Robert Blocker, Dean
doctor of musical arts degree recital
Christine Wu, piano
Thursday, December 15, 2022 | 7:30 p.m.| Morse Recital Hall in Sprague Memorial Hall
Oliver Knussen 1952–2018
Trevor Bača b. 1975
Pierre Boulez 1925–2016
Variations, Op. 24 Mráz (2017) Une page d’éphéméride (2005) intermission
Ludwig van Beethoven 1770–1827
33 Variations on a Theme by Diabelli, Op. 120
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.
Artist Profile
Christine Wu, piano
American pianist Christine Wu has performed in concert venues throughout North America and Europe, including Merkin Hall, the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater, Petit Palau de la Música Catalana, and Théâtre du Châtelet.
Praised in The New York Times by chief music critic Anthony Tommasini for her “arresting” playing, Christine’s performance of Oliver Knussen’s Variations, Op. 24, was described as “one of the highlights of the program” at Tanglewood’s Festival of Contemporary Music. Christine is the third prize winner of the Ettore Pozzoli International Piano Competition, and has performed both solo and chamber music in festivals including Music Academy of the West, Tanglewood Music Center, and Aspen Music Festival.
As someone who believes in the importance of playing both classical and contemporary music, Christine has a wide range of experience as a solo and ensemble player of new music. She is a former member of the Frankfurt-based International Ensemble Modern Akademie, and has played in major new music festivals including the Lucerne Festival, ManiFeste Paris, and Time of Music Festival in Viitasaari, Finland, and premiered over 20 new works.
Christine received both her Bachelor and Master of Music degrees at The Juilliard School, where she was a student of HungKuan Chen and Julian Martin. She is a Doctor of Musical Arts degree candidate
at the Yale School of Music, where she studied with Peter Frankl, Christopher Elton, and Peter Serkin. Christine is currently based in Cologne, Germany, where she studies with Pierre-Laurent Aimard.
Program
Notes by the performer
The idea behind this recital program came from my discovery that Oliver Knussen’s Variations were directly inspired by the late Peter Serkin’s rendition of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations. Serkin was an exemplar of what it means to be an interpreter of music: to realize what has been written into the current moment, bridging the gap between past and present; in extrapolation, to connect music from the past to music in the present. I decided to program both sets of variations while also incorporating a work that I also worked on personally with the composer, Trevor Bača’s Mráz. I mention later in these notes that Donald Francis Tovey described the theme of the Diabelli Variations as “rich in musical facts”—axioms that elucidate classical tonality. Both Beethoven and Boulez, in these late works, summarize their meditations on the “musical facts” of their respective musical languages. They demonstrate the richness of music in the way they create an entire musical universe out of the simplest of cells, a creative process which I believe is deeply felt in Knussen and Bača’s music as well. In this program, I try to reflect on old masterpieces through the lenses of newer ones, in the spirit of Peter Serkin, my final teacher at Yale, who remains a continual source of inspiration for me, and to whom I would like to dedicate my final recital.
Variations knussen
In 1989, Peter Serkin embarked on a project to commission eleven composers, many of whom were close friends, to write new works for him that would all be premiered in the same concert. Oliver Knussen was one of these composers, and the two collaborated closely on this work throughout its composition.
Knussen recounts, “I started sketching the piece in April [1989], but I have no confidence when composing at all, so Peter kept encouraging me, which was important. Then in September, I started to fax the music to Peter. [He] looked at the music, then called me on the phone and even played part of the piece on my answering machine. And I would phone him daily, to ask him if he preferred that I went one way or another with my composition. Peter, however, is more respectful toward the composer than almost anyone I know—too respectful, in fact. So he would never tell me which way he preferred me to go; I always had to decide by myself.”
Knussen continued, “Nevertheless, I tried to write the piece with Peter’s sound in mind... in fact, the piece didn`t really start clicking until I picked up a copy of Peter’s recording of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations over the summer, without telling him about it. Suddenly I began to figure out how to write for him, and the piece became a kind of letter to him. It has references to Bach and late Stravinsky and even Balinese music, all of which are important to Peter.’’
Variations opens with the first variation, which essentially announces the theme of the work: a tetrachord (A–C–E–B-flat) followed by a falling major third (D#–B) as a sort of tagline. All twelve variations spring from various transpositions and transformations of this minimal material. According to Serkin, the first five variations are character variations; the sixth through eighth are based on a passacaglia in the bass, wherein each iteration adds a new tone; and the ninth through twelfth are virtuosic etudes, although in the end Knussen decided on a quieter, coda-like ending for the final variation.
The best description of this work comes from Peter Serkin himself: “[It is] of tremendous interest, because it’s so concise and structured around just a few notes, yet it’s rich with permutations and variations of those few notes. So it gives the impression of being very large and spacious, even though it doesn’t last more than the prescribed six minutes.”
Mráz bača
The following inscription, written by the composer, is found at the head of the score: “Under stone, under feather, around the edges of fruit bristles ice in its tracings until morning. So small but so bright it is the crystals in night that give to the frost its serrations. What tracks are these that back-tread to dreams in grains that arise and enjamb?”
