This week's Wednesdays at One performance was devoted to music for solo piano. The one-hour recital at Alice Tully featured relatively short pieces by Beethoven, Chopin, Granados, Scriabin and Liszt.
The program opened with Beethoven's Sonata No. 22 in F major, Op. 54 (1804). This is a curious work, not often performed, that seems to puzzle everyone who listens to it. One has the sense that Beethoven was here taking a break between composing the much more ambitious sonatas, the "Waldstein" that preceded it and the "Appasionata" that followed it. Or it may have been that Beethoven was still searching for new techniques that that would enable him to break more fully from the classical style he had learned from Haydn and that the entire piece was intended by him as nothing more than a form of experimentation. Written in two movements, it swerves in an idiosyncratic manner from playfulness to a much darker feeling. The pianist was Mackenzie Melemed.
The next work was Chopin's Polonaise-Fantasy in A-flat major, Op. 61 (1846) performed by Kevin Ahfat. This is one of the composer's lesser known pieces, perhaps because it lacks the Romantic charm of the waltzes and nocturnes. It is certainly a much more complex work in which Chopin deliberately tries to forge a new style by melding the forms of the fantasy and polonaise into a single work. Along with the F minor Mazurka (Op. 68, No. 4), it comprises the totality of his "last" style. Marked by a melancholy elegance one does not usually associate with this composer, it progresses in an extremely self conscious and deliberate manner. While it requires more attention on the part of the listener, it is no less beautiful for that.
This was followed by Granados's Los Requiebros, the first movement of the Goyescas suite (1909-1911). In writing the Goyescas, the composer had been inspired by the paintings and etchings of the influential Spanish artist Francisco Goya to attempt a musical recreation of Spanish life as it existed in the artist's time. Anyone who knows Goya only from his grotesque etchings and his "Black Paintings" might be surprised by his earlier efforts as a court painter when he worked in a much more academic style in portraying the the majos, the flamboyant and elaborately dressed youths from Madrid's lower classes. It was six of these works, including the playful El pelele, that Granados had in mind when composing first the suite and then a few years later the one-act opera of the same name. The opening movement, Los Requiebros, is set in the form of a jota, a type of Aragonese folk dance music. The pianist was Tristan Teo who recently won the Bachauer Competition.
Next was Scriabin's Fantasie in B minor, Op. 28 (1900). This is a very popular work, one of the most often performed of the composer's solo piano pieces, and every time it appears on a program the notes invariably tell how Scriabin had forgotten he had composed it until reminded by the critic Leonid Sabaneyev who had begun playing it while Scriabin was in the next room. The fantasy has been seen as a transition piece between the composer's early romantic works and his later more subtle and mystical creations. This exceptionally challenging work was performed by the multi-talented Gabrielle Chou whom I had heard play violin the evening before in a performance of the final two movements from Bach's Sonata No. 3 in C major.
The recital ended with Liszt's Rhapsodie espagnole, S.254, R.90 (1863). The composer worked hard to give this piece authenticity, incorporating into it series of variations based on the jota, the same that Granados was later to use in Los Requiebros, as well as the traditional melody Folies d'Espagne. The work was premiered by Hans von Bülow, who was at the time still Liszt's son-in-law, in Amsterdam in 1866. Here it was performed with a great deal of flair by Angie Zhang.
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