KEYBOARD SONATAS
K. 208 in A Major
K. 33 in D Major
K. 14 in G Major
K. 380 in E Major
Domenico Scarlatti
1685-1757

Relatively little is known about the childhood and early career of Domenico Scarlatti. His father, Alessandro, who was a successful opera composer, was probably Domenico’s principal teacher. But Alessandro was also something of a prototype for Leopold Mozart, hauling his talented son around Italy looking for appropriate appointments for him and vetoing most of them as unsuitable for one reason or another. Of Domenico’s activities in Rome, for example, we know nothing except that it was there that he met and befriended the young George Frideric Handel (born in the same year) against whom he was pitted in an organ and harpsichord competition. Handel’s first biographer, John Mainwaring, attests to the friendship that developed between the two young composers, and to Handel’s opinion that Scarlatti had “the sweetest temper and genteelest behavior.” For the first part of his career, Domenico assumed several positions in Italy as court musician and maestro di cappella, writing religious music and several operas.

Then in 1724, he received the break that put his name on the map, his appointment as maestro di cappella at the royal court in Lisbon. Here his duties included teaching the Infanta Maria Barbara, later to become Queen of Spain. Maria Barbara must have been some harpsichordist! Scarlatti wrote hundreds of sonatas for her, many of which require the utmost in technical dexterity and musical virtuosity. Given the seclusion in which she was forced to live in the Spanish court, at least she had her talent to keep her from going mad – like some of her less fortunate forebears.

Although Scarlatti had already composed a considerable number of keyboard sonatas while he was still living in Italy, one of the signatures of his Spanish works has been the inclusion of Iberian folk melodies and harmonies. It has even been suggested that he assimilated local melodies as he moved around the cities of Spain with the Court. He was aware that the inclusion of these popular melodies and the clustered dissonances of Spanish flamenco harmony broke all the classic rules of harmony and counterpoint, but neither he nor his royal patroness seemed even slightly concerned. Scarlatti spent the last part of his life compiling his works for Queen Maria Barbara into fifteen volumes, which the queen bequeathed to Farinelli, the famous castrato, who in turn left them to Venice’s Biblioteca Marciana. While most of Scarlatti’s music was not published during his lifetime, after his death, “Scarlatti cults” cropped up in England, Paris and Vienna as aficionados collected and disseminated his music.

Most of Scarlatti’s sonatas consist of a single movement in two repeated sections (known as binary form), in which the first part moves away from the tonic and the second part returns to it. The second part develops the musical ideas from the first, indulging in limited modulations to other keys, and can often open with new thematic material (harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick (1911-1984), whose “K” numbering system is now the standard in the Scarlatti catalogue, called these “open sonatas.”) Both parts, however, always contain a common concluding motive. The binary structure, which takes its structure from dance suite, is the immediate precursor of classical sonata form.

Scarlatti wrote some of the sonatas in pairs in the same key or in major/minor combinations, thereby creating larger two-movement entities. Evidence for this pairing emerged from the relatively recent scholarship of Kirkpatrick. Nevertheless, most performers mix and match sonatas to create their own set of moods and contrasts.

While Scarlatti’s sonatas are usually associated with the harpsichord, Maria Barbara is known to have owned some of the earliest fortepianos, and some of the sonatas may have been written specifically for these instruments. Scarlatti’s entire oeuvre is now routinely heard on everything from guitar to calliope and even in orchestral arrangements.

As a rule, each of Scarlatti’s sonatas raises its own technical challenge. His style calls for fingers capable of great independence. Although the large structure is the same for all the sonatas, Scarlatti employs countless devices to bring variety into a standard template, including dances or all types, fugues and toccatas.

K. 208 first appeared in a manuscript collection in 1753. It is marked Adagio e cantabile, it has the character of a gentle, highly embellished love song.
K. 33 is full of rapid arpeggios.
K. 14 is from a collection of 30 sonatas published in London in 1738 and dedicated to King John of Portugal. Like many of the sonatas, it takes its inspiration from dances. According to music historian Charles Burney (1726-1814), an intrepid traveler and chronicler, Scarlatti learned part of his melodies “from carriers, mule-drivers and other common folk.”
K. 380 is said to have been a portrayal of a passing procession, perhaps outside the palace walls. Typically of Spanish and Portuguese women, Maria Barbara led an extremely secluded life; her teacher’s keyboard representation would have been about as close as she’d ever get to the street in any but the most formal Royal appearances.