Mráz, which is the Czech word for “frost,” is music meant as poetry. The piece is comprised of several different motives that are sharply juxtaposed and combined in a fragmentary way, where listeners are constantly shunted back and forth between motives familiar and unfamiliar that cut in and out of one another. This non-linear unfolding of events—reminiscent of Italo Calvino’s writing style in which a non-linear narrative engages the reader so deeply, only to jerk them out and bring them into a different world again—creates a sense of disjunction that can bring to mind the irregular fissures of tiny hairline fractures in ice crystals.
Through complex metric modulations, disjunct rhythmic motives that hang off each other when combined contrapuntally, and the use of harmonics and the overtone series, Mráz creates a magical soundscape evoking the beauty of a biting cold, culminating in a virtuosic explosion at the end.
Program Notes cont.
Une page d’éphéméride boulez
Une page d’éphéméride is published within an anthology of contemporary pieces titled Piano Project: New Pieces for Piano. This compilation was intended to familiarize students in the early stages of their musical studies with contemporary music to combat the frequent neglect of this repertoire. Nine composers, including Pierre Boulez, were approached to write short pieces for this collection.
In Une page d’éphéméride, Boulez works with simple, raw musical materials and uses all musical parameters (including range, texture, register, pitch, dynamic, duration, and time scale) to systematically expand and contract the material. It is gestural music unfolding in space, geometric in organization, akin to abstract visual art.
The work is clearly structured with an introduction and three following antiphonal sections—juxtapositions of opposites. In the introduction, a typical feature of Boulez’s works, the significance of the major seventh (A#–B) is stablished. These pitches, specifically in the middle register, become the primary boundaries of the piece, which is a narrative of its expansion and contraction. The first section juxtaposes resonant arpeggiations that span the lower half of the keyboard with secco, compact chords bound by the middle-register A#–B interval. The second section juxtaposes an initially dance-like motive that spans the middle of the keyboard with an intense toccatalike motive which is, again, bound by the
A#–B. The third section juxtaposes martellato chord repetitions, still within bounds, with expansive, luxurious arpeggiated chords that span the whole keyboard. Throughout all the sections, Boulez works systematically with increasing and decreasing dynamics (fff > ppp < fff), expanding and contracting tempo/time-duration (toujours plus lent or toujours plus rapide), and building up and building down texture (six notes – one note – six notes).
Through various compositional techniques including filtration of registers and activation of resonances through usage of damper pedals, Boulez achieves myriad sound worlds that one finds in his other works such as Répons or Structures. The softer, comparatively more consonant style hearkens back to his first piano piece, Douze Notations (1945), written much more in the French Modernist tradition of Messiaen, before he was intensely influence by the Second Viennese School, Bartok, and other modernist composers whose music he couldn’t access before the Second World War. In a mere five minutes, Une page d’éphéméride distills manifold aspects of Boulez’s work and comes full circle as a beautiful and concise summation of Boulez’s work and style.
33 Variations on a Theme by Diabelli
In 1819, Viennese composer Anton Diabelli invited fifty-one composers living in or associated with Austria to write variations based on a waltz he had written. Collectively, this would become the Vaterländischer Kunstverein (“Fatherland’s Society of Artists,” loosely translated). These composers included Carl Czerny, Franz Schubert, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Friedrich Kalkbrenner, and even the eleven-year-old Franz Liszt. Ostensibly, Ludwig van Beethoven, Vienna’s preeminent composer, was also entreated to participate, but he rejected this offer of working collectively on what he considered a banal, “cobbler’s patch” theme.
Instead, Beethoven decided to write what would become one of the most monumental works of his late period: 33 Variations on a Waltz by Diabelli. In this masterpiece, Beethoven takes Diabelli’s exaggeratedly hackneyed waltz and, over the course of nearly an hour of music, continually transforms it until it rises in rank to an elegant minuet.
Despite its apparent triviality, musical analyst Donald Francis Tovey described the theme as “rich in musical facts.” This assertion is illuminated by Beethoven’s variations as he reduces the theme’s basic elements—the opening turn, the repetitions of the chords in the right hand, the chromatic and sequential ascent, the falling half step—into motives rich with possibilities. The actual theme is rarely in the foreground, but closer examination shows that every
musical element stems from these simple “musical facts.” This is not a novel technique; Haydn, for example, employs the same technique of expanding tiny motivic kernels into complex works. But Beethoven displays unparalleled mastery here. Along the way, he makes playful reference to Mozart’s aria “Notto giorno faticar” from Don Giovanni and pays homage to the recognizable contrapuntal styles of Bach and Handel so that, as a whole, the variations encompass an entire range of musical tradition.
The concluding variations synthesize the classical conventions of variation finales: the adagio followed by brilliant allegro, the fugue, the minor mode turning to major, the free fantasy and, finally, a return to the theme. The final variation, a minuet, is clearly a sort of neoclassical evocation of an earlier style. As a summation of Beethoven’s technique and life’s work, it is befitting that his final large-scale work for piano would embody the Viennese Classical style he was so essential in shaping. Through Beethoven’s 33 transformations, Diabelli’s crude waltz has risen and opened the door to a transcendental sublime.
beethoven
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