to the tonic A minor, and thereafter to the relative major key of C. The C major section embodies one of Prokofiev’s quintessential inspirations, the fairy-tale, a compositional thread he would return to throughout his career in works

such as Tales of an Old Grandmother (1918) and Peter and the Wolf (1936). Although built on a four-note gesture reaching upwards an octave — a similar pattern to that of the melody from the introduction’s opening fanfare — the C major section could not contrast more starkly in mood. Its canonically overlapping melodic figures sing in the right hand above smoothly undulating scalar accompaniment in the left. Marked semplice e dolce, this section evokes a sense of storytelling about times long past.

During the development Prokofiev veers suddenly through different effects (swirling triplets from the opening; militaristic, driving rhythms; anxiously turbulent 16th-note gestures) before reaching the nadir: a mysterious pianissimo that gradually crawls out of the depths of the bass register. Sequentially rising trumpet calls lead to a thrilling climax that ends in shattering dissonant chords. Out of the wreckage, a single note survives: the dominant E, which germinates outward into spiraling chromatic figurations that morph back into the tonic key for the recapitulation and rousing coda.

Upcoming Events Carol Jantsch, tuba Faculty Artist Series Giancarlo Castro’s Sonatina for Tuba, and arrangments of music

by Brahms, Faure, Korngold, and Raymond Scott.

3:00 p.m. | Morse Recital Hall

free OCT 13

oct 16 Lunchtime Chamber Music 12:00 p.m. | Morse Recital Hall

free OCT 17 Samuel Suggs, double bass

DMA Recitals 7:30 p.m. | Morse Recital Hall

free oct 22 Akropolis Reed Quintet

Oneppo Chamber Music Series New works by Jeff Scott and Steven Snowden, as well as arrangements of Rameau and Gershwin.

7:30 p.m. | Morse Recital Hall

Tickets start at $28, students $13

oct 25 Ludovic Morlot,

guest conductor

Yale Philharmonia Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony, Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, and Szymanowski’s Violin Concerto No. 1, with Woolsey Hall Concerto Competition winner Jung Eun Kang.

7:30 p.m. | Woolsey Hall Tickets start at $12, Yale faculty/ staff $8, students free* $3 surcharge at the door oct 26 Yale Choral Artists

YSM Ensembles An all-Brahms vocal and piano four-hands program that includes the Liebeslieder Waltzes, Op. 52, and Nänie, Op. 82, with faculty pianists Robert Blocker and Melvin Chen.

7:30 p.m. | Morse Recital Hall

free Nov 1-2 Fall Scenes

Yale Opera A variety of scenes from beloved comic and tragic operas.

7:30 p.m. | Morse Recital Hall

Tickets start at $12, students $5

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