From:
LYRIC PIECES
Berceuse, Op. 38, No. 1
Butterfly, Op. 43, No. 1
Album Leaf, Op. 47, No. 2
Halling, Op. 47, No. 4
Notturno, Op. 54, No. 4
Puck, Op. 71, No. 3
Edvard Grieg
1843-1907

The most successful and best known of nineteenth-century Scandinavian composers, Edvard Grieg, was one of the great exponents of Romantic nationalism. He saw it as his role in life to bring Scandinavian musical and literary culture to the attention of the rest of Europe, and he succeeded in this endeavor. As composer, pianist and conductor he became a sought-after fixture in Europe’s music centers. His wife Nina was an accomplished singer, and the two traveled extensively together, popularizing his songs and piano works. In the process, he also helped introduce to the rest of Europe the writings of Scandinavian poets and dramatists, particularly Henrik Ibsen, for whose play Peer Gynt he composed incidental music.

As a student Grieg was a failure. He quit school at 15 never to return. Under the sponsorship of Norwegian violinist Ole Bull, he was granted a scholarship to the Conservatory in Leipzig but hated his teachers there and never forgave them their conservatism and pedantry. Understandably, he was not happy with the constraints of the classical sonata form; of all his surviving output, only eight works fall into this category: a youthful symphony, the famous piano concerto, a string quartet, a piano sonata, three violin sonatas and a cello sonata. In all his other compositions he insisted on the freedom of form so dear to the Romantic tradition.

All his life, Grieg felt most comfortable with and excelled in smaller musical forms: songs, miniature piano pieces, orchestral dances and re-workings of folk melodies. Between 1867 and 1901 he published ten sets of short piano pieces, entitled Lyric Pieces, many of which exploit Norwegian folk idioms. He later orchestrated four from the Op. 54 set, publishing them as Lyric Suite.

The evocative titles are typical for nineteenth-century miniatures, which were designed for both home and concert performance. The halling is a Norwegian folkdance in duple time, played on either the Hardanger fiddle or the violin. It may be notated in either 2/4 or 6/8 time. It is chiefly a solo man's dance, but may be performed by two or more men dancing in competition or by couples. Grieg used the term for compositions in folk dance style.

From SUITE BERGAMASQUE
Claude Debussy ”CLAIR DE LUNE”
1862-1918

As a budding composer, Claude Debussy disliked the piano because its percussive tone did not allow for the subtle gradations in dynamics and timbre he was seeking. Although most of his early works are songs, he gradually mastered the piano’s shortcomings until it became his major means of expression.

Debussy composed the Suite bergamasque in 1890 while he was still fairly unknown and published it after extensive revisions only in 1905. By that time, after L’après-midi d’un faune, Pelléas et Mélisande and the String Quartet, he had become famous – or notorious. The order and number of movements in the Suite was probably affected by publishing, rather than musical considerations, since even the titles were not finalized until it went to print. The Suite belongs to a tradition of French keyboard music dating back to the eighteenth century with the keyboard works of the Couperin family and especially Jean-Philippe Rameau. These are short pieces evoking a mood, an image or even the personality of a specific individual. Like so many of Debussy’s subsequent works, they are deliberately referential, containing programmatic, visual or musical allusions that would have been readily familiar to his audience.

The significance of the title bergamasque is uncertain. Bergamo is about 25 miles northeast of Milan, considered the traditional home of white-faced clown Harlequin of the commedia dell’arte, the street theater dating from the sixteenth century; Debussy had always been a fan of the tradition.

Clair de lune is the third movement of the suite and is Debussy’s most used – and abused – piano composition. Because of its familiarity, it can evoke superficial salon music, unless played with great care. The movement was not born with this name; the original title was Promenade sentimentale, which Debussy changed just before publication. The title Clair de lune came from Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine’s poem, which Debussy had already set twice to music. In the poem appear the alliterative lines “masques et bergamasques” perhaps giving Debussy the idea for the title of the Suite.

L'ISLE JOYEUSE
Claude Debussy
1862-1918

Debussy's titled piano works represent a long tradition of French character pieces for keyboard, works with often arcane titles and personal allusions that may have meant something to the composers and their contemporaries but which have lost their significance for us. Many of Debussy's works, both for piano and orchestra, capture visual images in music, but L'Isle Joyeuse is unusual in that it reflects a concrete personal experience.

The "Happy Isle" is Jersey, one of the Channel Islands, where, in 1904, the composer carried on a passionate love affair with Emma Bardac, who was to become his second wife. The work is almost frantic in its exuberance, but is also tightly structured. It opens with an introduction of shimmering "water music" that gives way to a bouncy theme evoking nothing so much as images of children (or a couple?) skipping through a meadow or along the beach. After a complex harmonic transition, a sentimental waltz changes the meter but not the ebullient mood. After a return to the main theme, the piece closes with a reprise of the introduction, thus forming a grand musical arch.

