CMS Webcast: Anne-Marie McDermott Performs Haydn

Joseph Haydn is so often remembered as "the father of the string quartet" and "the father of the symphony" that it's often forgotten he also pioneered the Classical piano sonata.  Wikipedia lists some 62 of these works, seven of which are lost, seven are doubtful, one is incomplete, and one is a different version of another.

At the time Haydn began composing sonatas in the mid-1750's the modern piano was not then available to him.   Though the piano had been invented in Italy circa 1700 by Bartolomeo Cristofori, it did not come into wide use in northern Europe until the latter part of the eighteenth century when Viennese designers such as Johann Andreas Stein and his daughter Nannette Streicher began to manufacture the fortepiano.  Before that time the keyboard instrument most widely in use - that for which J.S. Bach composed his sonatas - was the harpsichord.  There is a basic distinction between the harpsichord and the fortepiano.  While with the former the strings are plucked when the musician strikes the keys, with the latter the strings are hammered.  This innovation allowed greater volume and sustain than had previously been possible.  The development of this new instrument thus granted the musician greater freedom of expression and made possible the advent of the virtuoso pianist.

When Haydn began composing his sonatas he was writing for the harpsichord.  Since there were then no such thing as a piano soloist - Mozart would be among the first - these works were not intended for publication but as exercises for his students.  The reason several of Haydn's earliest sonatas were lost was because he placed no value upon them and in some cases did not even bother to make copies.  It was only as the fortepiano came into increasing use that Haydn paid more attention to the sonata as a serious form of composition.

In a sense then the history of Haydn's sonatas parallels that of the fortepiano itself.  His final sonatas were written only after he had encountered the Broadwood piano, the most modern then available, on his second sojourn in England.  The Broadwood was the first to have a range of more than five octaves, and so impressed was Haydn that he took three of them with him when he returned from London to Vienna.

On Thursday evening, the Chamber Music Society webcast a recital by pianist Anne-Marie McDermott whose program consisted entirely of Haydn sonatas.  The works performed were, in order performed, the Sonata in G major for Keyboard, Hob. XVI:40 (1784); the Sonata in C minor for Keyboard, Hob. XVI:20 (1771); the Sonata in C major for Keyboard, Hob. XVI:50 (c. 1794-95); the Sonata in F major for Keyboard, Hob. XVI:23 (1773); and the Sonata in E-flat major for Keyboard, Hob. XVI:52 (1794).

All the above were of great merit, but the two I found most interesting were the No. 50 in C Major and the No. 52 in E-flat major.  These were both among Haydn's last three sonatas; they were written during his second and final visit to London and dedicated to Therese Jansen Bartolozzi, an accomplished pianist who had once been a student of Muzio Clementi.  Into these sonatas Haydn put everything he had learned of the form over the roughly forty years he had spent working with it.  He was here at the peak of his powers and writing for a virtuoso performer fully capable of realizing whatever challenges he set before her.  The No. 52, in particular, demonstrates a maturity of style coupled with a boldness of invention that clearly anticipates Beethoven's late sonatas.  I had already heard András Schiff perform this work in recital in November and appreciated the opportunity to hear another excellent performance.

Anne-Marie McDermott is not as well known to the public as some other soloists - primarily because she devotes so much of her time to chamber music - but she is an exceptionally accomplished pianist who shone at this intimate recital.  Her reading of the Haydn sonatas gave me great insight into the venerable composer's accomplishment as a master of the sonata form.

Juilliard Wind Orchestra Performs Mozart

Though it was raining heavily in New York City yesterday afternoon, there was still a good size crowd on hand for this week's Wednesdays at One installment that featured at this performance the Juilliard Wind Orchestra.  Only one work was performed at the hour-long recital, the Serenade No. 10 in B-flat Major, K. 361 (1781) by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

While it was not Mozart who gave the work its name Gran Partita, the title is fully deserved both for the serenade's length and its grandeur of expression.  Those which Mozart had composed in Salzburg were much shorter and of lighter weight, more in the nature of divertimentos.  The music here progresses in a more stately fashion while still possessing a captivating beauty.  If the K. 361 was indeed composed in 1781, as determined by the paper type used by Mozart when writing it, the work would have been one of the first pieces the composer devised upon his arrival in Vienna.  Wind orchestras had great popularity during this period, and Mozart may have intended the work to be played at some public celebration as a way of introducing himself to the Viennese citizenry.  Its premiere must have been successful because an abbreviated version consisting of only four movements was encored three years later at a concert given by the virtuoso Anton Stadler for whom Mozart later wrote both his Clarinet Quintet, K. 581 and his Clarinet Concerto, K. 622.

