Wei-Yi Yang, piano, February 8, 2023

horowitz piano series

Boris Berman, artistic director

Wei-Yi Yang

Wednesday, February 8, 2022 | 7:30 pm

Morse Recital Hall in Sprague Memorial Hall

Robert Blocker, Dean

1797–1828

Piano Sonata in E-flat major, D. 568

I. Allegro moderato

II. Andante molto

III. Menuetto. Allegretto – Trio

IV. Allegro moderato

Selections from Études, L. 136

1862–1918

XI. Pour les arpèges composés

VII. Pour les degrés chromatiques

X. Pour les sonorités opposées

V. Pour les octaves

intermission

Robert Schumann

1810–1856

Humoreske in B-flat major, Op. 20

Einfach – Sehr rasch und leicht – Noch rascher –Wie im Anfang

Hastig – Nach und nach immer lebhafter und stärker –Adagio

Einfach und zart – Intermezzo

Innig – Schneller

Sehr lebhaft – Immer lebhafter

Mit einigem Pomp

Zum Beschluß

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.

Franz Schubert

Claude Debussy

Artist Profile

Wei-Yi Yang, piano

Pianist Wei-Yi Yang has received worldwide acclaim for his captivating performances and imaginative programming. Winner of the gold medal at the San Antonio International Piano Competition, he has performed at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and across America, Asia, Europe, and Australia. Most recently, his debut at Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium as the soloist in Messiaen’s TurangalîlaSymphonie was hailed by The New York Times as “sensational.”

In demand as a dedicated teacher, Wei-Yi Yang has presented master classes and performances in Scotland, Ireland, Austria, Germany, Italy, Spain, Holland, Thailand, Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, Mexico, Serbia, and Montenegro, among other countries around the world. Mr. Yang’s performances have been featured on NPR, PBS, RAI (Radiotelevisione Italiana), ARTE (Association Relative à la Télévision Européenne), the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Company), and on recordings for such labels as Genuin (Leipzig), Hyperion (London), Naxos (Hong Kong), Albany Records, Renegade Classics, and the Holland-America Music Society.

A dynamic chamber musician with a diverse repertoire, Mr. Yang is a frequent guest artist at festivals in Lucca, Italy; Mallorca, Spain; Novi Sad, Serbia; Monterrey, Mexico; Konstanz, Germany; Kotor, Montenegro; Bergen, Netherland; and La Jolla and Napa, California; as well as the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival in Connecticut. Mr. Yang

has collaborated with such distinguished musicians as Frederica von Stade, Dawn Upshaw, Richard Stoltzman, David Shifrin, Frank Morelli, Roberto Díaz, Roger Tapping, Clive Greensmith, Syoko Aki, and Ani Kavafian, to name just a few, as well as such esteemed ensembles as the Imani Winds, the Brentano, Miró, Dover, Pacifica, and Tokyo string quartets, among numerous others.

Mr. Yang has curated inventive interdisciplinary projects, including a collaboration with English actress Miriam Margolyes as part of the “Dickens’ Women” world tour; lecture/recitals on the confluence of Czech music and literature; and multimedia performances of Granados’ monumental piano suite Goyescas with projections of Goya’s etchings. Mr. Yang has worked with several composers including Ezra Laderman, Martin Bresnick, and George Crumb to prepare their works for premiere and recording. He is a founding member of the Soyulla Ensemble, which received the prestigious McKnight Fellowship and recently made its debut at Alice Tully Hall and toured Korea.

Born in Taiwan of Chinese and Japanese heritage, Mr. Yang studied first in the United Kingdom and then in America with renowned Russian pianists Arkady Aronov at the Manhattan School of Music and Boris Berman at Yale. Mr. Yang has also worked with eminent pianists Claude Frank, Peter Frankl, Vera Gornostaeva, Byron Janis, Lilian Kallir, and Murray Perahia. In 2004, he received his doctor of musical arts degree from Yale University, where he joined the School of Music’s faculty in 2005, and serves as Professor of Piano and Chair of the DMA Committee.

Program Notes

Sonata in E-flat major schubert

Patrick Campbell Jankowski

Owing to the immense body of work that Schubert produced in his short lifetime, one wonders at all that he might have done had he spent more than just thirty-one years on this earth. Like many of his compositions, this piano sonata in E-flat didn’t see the light of day until after his death, though its origin story begins much earlier. It is in fact a revision and expansion of an earlier sonata in D-flat which he never completed in its initial form for whatever reason (it was written when he was in his late teens). Interestingly, he took the time to refresh the work (while transposing it up by a full step in key) almost a decade later. At its core, it is distinctly classical, and even Mozartian in style, particularly in the opening movement. Well-balanced proportions, elegant thematic arcs, delicately ornamented melodies, flourishing scales and buoyant arpeggios abound throughout the work. We are fortunate that Schubert took the time to revisit this work, and that it has been preserved for us to hear today.

Études debussy

Patrick Campbell Jankowski

What is an étude anyway? On its surface, it is a “teaching piece,” meant for musicians to build upon their technical skills. Debussy had plenty of reasons and qualifications to write such pieces, as he was not only an inventive composer but a brilliant pianist, and these études from late in his life are a culmination of his expertise, and as he playfully described, “apart from the question of technique, a useful warning to pianists to not take up the musical profession unless they have remarkable hands.” These are expressive works, and by no means dry nor didactic: each is not only focused predominantly on a particular technical element but uses the very substance of that technique as an inspiration for musical character. The “octaves” (No. 5) are bold and monumental in tone. The “chromatic” study (No. 7) is sinuous and dizzying. The “repeated notes” (No. 9) are percussive and incessant. Lastly, the “chords” of the final étude explore the harmonic possibilities of both expansive sonority and gritty dissonance.

Humoreske

schumann

Patrick Campbell Jankowski

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 Eusebeus, 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 towards 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 sombre 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 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

Program Notes cont.

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.

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