FIVE JAZZ ETUDES
Erwin Schulhoff
1894-1942

One of the glib sayings in the 1930s, following the rise of Nazism and the expulsion of so many artists from Germany, was that Germany's loss was our gain. What the world forgot was the fate of the many artists who did not escape the Nazi death machine.

In the last ten years there has been a concerted effort to rescue the music of some talented composers whose potential for greatness perished in the German concentration camps. Many of these composers were incarcerated in Hitler's "model" concentration camp Terezin (Theresienstadt) and continued to compose, even as they were imprisoned under inhumane conditions. Along with fellow artists and musicians, they were frequently paraded before the public as "proof" of the thriving Jewish community in the camps. As these artists gradually disappeared, victims of starvation, disease or the gas chambers, some of their manuscripts were hidden or smuggled out.

One of the most notable of these artists was the Czech composer Ervin Schulhoff, who died in the Wülzburg concentration camp in Bavaria in 1942. He was also a virtuoso pianist, well known in the 1920s and '30s for his jazz performances and recordings. Schulhoff showed precocious musical ability, and it was Dvorák who, in 1901, recommended that the seven-year-old boy follow a musical career. He studied composition, piano and conducting in Germany, and at the outbreak of WWI was conscripted into the Austrian army, serving to the bitter end of the war.

In the 20s he met the painter George Grosz, a lover of all things American and an avid collector of contemporary jazz records. Looking for a new direction to liberate him from his early late-Romantic voice, Schullhoff produced during the following ten years a series of jazz-inspired compositions. The Five Jazz Etudes (1926) adapt certain jazz “fingerprints” to the harmonic language of Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century:

1. Charleston: This highly chromatic piece takes its rhythm and tempo from the dance but its harmonies from the European atonal composers.
2. Blues: Although it opens with a bluesy rhythm and lots of blue notes, the overall harmonic style is more that of Ravel’s or Debussy’s take on jazz than the authentic nitty-gritty sound. It sports an ostinato accompaniment figure.
3. Chanson: This etude brings us inside the smoky club. But as with all the pieces, the ambiance is attenuated by Schulhoff’s individual harmonic language.
4. Tango: Once again only the ostinato accompaniment figure and the formal structure is that of the South American dance.
5. Toccata on the shimmy ‘Kitten on the Keys’” by Zez Confrey (1895-1971): Toccatas dates from the early seventeenth century, emphasizing rapid virtuosic fingering. Here the texture is thin – a skittery kitten rather than a pouncing one.

PIANO SONATA No.1, Op.22
Alberto Ginastera
1916-1983

Throughout most of his career, Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera attempted to find a synthesis between the indigenous music of his native country and the techniques of the twentieth century. His works, especially his ballets, often feature the fantastic, mysterious and magical stories and symbolism of native Indian and pre-Columbian cultures. In 1958 he embraced serialism, blending it successfully with the rhythms of native traditions. In September 1971 the Opera Society of Washington staged Ginastera’s opera Beatrix Cenci as the inaugural production of the opera house of the new Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC.

Born in Buenos Aires to a Catalan father and Italian mother, Ginastera revealed musical ability at an early age. He graduated from the Buenos Aires conservatory in 1938, but even before graduation, a public performance of the orchestral suite from his ballet Panambi brought him to the attention of Lincoln Kierstein who commissioned him to write a ballet with an Argentine setting for the American Ballet Caravan. In 1945 Ginastera received a Guggenheim fellowship to visit the United States, where he studied at Tanglewood with Aaron Copland, with whom he also forged a close friendship. Returning to Argentina, he organized and became director of the Conservatory of Music and Theatre Arts at the National University of La Plata.

Ginastera was an avid world traveler. While he spent a considerable number of years teaching in his native country, the unsettled political situation, especially the rise to power of Juan Perón, interfered with his academic duties, requiring him to spend many years abroad, mostly in the USA and Europe. In 1971 he settled permanently in Geneva but continued to travel extensively.

Ginastera composed the Piano Sonata Op. 22 in 1952 for the Carnegie Institute and the Pennsylvania College for Women. It was premiered by Johana Harris, wife of composer Roy Harris, and dedicated to them. At the time, the composer was using the model of Bartók’s short melodic and rhythmic ideas but applied to Argentinean folk elements. The Sonata caused a sensation, in large part because Ginastera was able to blend atonality and even 12-tone techniques with a rhythmic drive and expressiveness that was completely accessible.