The work is scored for thirteen instruments - twelve winds and a double bass.  The use of a stringed instrument implies that the work was originally intended for indoor performance; if the piece were on some other occasion to be played in an outdoor setting a contrabassoon could easily be substituted in its place .  (There can be no question of which instrument Mozart had in mind when composing the work because the bass part contains pizzicato markings.)   Unusually, at yesterday's performance both a contrabass and a contrabassoon were included in the instrumentation.  No reason was given for this arrangement.

I had not heard Juilliard's Wind Orchestra in some time and was impressed at the high level of performance.  This was as seamless a presentation of Mozart's great work as one could have wished.

Met Museum: Celebrating the Arts of Japan, Rotation 1

The Met has been celebrating its Department of Asian Art's 100th Anniversary all through 2015 and into the current year.  The Masterpieces of Chinese Painting exhibit I reviewed in December is part of that event as is the show I saw more recently, Celebrating the Arts of Japan, a selection of works from the Mary Griggs Burke Collection.  Judging from the pieces on view, Ms. Burke was an exceptionally discriminating collector.  Together with her husband, Jackson Burke, she began acquiring masterpieces of Japanese art in the 1960's.  They began with ukiyo-e, the woodblock prints that are to Western eyes the most accessible forms of Japanese art.  Upon her husband's death in 1975, Ms. Burke continued on alone until her own passing in 2012.  The number of masterpieces contained in the Burke collection is astonishing.  It's no wonder that it was the first Western collection ever to have been exhibited at the Tokyo National Museum.

After having seen so many great landscapes at the Chinese painting exhibit, it's not surprising that the works I was most drawn to here were of the same genre.  In some cases it was easy to make a direct comparison.  Take, for example, Landscape after Xia Gui, a Muromachi period work attributed to the Buddhist monk Tenshō Shūbun.  I had only just seen Xia Gui's Mountain Market, Clearing Mist and been incredibly impressed with the painter's brushwork.  In his own work, which consisted of two six-panel folding screens placed side by side, Shūbun (if he were indeed the artist) employed the same technique of using rough strokes in the foreground and then ink washes to make the background appear to dissolve in mist.  He also made deliberate use of the "one corner" style but here moved the detailed foreground closer to the work's bottom center.  The influence of the "one corner" style can also be seen in the much later Goose and Reeds; Willows and Moon, a six-panel folding screen by Edo period artist Maruyama Ōkyo.  Here almost all the detail is at the bottom on the first three panels with the fowl strategically placed a bit higher on the fourth panel; the fifth and sixth panels are left completely blank.

The extensive use of massive folding screens is uniquely Japanese.  While most Chinese works are done on a handscroll so that the landscape is slowly revealed to the observer as the scroll is unwound, the Japanese screens in contrast offer huge panoramas that deliberately overwhelm the viewer.  These two totally different approaches to apprehending the same subject create in the mind vastly different impressions.

A similar difference in presentation could be seen in the juxtaposition of Sakai Ōho's 1839 Six Jewel Rivers (Mu-Tamagawa), a small format handscroll, with Utagawa Hiroshige's 1857 Six Tamagawa Rivers from Various Provinces (Shokoku Mu Tamagawa), a series of six polychrome woodblock prints.  As the museum's website notes of Hiroshige's work, "the groupings and postures of the figures in each of the prints nearly exactly echoes those found in a set of handscrolls by Sakai Ōho."  But though the subjects and their arrangement are nearly identical, one experiences completely different emotions when viewing the two artists' paintings.

My favorite works were those that showed the Japanese pursing their characteristic love of beauty.  As anyone who has traveled through Asia knows, aesthetic appreciation in the East can be expressed in forms completely unfamiliar to Westerners, as in the gold leaf painted folding screen Women on a Bridge Tossing Fans into a River that shows elegantly appareled court ladies standing on a low bridge and talking among themselves as they watch the current carry their painted fans away.  Or in Zhou Maoshu Admiring Lotuses, a hanging scroll by Kaihō Yūsetsu portraying the Chinese philosopher bending over the edge of a small boat to better see the lotuses floating on the lake's surface.  In the same manner, the Japanese love of music is expressed in highly stylized form in the mystical representation of Jizō Bosatsu Playing a Flute, a hanging scroll from the Edo period painted by Kanō Tan'yū that depicts the bodhisattva standing on a cloud with the moon behind him as he plays his phoenix-headed flute.

Though not announced as such on the museum's website, this is a two part exhibit.  The first rotation runs through the early part of 2016 (contact the museum for an exact date) while the second rotation continues through January 22, 2017.

Juilliard Piano Recital: Haydn, Chopin, Corigliano, Bashaw and Ravel

I went on Wednesday afternoon to Paul Hall to hear a recital given by Juilliard's Piano Performance Forum that featured the music of Haydn, Chopin, Corigliano, Bashaw and Ravel.

