horowitz piano series
Boris Berman, artistic director
Yefim Bronfman, piano
Wednesday, January 29, 2025 | 7:30 p.m.
Morse Recital Hall in Sprague Memorial Hall
José García-León, Dean
Program
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
1756–1791
Claude Debussy 1862-1918
Piano Sonata No. 12 in F major, K. 332
I. Allegro
II. Adagio
III. Allegro assai
Images Book 2 (1907)
I. Cloches à travers les feuilles
II. Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut
III. Poissons d’or
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky 1840–1893
intermission
Grand Sonata in G major, Op. 37
I. Moderato e risoluto
II. Andante non troppo quasi Moderato
III. Scherzo. Allegro giocoso
IV. Finale. Allegro vivace
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
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.
In Europe he will tour extensively in recital and with orchestras in cities including Berlin, Vienna, Rome, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Brussels, and Leipzig. Continuing his long-standing partnership with Pinchas Zukerman, the duo will appear in Copenhagen, Milan, Naples, Barcelona, Berlin, and St. Petersburg in March. Always keen to explore chamber music repertoire, Mr., Bronfman’s partners have also included Martha Argerich, Magdalena Kožená, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Emmanuel Pahud, and many others.
Mr. Bronfman works regularly with an illustrious group of conductors, including Daniel Barenboim, Herbert Blomstedt, Semyon Bychkov, Riccardo Chailly, Christoph von Dohnányi, Gustavo Dudamel, Charles Dutoit, Daniele Gatti, Valery Gergiev, Alan Gilbert, Mariss Jansons, Vladimir Jurowski, James Levine, Zubin Mehta, Riccardo Muti, Andris Nelsons, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Sir Simon Rattle, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Franz Welser-Möst, and David Zinman.
Widely praised for his solo, chamber and orchestral recordings, Mr. Bronfman has been nominated for 6 GRAMMY®
Awards, winning in 1997 with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic for their recording of the three Bartok Piano Concerti. His prolific catalog of recordings includes works for two pianos by Rachmaninoff and Brahms with Emanuel Ax, the complete Prokofiev concerti with the Israel Philharmonic and Zubin Mehta, a Schubert/ Mozart disc with the Zukerman Chamber Players and the soundtrack to Disney’s Fantasia 2000. His most recent CD releases are the 2014 GRAMMY® nominated Magnus Lindberg’s Piano Concerto No. 2 commissioned for him and performed by the New York Philharmonic conducted by Alan Gilbert on the Da Capo label; Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No.1 with Mariss Jansons and the Bayerischer Rundfunk; a recital disc, Perspectives, complementing Mr. Bronfman’s designation as a Carnegie Hall ‘Perspectives’ artist for the 2007-08 season; and recordings of all the Beethoven piano concerti as well as the Triple Concerto together with violinist Gil Shaham, cellist Truls Mørk, and the Tönhalle Orchestra Zürich under David Zinman for the Arte Nova/BMG label.
Born in Tashkent in the Soviet Union, in 1973 Yefim Bronfman immigrated to Israel with his family, where he studied with pianist Arie Vardi, head of the Rubin Academy of Music at Tel Aviv University. In the US he studied at The Juilliard School, Marlboro School of Music, and Curtis Institute of Music, under Rudolf Firkusny, Leon Fleisher, and Rudolf Serkin. A recipient of the Avery Fisher Prize, in 2010 he was further honored with the Jean Gimbel Lane prize in piano performance from Northwestern University and, in 2015, with an honorary doctorate from the Manhattan School of Music.
www.msmnyc.edu
Program Notes
Piano Sonata No. 12 in F Major, K. 332 mozart
Julia Clancy
While Mozart was churning out and performing masterful symphonies, piano concerti, and operas to large, generally enthusiastic audiences, it is a wonder that he took such exquisite care with his smaller works, intended for either personal practice or small, private gatherings. Written in the early 1780s while he and his wife, Constanze, were visiting his father, Leopold, in Salzburg, Mozart’s Sonata No. 12 bears all the composer’s fingerprints: lyricism, balance, and vibrant rhythmic energy.
Within the first twenty-two measures alone, Mozart seamlessly assembles a montage of four distinct styles from several decades. At first, we are in the opera house; a soprano sings a cantabile melody atop a pleasantly rolling alberti bass. Suddenly the vocal line harks back to the “learned” contrapuntal style of Handel and Bach, shapeshifting quickly into a courtly minuet. The scene changes yet again as horn calls bring us outside for a hunt. A stormy D minor passage gives way to a buoyant, secondary theme in C major that Verdi was surely humming as he wrote “La Donna e Mobile,” from Rigoletto. The movement continues in jagged juxtapositions of thematic material. The Adagio maintains the sense of contrast established in the first movement, with warmer hues. As indicated by his first published version of the Sonata, this movement allows the performer to shine brilliantly within a
slow tempo with elaborate ornaments in the second half. The dazzling final movement begins in a frenzied hurry. The bright and cheery disposition of the music betrays the taxing demands it puts on the performer. With all the virtuosic flashes of the opening and development, the movement surprisingly closes with a faint whisper, vanishing as quickly as it appeared.