The opening movement, marked Allegro marcato, is pervaded by a thick choral texture, but lively and syncopated rhythms, a dialogue between the right and left hands. It is classic sonata allegro form.

Presto misterioso is the tempo marking for the second movement, a perpetual motion in the form of a scherzo/trio combination. It derives from the Argentinean malambo, in which the dancer performs a series of foot movements within a very small area. The scherzo, with its chromatic runs, is reminiscent in character, although certainly not in thematic material with some of the scherzos in Brahms chamber music. The Trio has more of a Debussy feel to it.

The sense of mystery continues in the Adagio, molto appassionato, for while it has to work up to the passionate climax, it creeps pianissimo, first through notes of the open strings of the guitar, then through serpentine chromatic passages.

The final movement, marked Ruvido ed ostinato (noisy and ostinato), is a toccata, a centuries-old style associated with rapid fingering and, as here, pecking at a single note. Over the ostinato is the return to the cross rhythms of the malambo.

Program notes by:
Joseph & Elizabeth Kahn
Wordpros@mindspring.com
www.wordprosmusic.com

SONATAS K.87 IN B MINOR
Domenico Scarlatti
1685-1757

An odd bit of musical trivia: three great composers, Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frederick Handel and Domenico Scarlatti were all born in the same year.
In 1724 Scarlatti was appointed as maestro di cappella at the royal court in Lisbon It was the break that put his name on the map.

His duties included teaching the infanta Maria Barbara, later to become Queen of Spain. The over 600 sonatas Scarlatti wrote for her indicate that she must have been a first-rate harpsichordist, since many of them require the utmost in technical dexterity and musical virtuosity. Most of the sonatas are in two repeated sections, with some shared and some new thematic content in the second part, but each one always closing with a common concluding motive. Scarlatti wrote the sonatas in pairs in the same key, thereby creating a larger two-movement entity. Many artists, however, mix and match sonatas to create their own set of moods and contrasts.

While Scarlatti’s sonatas are usually associated with the harpsichord, Maria Barbara is known to have owned some of the earliest fortepianos. Some of the sonatas may have been specifically written for these instruments or for any keyboard instrument.
K. 87 is unusual in that it is a fugue whose subject is a virtuosic toccata.

PIANO SONATA IN A FLAT MAJOR, Hob.XVI:46
Franz Joseph Haydn
1732-1809

Franz Joseph Haydn’s keyboard sonatas span over 40 years of his creative life. The total number is still uncertain since new ones are periodically discovered while others, especially early ones, are found to be misattributed or spurious, but they number around 60. The earlier sonatas, composed up to the late 1770s, were written for the harpsichord, followed by several intended for either fortepiano or harpsichord. The later ones were definitely composed for fortepiano.

Composed probably in 1767, the A-flat Major Sonata is in a key rarely used by Haydn and, in fact, rarely used until the 19th century. One reason for avoiding keys with too many sharps and flats in their key signatures was the result of the various tuning conventions over the centuries that caused some of the important intervals in these keys to sound out of tune. With the general acceptance of equal temperament and the adaptations in the design of other instruments with fixed pitches, a composer such as Chopin could indulge in his penchant for five, six and seven flats.

According to the latest research on Haydn’s manuscripts, the A-flat Sonata was written for the harpsichord, but was later published around 1790 together with sonatas Hob.XII:44 & 45 as sonatas “for harpsichord or piano-forte with or without violin accompaniment.”

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this sonata is that it reveals some of the influences on Haydn’s musical style. The exposition of the opening movement could have been written by Domenico Scarlatti, but the unusual excursions into distant keys and surprising modulations are a hallmark of C. P. E. Bach. The second movement, on the other hand, with its delicate and poignant lyricism is seen again in the slow movements of Mozart sonatas and piano concerti. The final movement is typically Haydn in overall style. It is this movement that exemplifies so perfectly the keyboard style associated with the harpsichord.

A LITTLE THEATER MUSIC, Op. 1
John Nauman
b.1962

These days, conservatories usually require young performers to step out of the practice room for a few hours to try their hand at composition. Most give it a whirl and say “no thank you.” Tonight’s artist, John Nauman, show another side of his musical personality – not only his own composition but one that ventures into the world of literature.

Nauman writes about A Little Theater Music: “Tonight’s offering was born in the BMI Musical Theater Workshop, New York City. My terrific lyricist Timothy Mathis and I began setting Graham Green’s poignant The End of the Affair. We lovingly staggered forward with our efforts. We soon learned however that Jake Hegge and Houston Grand Opera had rights to the Green property. A very proper English barrister informed Tim and me to basically, “step off.” The pieces on tonight’s program have been dormant, in storage for years.

