On Sunday evening KUSC broadcast live a piano recital given by Alexandria Le, a recent alumna of the ACJW Ensemble, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The performance featured the music of Bach, Mozart and Mussorgsky.
The program began with Ferruccio Busoni's 1893 transcription of J.S. Bach's Chaconne for solo violin from the Partita No.2 in D minor. BWV 1004 (1717-1720). This was far from being the only piece of Bach's music that Bussoni arranged. The Bach-Busoni Editions comprise some thirty-two volumes compiled over a thirty year period. So associated with Bach was Busoni in the public's mind that his name was often thought to be Bach-Busoni. The Chaconne itself, the closing movement of the partita, is considered the most beautiful in the violin repertoire. Brahms wrote of it:
"On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind."
Coincidentally, I had attended earlier in the evening a violin recital at Juilliard (about which I'll blog at a later date) at which all Bach's works for solo violin were performed. I was thus able to hear both the original and the transcription on the same date.
The next work was Mozart's Twelve Variations from Ah! Vous dirai-je, Maman, K. 265/300e (c. 1782). The concept of theme and variations was immensely popular during the Classical period and was to form the basis of some of Beethoven's greatest music. Often a composer or performer would take a popular melody as a theme and complete a series of variations upon it. In this case, Mozart composed twelve variations, the last being a recapitulation of the preceding eleven, on the simple source material from which the children's songs "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" and "Baa-Baa Black Sheep" are derived. Originally thought to have been written during Mozart's Paris sojourn of 1778, it has now been dated to 1782 when he was already living in Vienna. What was most interesting here was that the tune is still instantly recognizable to the listener. I therefore had a rare chance to experience what late eighteenth century audiences must have felt when they heard Mozart, and later Beethoven, take a favorite piece and transform it before them. Listening, I was thrilled by the apparent ease with which the composer handled the music. So adept was the transcription it seemed at times a conjuring trick.
The program concluded with Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition (1874). Most listeners are familiar with this work through Ravel's superb orchestration, but Mussorgsky originally composed it as the virtuoso piano piece performed here. It was intended as a tribute to the Russian artist Viktor Hartmann who died of an aneurysm at only age 39, Like Mussorgsky and other members of "the Five," Hartmann had been an strong advocate of promoting nationalist themes in Russian art. and this had formed the basis of the pair's close friendship. Upon Hartmann's death, an exhibit of his artwork was staged in Saint Petersburg as a memorial to him. It was while viewing the exhibit that Mussorgsky hit upon the concept of the work as a musical representation of a viewer passing through the show and pausing to look at one Hartmann picture after another. Ironically, most of the original artwork has since been lost and it is only through Mussorgsky's music that these paintings now exist. The music itself is much more powerful in the original piano version; it has a rawness and a hard edge that has been subsumed in Ravel's elegant transcription.
All the above pieces were obviously chosen for their difficulty. Any pianist, no matter how accomplished, would have found this program a daunting challenge. I had previously heard Alexandria perform only chamber works with the ACJW, and this was my first opportunity to hear her in solo recital. It was something of a revelation as I'd never before been able to appreciate how truly talented she is at the keyboard. She gave here a recital that was equal to or better than many given on Carnegie Hall's main stage. I'm very much looking forward to hearing her perform in person at some future date.
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