I went to Alice Tully Hall earlier this week to hear a one-hour recital that formed part of Juilliard's Wednesdays at One series. This installment focused on piano music and, despite the limited time frame, managed to feature works by a number of radically different composers.
The program opened with Anran Qian performing Haydn's Sonata in E major, Hob. XVI:13 (c. 1767?). This was a fairly short and simple three movement work that certainly sounded like Haydn's music even if its authorship has not been conclusively established. A note on the IMSLP website states:
"According to Grove Music, this work is 'probably authentic; Haydn’s statements in 1803 concerning his authorship were contradictory'."
This lack of certainty is not surprising. If the date of composition is correct, Haydn at this time would still have been only 35 years old and only recently appointed Kapellmeister to the Esterházy family, a position he was to hold until 1790 when he was more or less pensioned off and given his freedom to travel. It's important to remember that the predominant keyboard instrument in the 1760's was still the harpsichord. Though the piano had been invented in Italy at the turn of the century by Bartolomeo Cristofori, its progress through Europe over the following decades had been slow and somewhat haphazard. Thus a distinction is usually drawn between Haydn's first nineteen "sonatas" (the composer himself referred to them as "partitas") and those that followed. The first group were devised primarily as pedagogical tools for the use of Haydn's students rather than as musical works meant to stand on their own. The composer placed no great value upon these early pieces and some may have been lost simply because Haydn gave them to his students without bothering to keep copies for himself. They were, at best, intended as no more than entertaining divertimenti. The present work fits that description very well. It was charming to hear but had no profound depths nor any of the innovative features that were to characterize Haydn's later keyboard music once the introduction of the fortepiano had allowed him to endow his sonatas with greater complexity.
The next musician to take the stage was Qi Xu who proceeded to perform works that moved from the twenty-first century back to the Romantic era. First came Elliot Carter's Catenaires (2006). The best description of this very brief late piece, written for Pierre-Laurent Aimard, is that furnished by the composer himself:
",,,I became obsessed with the idea of a fast one line piece with no chords. It became a continuous chain of notes using different spacings, accents, and colorings, to produce a wide variety of expression."
Immediately following this decidedly modern work, the pianist performed two Schubert songs that had been transcribed for piano by Franz Liszt in 1838. These were Gretchen am Spinnrade (1814, its text taken from Goethe's Faust) and Liebesbotschaft (from a text by Ludwig Rellstab), the latter posthumously published in a collection appropriately entitled Schwanengesang. In his transcriptions, Liszt had a genius for capturing the spirit of the original works. This is especially true of Schubert's music. Listening to these lyrical works, one would never suppose they had not originally been composed for piano, so artfully did Liszt arrange them.
The bulk of the recital was then given over to a performance of one of Schumann's finest works for solo piano, Kinderszenen, Op. 15 (1838). Despite the injury to his hand that ended his hopes for a career as a concert pianist, the 1830's were generally a happy time for Schumann. He was deeply in love with Clara Wieck, no matter her father's objections, and had made one of his most important musical connections when in 1835 he had first met Mendelssohn. Schumann had a habit all through his career of concentrating his talent by composing a number of works for one particular genre before moving on to the next. The 1830's were no exception. It was during this period that he composed almost all his greatest works for solo piano including Carnaval, Kreisleriana and the Fantasie in C. What distinguished Schumann's piano music from that of other composers was that many of these works, with the exception of the Fantasie, were programmatic in their content. Already, years before his mental breakdown, Schumann was inclined to retreat into fantasy worlds of his own imagining. In Kinderszenen, he visited scenes of childhood play with wonderfully fortuitous results. There's a fairy tale quality to these thirteen movements, each of which is so brief and ethereal it seems to vanish almost before it's begun. The pianist here was Vatche Jambazian who did a fine job capturing the subtlety of each of Schumann's scenes, most especially when playing that perennial favorite Träumerei.
In the recital's remaining ten minutes, there was just enough time for two short pieces. The first of these was Debussy's L'isle joyeuse (1904) as performed by Sylvia Jiang. The piece was inspired by a painting, Watteau’s enigmatic L’embarquement pour Cythère, that actually exists in two versions, the first completed in 1717 and the second the following year. Debussy was always seeking to promote French culture and would take this passion even further a decade later when his country confronted Germany in World War I. For example, his 1890 Clair de Lune was inspired by a poem by Verlaine who not so coincidentally also wrote another in praise of Watteau. There is more to Debussy's musical piece, however, than a mere a celebration of French culture. As the article in Wikipedia indicates, the painting depicts a fête galante and "celebrates love." And love was very much in the mind of the middle aged composer in 1904. He had secretly begun an affair with a banker's wife and had impetuously taken her on a romantic getaway to the island of Jersey where he revised the present work (hence the use in the title of the English "isle" rather than the French "île"). As in his orchestral work La Mer, Debussy in this piece invokes at points the movement of the sea. Far more than an impressionistic rendering of nautical sounds, though, this is an impassioned paean to illicit love as only a Frenchman could write.
The final piece was by Brahms, his Variations on a Theme by Paganini, Op. 35 (1863), expressly designed to showcase a pianist's skills. This was for Brahms a great departure. Even if he had begun his own career as a pianist, he had little interest in composing music that would allow a soloist to flaunt his prowess at the keyboard. Despising ostentation and never one to favor style over substance, he would stubbornly work and rework a piece until he was fully satisfied with its structure and internal consistency with little or no regard to surface brilliance. Brahms made an exception, however, for his friend Carl Tausig. For Liszt's former student, the composer turned to Paganini, that most sensational of violinists, and chose a theme from the famous Caprice No. 24 in A minor, the same that Rachmaninoff later was to use as the basis for his Op. 43. Brahms then devised a series of intricate variations upon this theme that remain among the most difficult in the entire repertoire. The pianist at this recital was Ming Xie who played the pyrotechnics to the hilt and ended the program with a flourish.
The Wednesdays at One performances invariably offer a sharp contrast between audience and musicians. The former, consisting mostly of older individuals, are generally a relaxed crowd seeking little more than to pass an hour listening to a free performance of pleasant sounding music. Onstage, though, it's a different story, particularly at piano recitals such as this. The works chosen are almost always those that present the greatest difficulty in performance and whose correct execution would pose a challenge to the skill of even the most experienced virtuosi. While the audience sits back comfortably in their seats, the pianists strive mightily to offer them thrilling renditions that would not be out of place on the main stage of Carnegie Hall.
Finally, a note of thanks to pianist Qi Xu who did an excellent job on the Carter and Schubert pieces and was courteous enough to take the time to supply me with the titles of the two Schubert lieder that for some reason had been omitted from the printed program.
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