“Knitting together, A Little Theater Music is the story of Sarah from the Graham Greene novel, The End of the Affair. Set in London during and just after World War II, this story is a three-way collision between love of self, love of another, and love of God.

“In the first song, “In a Quiet Way,” we find Sarah and Henry Miles in the midst of daily life, Sarah finds comfort in the familiarity of their love, but longs for the passion and romance she found with the novelist Maurice Bendrix. Sarah silently cries for those things she misses and recalls those happy moments; meeting at a party while the “Charleston” plays in background.

“The affair had gone unchecked for several years until, during an afternoon tryst, Bendrix goes downstairs to look for intruders in his basement and a bomb falls on the building. Sarah rushes down to find him lying under a fallen door, and immediately makes a deal with God. “I love him and I’ll do anything if you’ll make him alive... I’ll give him up forever, only let him be alive with a chance... People can love each other without seeing each other, can’t they, they love You all their lives without seeing You.”

“Sarah is plagued by both guilt and longing as she struggles to keep her vow; to give up Maurice forever. Sarah wishes for just one more day, one more time to hold him as she sings “Too Much to Ask For.” Finally, Sarah contemplates the sadness of being alone in “Such an Awful Waste.” But in the end, Sarah stays true to her vow to God. The novel becomes less a story about faithfulness and more a lesson of grace and redemption.”

FANTASY IN B MINOR, Op. 28
Aleksander Skryabin
1872-1915

Composer and pianist Aleksander Skryabin was dubbed the bad boy of Russian music. Considered a visionary and musical messiah by some, to others he was a charlatan and neurotic degenerate. He developed an interest in mysticism, which became gradually increasingly esoteric, leading him to create music that combines the stimulation of all the senses. It culminated in his planned Mysterium, a fantastic synthesis of the arts, which was to include music, speech, colors, aroma and even touch. But only sketches remain of this forerunner of today’s multimedia events: despite his grandiose personality, Sryabin died suddenly a prosaic death of septicemia from a boil on his lip.

Skryabin’s early models were Chopin and Liszt, but he was a loner and innovator and quickly discarded their influence to develop his own musical language. His innovative harmonies make his music instantly identifiable, while still recalling his early models. Of his many piano works, the most often heard are his ten piano sonatas, his 60+ preludes and 26 etudes.

Pianist John Nauman states that the Fantasy, (1900) is a monumental work with “extraordinary technical demands, pyrotechniques, soaring themes and resounding chordal blocks. It is not heard often. Balance is key and perhaps the most important factor in negotiating the marvelous showpiece. It belongs in the nineteenth century in terms of lyricism, harmonic language and breadth.”

PIANO SONATA IN B MINOR
Franz Liszt
1811-1886

Two figures bigger than life dominated solo performances in musical life of the 19th century: The violinist Niccoló Paganini and the pianist Franz Liszt. Their prodigious technique and flamboyant personalities set standards of performance that have challenges soloists to this day.

Liszt single-handedly created the modern piano recital, pioneering the presentation of programs from memory, combining the older repertoire with new works, positioning the keyboard at a right angle to the audience for maximal acoustical effect, and touring as solo recitalist from Spain to Russia. His mastery of the piano awed Frédéric Chopin: “I should like to steal from him the way to play my own etudes.”

Lionized by his audiences, the young Liszt broke many a heart and many a commandment. But by the time he reached middle age, he returned to his Catholic faith and even took minor orders in 1865, with the right to be called Abbé.

In 1848 Franz Liszt settled in Weimar, considered at the time one of the most progressive musical center in Germany. As Grand Ducal Director of Music he held court there like royalty and succeeded, within a few years, in making it the Mecca for the “music of the future,” including that of his future son-in-law, Richard Wagner. Despite his extensive conducting and performing obligations he nevertheless found time to compose some of his best music, including the Piano Sonata in b minor.

The Sonata was a radical work for its time and fitted well into this new virtuoso image. Composed in 1852-53 and premiered by Liszt’s pupil, Hans von Bülow in 1857, it was dedicated to Robert Schumann, in thanks to the latter’s dedication of his C Major Fantasy.

The Sonata combines three contrasting movements into a single continuous whole that baffled even Liszt’s students and devotees. Its novelty and digression from convention, together with its technical demands, proved too much for its first audiences. Brahms is said to have nodded off during one of the most gripping episodes.

