Earlier this week I attended a piano recital at Alice Tully Hall, part of Juilliard's Wednesdays at One series, that featured short works by six prominent twentieth century composers - Alban Berg, Olivier Messiaen, Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Alexander Scriabin and Enrique Granados.
The recital began with Siyumeng Wang peforming Berg's Sonata, Op. 1 (1907-1909?). The work was actually a graduation exercise of sorts that marked the end of Berg's compositional studies with his mentor Schoenberg. The home key is nominally B minor; but even though the twelve-tone system had not yet been formulated by Schoenberg, the piece reflects his burgeoning interest in atonality and chromaticism as well as his concept of the "developing variation" in which everything within a piece derives from its initial concept. Berg had originally intended the work to be a traditional three-movement piano sonata, but when he was unable to formulate any ideas for the second and third movements Schoenberg suggested Berg "had said all there was to say" and should allow the single movement to stand on its own.
The next work was Messiaen's L'allouette Calandrelle from Catalogue d'oiseaux (1956-1958) played by Nathan Ben-Yehuda. The Catalogue d'oiseaux is an intricately devised work of which L'allouette forms the eighth and shortest movement; together with the ninth movement, La Bouscarle, it comprises the larger work's Book No. 5. It only gets more complicated from there. One critic paraphrased the composer as follows:
"Catalogue d’oiseaux ... illustrates not only the songs of birds but their flight, the landscapes which they inhabit, even the times of day and the seasons of the year at which he [Messiaen] chose to portray them."
The mammoth work, which in its entirety takes approximately 2.5 hours to perform, is thus a study in contrasts. It requires virtuoso technique, not to mention stamina, on the part of the pianist to successfully explore the sharply different moods that Messiaen evokes within it. Obviously, the composer had high regard for the abilities of his wife, Yvonne Loriod, who premiered the entire work in Paris in 1959 and to whom it was dedicated.
Next came Shostakovich's Prelude and Fugue in G-sharp minor, Op. 87, No. 12 (1950-1951) as performed by Ryan Soeyadi. Only last month I had heard two selections - the No. 7 in A major and the No. 15 in D-flat major - from the Op. 87 performed at another Juilliard recital and had posted my thoughts regarding the influence of Bach's Well Tempered Clavier and of pianist Tatyana Nikolayeva to whom Shostakovich dedicated the work
Pianist Elliot Wuu took the stange next to perform three Preludes by Rachmaninoff - the D major, Op. 23, No. 4 (1901-1903); the G major, Op. 32, No. 5; and the A minor, Op. 32, No. 8 (1910). It was extremely interesting to compare Rachmaninoff's Preludes, also inspired by Bach, to Shostakovich's. Rachmaninoff's were in general much more accessible and exhibited greater emotionalism than that by Shostakovich. That's not surprising as Rachmaninoff was the last standard bearer of nineteenth century Russian Romanticism while Shostakovich's music looked relentlessly forward.
The next work was Scriabin's Sonata No. 2 in G sharp minor, Op. 19 (1893-1898); it was performed by Yun Chih Hsu. This two-movement sonata was one of Scriabin's earlier works, written at a time when he was still heavily under the influence of Chopin, and was accordingly given a thoroughly Romantic program described by Scriabin as follows:
"The first section represents the quiet of a southern night on the seashore; the development is the dark agitation of the deep, deep sea. The E major middle section shows caressing moonlight coming up after the first darkness of night. The second movement represents the vast expanse of ocean in stormy agitation."
And yet some elements of Scriabin's later mystical preoccupations are already present here, namely his synesthetic attempt to find in musical tones the equivalence of colors. The key of E mentioned above by Scriabin was that which he equated with a white color similar to that of the moon.
The program closed with Rixiang Huang performing Granados's Los Requiebros, the opening movement of the composer's Goyescas, Op. 11 (1911). Subtitled Los majos enamorados, Goyescas was Granados's attempt to evoke the Spanish spirit as it existed in the time of its greatest artist by creating musical equivalents of Goya's artworks. But these are not meant to be literal repesentations. Rather they are intended to bring to mind in as Romantic a manner as possible the bygone world of courtly manners that existed in Spain at the end of the eighteenth century.
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