Images Set II
Debussy
Patrick Campbell Jankowski
Debussy wrote music from somewhere in the space between visual art, poetry, and sound. Much of his music – if not most – bares some connection to something beyond itself, whether something he had seen or a phrase he had heard, yet he seldom depicts anything explicitly. Always suggestions, never statements. Always “what if…” and never “this is…”
His Images are a set of six miniatures for piano assembled into two books of three, and in each one you step into a selfcontained little world enclosed in glass. Cloches à travers les feuilles (Bells through the leaves) casts the sounds of tolling bells in whole-tone scales. The first few moments are whisper soft and simple. There are the bells. A few moments later, delicate, wind-blown leaves emerge to obscure the sound. Throughout the little scene, we hear these elements dance around one another. Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut (And the moon sets over the temple) that never was suggests a nocturnal scene in a dream-like state.
Pentatonic scales imply somewhere distant yet no placeable. Later in the movement, an almost chant-like figure emerges, and after that the bright tones in the piano’s upper register cast bright yet intangible light onto the scene. You may hear similarities to the composer’s ubiquitous Clair de lune in the way he imagines the sound of moonlight. The name Poissons d’or (Goldfish) is an enigmatic and indefinite title particularly in English. “Golden fish” is more appropriate, perhaps, than the image of the little orange creatures swimming around a plastic bag. The aqueous nature of the piece is evident in the undulating accompaniment, and this is by far the most rhythmically active of the three Images in the second set. Figures whip around the piano rapidly in moments of propulsion and weightlessness, fading away into a conclusion that in context seems to punctuate the set with an ellipsis rather than a period…
Grand Sonata in G Major, Op. 37
tChaiKoVsKy Patrick Campbell Jankowski
Its grandiosity is certainly evident from the beginning, with its opening motif mightily rendered in fortissimo. A fanfare for the piano, in the absence of a full brass section… maybe that’s the key to understanding this fascinating but rarely heard sonata. Some composers think from the piano outward, and others from an orchestra inward. Although Tchaikovsky was a skilled pianist, most of his compositions were for larger forces, and he wrote this sonata in multiple stages
around 1878 in the same period that he’d finished is Fourth Symphony, his masterful lyric opera Eugene Onegin, and at the same time that he was writing his Violin Concerto. To say that this an orchestral work for piano is hardly accurate, but Tchaikovsky had an orchestral ear, and to approach the piece with that in mind helps us to navigate its terrain, quirks and all. Once the march-like theme subsides in the first movement, it gives way to a more subdued version, with “oompah” bass that you could imagine hearing in the bassoons, that gradually transitions into a tender second theme. Traces of the opening motif still remain, now humorously conceived as sprightly interjections (perfect for the flutes). The second theme is more overtly pianistic, with an active accompaniment churning beneath the long reach of the melodic line. It grows into an even more bombastic return of the opening, now in fff dynamic and the indication to play “with full force.” The development, as expected, finds these two highly contrasting themes in dialogue with one another, and the movement concludes as forcefully and exuberantly as it began.
The central movement is mournfully beautiful and fragile. It opens with an unhurried cantabile dirge-like figure. As with the first movement, this music begins in triple meter, yet Tchaikovsky plays with this idea. The opening was akin to a march transplanted into a dance meter, and here we encounter a dirge-like theme in 9/8 that initially reveals very little of the lilting rhythmic feel that we’d expect from that meter: a tension
between what is written and what is heard. Eventually, it begins to move, taking on the guise of a Nocturne that dies away to nothing. Following a brief yet powerful pause, new music emerges in duple meter, briefly casting light into the nocturnal scene. When the opening material returns, it is a bit more energized, yet fades away just the same. Tchaikovsky was a maximalist when it came to dynamics, and his Sixth Symphony famously contains a passage for solo clarinet that dissolves to pppppp, near-silence, followed by an orchestral explosion. Here he marks morendo e perdendosi. “Dying and losing itself” could hardly be more apt. The third movement, a briefly playful scherzo, is Schumannian in its virtuosity for the sake of musicality. It gives way in a flash to a jubilant finale not far removed from his Fourth Symphony finale in its juxtaposition of bombastic fireworks with subdued folk-like counter-melodies. Even to the very end, it remains full of surprises.
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Upcoming Events at YSM
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