Liszt was a proponent of a concept he called thematic transformation, which he had applied specifically to the Piano Concerto No. 2, composed in various versions between 1839 and 1861. One of the composer’s favorite techniques for achieving musical unity in a work, thematic transformation involved making significant changes to the theme, while retaining its basic shape and identity. While the Second Piano Concerto develops a single theme throughout, the Piano Sonata works primarily with three themes, which Liszt both transforms and combines into an array of moods. Although the Sonata consists of three movements, they all partake of the same musical material.

The Sonata opens with a brief, ominous introduction of slowly repeated staccato “Bs” deep in the piano’s register followed by fragments of descending scale. These coalesce into the first theme, marked allegro energico. After developing the theme almost as if for a fantasy, Liszt uses a transformation of the material from the introduction to introduce a second subject, marked Grandioso. The term elicited many snide comments in its time, notably the comparison of the theme and its expansive sweep with the pianist’s “grandiose” stage behavior. Around the middle of the movement, the mood suddenly turns gentle, introducing the third important theme of the Sonata. One of the fascinating features of this work is not only how ingeniously Liszt combines and recombines his three themes, but also how he transforms them to serve the whole gamut of human emotions from tenderness and passion to anger and violence.

The first movement blends seamlessly into the second, which takes up a new theme, reminiscent of a Chopin nocturne. But it quickly returns to the Grandioso theme in a passionate counterpoint with the main theme of the first movement. The thing that sets the second movement apart is the gentler working out of the now familiar melodies. It concludes with a quote from the introduction to the first movement.

The Finale, again marked Allegro energico, begins as a fugue on the first theme. As it becomes increasingly passionate, it veers off its contrapuntal course into a rapid fantasy on the theme, including a little digression to develop the Introduction, now played Allegro. The middle of the movement returns to the Grandioso theme, its pomposity for a moment considerably curbed as it combines with the gentle second movement theme. But as before, the mood swings come thick and fast so that part of the musical tension is created by the uncertainty of how the work will end. Surprisingly, calm wins out, and the Sonata concludes with another quote from the introduction.

Program notes by:
Joseph & Elizabeth Kahn
Wordpros@mindspring.com
www.wordprosmusic.com

32 VARIATIONS IN C MINOR, WoO.80
(On an Original Theme)
Ludwig van Beethoven
1770-1827

The year 1806 was a fruitful one for Beethoven. In addition to the revision of his opera Fidelio, he composed the Fourth Piano Concerto, the Violin Concerto, the Fourth Symphony, the three Razumovsky Quartets Op.59 and, towards the end of the year, the Piano Variations WoO 80. This last was composed at about the same time as the finale of the String Quartet Op.59, No.3, since sketches for both can be found on the same page of his sketchbook.

At the end of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, keyboard variations were often spontaneous works of virtuosity and improvisation. At every keyboard performance a theme was suggested to the artist on which he was expected to improvise a set of variations. Only very few of these impromptu compositions, however, were eventually set to paper. Beethoven’s 14 early sets of variations probably originated from such events, but by 1802, with the Variations Op.34 and 35, Beethoven thought some of them worthy of publication.

The simple original theme of the Variations WoO.80 is only eight bars long, making it possible to cram 32 variations and a coda into an 11-to-12-minute work. The tempo remains constant throughout, and some variations flow seamlessly together without discernible pause.

Usually with sets of variations, the level of difficulty increases with each variation. But Beethoven creates instead a carefully shaped musical architecture more dependent on shifting and contrasting moods among groups of variations than on the frenetic display of sheer pianistic virtuosity. Flying in the face of tradition, he humorously ends the work on pianissimo cadence.

While it is not known whether Beethoven had Bach’s great c minor Chaconne in mind, the harmonic structure of the two works is identical as is the length of the theme. More common during the Classical period were variations on more elaborate tunes with an ABA structure, often based on operatic arias.

PIANO SONATA No.31 IN A-FLAT MAJOR, Op.110
Ludwig van Beethoven
1770-1827

Beethoven’s last five piano sonatas fall into what is generally agreed to be his “late” style. Together with the Ninth Symphony, the Missa Solemnis and the last five string quartets, they represent the composer’s most musically complex and emotionally intense creations. Written after Beethoven had become profoundly deaf and no longer able to continue his career as a virtuoso pianist, the last three sonatas in particular are also the most inward looking, the composer’s dialogue with his instrument that he could only hear in his mind’s ear.

Beethoven composed the last three piano sonatas during and immediately following an enormously stressful period in his personal life, one that seemed to sap his creative energy for several years. Deprived of the joys of family life as husband and father, he invested all his love and concern in his nephew Karl, the son of his brother Carl Caspar. Upon Carl Caspar’s death in 1815, Beethoven was awarded joint custody of the boy with his mother, a woman whom Beethoven loathed and considered to be of loose morals, referring to her as the “Queen of the Night.” A protracted lawsuit for full custody ensued and dragged on for four and a half years. Although Beethoven eventually won full custody of Karl, he over-protected the boy and bad-mouthed his mother to the point where Karl attempted suicide in 1826.

The Sonata Op.110 was completed during December of 1821 and was followed almost immediately by Op.111, so that the two works are often thought of as a pair. The thematic material of the first movement of Op.110 is treated in a quite original way. It opens with a gentle chordal theme that contains within it an abbreviated version of what will become the fugue subject of the final movement. The theme changes character and continues into a cantabile section interrupted by a long digression of arpeggios that create tension as the listener waits for the theme to return and resolve. It is characteristic of Beethoven during this final period to make his themes asymmetrical, sometimes interrupting them or allowing them to flow imperceptibly into new musical ideas.

The Scherzo is based on mere snatches from two Austrian folk melodies. In this short movement, Beethoven builds up tension through the use of syncopation and abrupt changes in tempo and dynamics. The flowery arpeggiated trio contrasts sharply with the pounding scherzo theme.

The final movement is one of Beethoven’s most unusual creations, with a recitative and heart-wrenching arioso in full operatic style, resolving into a fugue (based on the opening theme of the first movement). The whole structure is then repeated in slightly varied form while the second statement of the fugue introduces the subject in inversion and continues with further development and drama.

This fugue and the other great fugues from Beethoven’s last period – the final movement of the “Hammerklavier” Sonata Op.106 and the Grosse Fuge Op.133, which was the original finale to the String Quartet Op.130 – are monuments of contrapuntal mastery as well as flights of spiritual fancy. “To write a fugue is no great art,” Beethoven once said, “ …But the imagination also insists on its rights, and nowadays the traditional form must be penetrated by another, genuinely poetical element.”

From FANTASIEN, Op.116
No. 3, Capriccio in g minor
No. 4, Intermezzo in E Major
No. 7, Capriccio in d Minor
Johannes Brahms
1833-1897

Late in his life Brahms composed a number of short piano pieces, twenty of which he published; certainly, there were others he destroyed in his characteristic perfectionist manner. He gave the pieces vague titles, such as Intermezzo, Capriccio, Fantasie, Ballade, Romance or Rhapsody, often not deciding on the title till the last minute before publication. He compiled and published them in four sets, Op.116 to 119.

The Seven Fantasien, Op.116 published in 1892, consist of three vigorous Capriccii and four introspective Intermezzi. The set seems to be more consistent and unified than the later three sets, Op.117, 118 and 119, which are more in the nature of a collection of independent pieces. While each of the seven works within Op. 116 can stand on its own, Brahms created an order for the set that for the most part maintained contrast in tempo and mood between adjacent pieces. The alternation between agitated and contemplative also applies within the individual pieces, all of which follow a ternary (ABA) form.

Characteristic of all Brahms’s short piano works of this period is ambiguity of tonality, especially in the faster pieces. Frequently, Brahms creates tension by establishing a key, but not settling on its tonic until the final resolution; at other times, he simply keeps the listener guessing through cascades of diminished seventh chords (that can resolve into more than one key) and unexpected modulations.

The Capriccio No. 3 in g minor begins as a frequently modulating cascading theme. It serves as the scherzo of the set with its broad, less agitated middle section in B-flat major.

Originally, Brahms called No. 4 in E major Nocturne, a title that suits its dreamy, tender character – although with progressing melancholy. Retaining the principal theme throughout, it is the most free in structure of the set.

The set concludes with a Capriccio in d minor, a very agitated piece. In the two repeated sections, Brahms varies the theme with changes of texture.

PIANO SONATA No.2 IN B FLAT MINOR, Op.35
Frédéric Chopin
1810-1849

For modern audiences, the intensely emotional character of nineteenth century music so often connotes sentimentality, that they forget the stormy iconoclasm that was the driving force behind the Romantic movement. Breaking free of the constraints of Classical forms and harmony was not just an emotional indulgence; it was a philosophical position. So when musicians and listeners are asked to come up with names of composers who were great musical innovators, Chopin, the darling of Paris salons, seldom makes the list. Yet, a close look at the ballades, nocturnes, many of the preludes and the b-flat minor Sonata reveals him to have made striking contributions to musical structure and, particularly, to the expansion of the harmonic language.

By the time Chopin composed the Sonata in b-flat minor, he was renowned particularly for his short dance-inspired works (mazurkas, waltzes, polonaises); his only multi-movement works known to the public were the two piano concertos and the piano trio written in 1828-1830. The First Piano Sonata, composed in 1828 was published posthumously in 1851.

The second Sonata was written between 1837 and 1839 and published a year later. Characteristically, its genesis was as a single-movement piece; the Funeral March, now the Sonata’s third movement, was originally composed to stand alone. How and why it became incorporated into a larger structure is not known. The great pianist Anton Rubinstein posited a program for the entire work, “the span of life,” with the Funeral March representing “humanity’s mourning for the dead” and the Finale as “the winds of night sweeping over churchyard graves.” Unfortunately, such interpretations have stuck and diverted the attention of the listener from perceiving what a fascinatingly innovative musical adventure the Sonata actually was.

Chopin’s contemporaries, however, knew only too well how he was straining at the leash of convention. In a much quoted review of the Sonata, Robert Schumann conjured the image of a conservative cantor from the country buying the music and throwing it away as worthless trash after trying to get through the first page, then having it rediscovered and appreciated by the man’s grandson years later. Schumann saw the first movement with its “dissonances through dissonances in dissonances,” contrasted with “beautiful melody,” as characteristically Chopin. Yet, even this standard-bearer of musical romanticism was puzzled by the “unmelodic and joyless” atonal finale, seeking some deeper emotional content in what on the surface seemed “a mockery.”

While Mendelssohn didn’t like it and Schumann thought it didn’t hang together as a coherent work, later critics with combined experience of Schoenberg and Bach have had no difficulty perceiving the sonata’s precise melodic and harmonic organizing principle.

In terms of formal structure, there is nothing out of the ordinary in the first three movements. All three are built around intensely contrasting themes, a feature one would expect between the first and second theme groups in a movement in sonata form. But the Trio in the second movement Scherzo is unusual in its level of contrast, and the middle section of the Funeral March movement actually seems an attempt to give a sense of comfort after the heaviness of the surrounding march.

The most unusual movement and clearly the one that gave Chopin’s contemporaries the most trouble is the Presto with its chromaticism and ambiguous key wedded to a perpetuum mobile. More an étude than a finale, this movement literally muddies the waters of what is to us otherwise a rather accessible work. If regarded from an emotional point of view, however, this stormy movement fits quite well with the darker moments of the three preceding movements.

ANDANTE SPIANATO AND GRANDE POLONAISE
Frédéric Chopin IN E-FLAT MAJOR, Op.22
1810-1849

Chopin’s chosen medium was the piano as a solo instrument. In his late teens he had tried to combine piano and orchestra, but coordinating the two was difficulty for him. After age 20 he never again wrote for a large ensemble. In these early orchestral works, the orchestral scoring is so light that in the nineteenth century it was fashionable to re-orchestrate and “improve” the accompaniment. It is probable, however, that Chopin intended the orchestra to serve merely as a gauzy background fabric for the soloist. Moreover, because he himself was known to have had a rather light touch on the piano, a heavy orchestral accompaniment would have drowned him out.

The Andante Spianato and Grand Polonaise Op.22 is a hybrid work. Chopin had originally composed the Polonaise for piano and orchestra in 1830-31, adding the Andante Spianato for piano solo in 1834. He premiered the complete work at one of his last public appearances in Paris a year later. In 1838 he arranged the Polonaise for piano alone, the form in which it is frequently performed today.

The Andante is truly “spianato,” (smooth, even) with virtually no dynamic changes. The Polonaise, by contrast, is in Chopin’s early, more extroverted style. As with most works of this period, the most brilliant virtuosity is reserved for a grand climax in the last pages.

Program notes by:
Joseph & Elizabeth Kahn
Wordpros@mindspring.com
www.wordprosmusic.com

Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
Sonata in E Major, Hob. XVI/31
Moderato
Allegretto
Finale: Presto

Sonata in B minor, Hob.16/32
Allegro moderato
Menuet: Tempo di menuet
Finale: Presto

FREDERIC CHOPIN (1810-1849)
Sonata No.2 in B-flat minor, Op.35
Grave – Doppio movimento
Scherzo Marche funèbre
Finale: Presto

Intermission

Three Chinese Pieces
JIAN-ZHONG WANG (b. 1933) Liu Yang River
YING-HAI LI (1927-2007) Xi Yang Xiao Gu (Flute and Drum At Sunset)
WANG-HUA CHU (b. 1941) Shin Jiang Fantasy

MAURICE RAVEL (1875-1937)
La Valse