The program opened with Haydn's Sonata in E Major, Hob: XVI:31 (c. 1776) performed by Seungyeon Lee.  Even though this is not one of the composer's better known sonatas it's still of the highest quality and well worth hearing.  In this work it's the E minor middle movement, an allegretto, that most immediately captures the listener's attention.  The sound here is more reminiscent of a stately Baroque form than a classical work.  The development section is never resolved but leads without pause directly into the final movement theme and variations.

The next piece was Chopin's Sonata No. 3 in B minor, Op. 58 (1844), one of the composer's most technically demanding works.  Though composed some five years before his death, Chopin was already in failing health at the time of its composition and may already have been looking toward his legacy when writing this work.  At any rate, it contains one of his most brilliant evocations of the Romantic ethos.  The third movement largo, in particular, is filled with yearning but at the same time a sense of peaceful resignation.  For some reason Chopin never performed this work in public, but he must have realized that the "galloping" final movement was so daunting that there were very few pianists who possessed the virtuosity needed to successfully render it.  At this recital it was played exceptionally well by Peng Lin.

This was followed by the piece I found most intriguing at this recital, Corigliano's Fantasia on an Ostinato (1985), performed by Tomer Gewirtzman.  In addition to the original piano version played here, originally composed for the Van Cliburn Competition, Corigliano prepared the following year an orchestration that was premiered by the New York Philharmonic.  The endlessly repeating ostinato form is a perfect vehicle for Corigliano's minimalist style, and it also allows him to revisit Beethoven's use of ostinato - consisting of of a quarter note, two eighth notes and two quarter notes - at the beginning of the Seventh Symphony's second movement.  The result contains distinctive echoes of Beethoven throughout while still retaining an uncompromising modernist sound that is almost hypnotic.

The program ended with an incredible display of virtuosity by Ming Xe who performed Ravel's Gaspard de la nuit (1908) prefaced by contemporary composer Howard Bashaw's Prelude: Dita correnti.  Bashaw is a Canadian composer, and this was the first time I'd had an opportunity to hear any of his work.  The Prelude performed here worked very well as an introduction to the Ravel's longer work.  As for Gaspard itself, this is one of the most onerous in the repertoire, most especially the final "Scarbo" section, and it seems a favorite of the Julliard pianists - at another recital last month I heard Christopher Staknys play "Ondine" - who are continually seeking out the most challenging works available for their performances.  It's exactly this willingness to take on the pieces known for their difficulty that make attending these recitals so rewarding.

Carnegie Hall: Mitsuko Uchida Performs Mozart

Yesterday evening, famed pianist Mitsuko Uchida performed as soloist with the Cleveland Orchestra on an all-Mozart program consisting of two concertos and a symphony.  Ms. Uchida conducted both concertos from the piano. .

The program opened with the Piano Concerto No. 17 in G major, K. 453 (1784).  After having relocated from Salzburg to Vienna, Mozart gave a series of subscription concerts at which he played piano concertos he had composed for the occasion.  He was at the time only recently married and badly in need of means to support himself and his wife.  Still better known in Vienna as a pianist than a composer, Mozart used the concerts as a showcase for both his virtuosity and his musical writing.  The No. 17, however, was written for a talented student, Barbara Ployer, who paid "handsomely" for the privilege.  It turned out to be a great success and was only one of six to have been published during the composer's lifetime.  At its premiere in the suburb of Döbling, where the soloist's father had hired an orchestra, Mozart himself later played the piano part on his Quintet in E-flat major for Piano and Winds, K. 452 and then joined his student on a performance of his Sonata for Two Pianos in D major, K. 448.  Mozart had brought along as his guest the celebrated Italian composer Giovanni Paisiello and may it have been as much for the latter's benefit as that of his student that he worked so hard to make the evening a success.

The opening movement of the K. 453 is distinguished by a second theme that moves rapidly through several keys, an idea Beethoven later used in his own G major concerto.  Since the concerto was written to be played by another, the first movement contains one of the few cadenzas Mozart took the trouble to write out, usually improvising them at the keyboard when he was himself the soloist.  The second movement is noteworthy for the prominent part given the winds, an unusual innovation for that period.  The third movement is a theme and variations, and one of the most often told stories of this work is Mozart's pet starling's ability to sing almost perfectly the simple theme.

The next work was the Symphony No. 34 in C major, K. 338 (1780) led by the orchestra's concertmaster William Preucil.  This is a festive cheerful work, the last symphony Mozart wrote before leaving Salzburg for Vienna, and its good nature might have something to do with his impending departure from a position where he had never been happy.  The opening movement, similar in style to an Italian overture, sets the mood for the rest of the piece; the middle movement, while marked andante di molto, contains a note that the music should be played more quickly; and the final movement, in 6/8 time, is as lively as one could wish.  There is evidence that the work was originally to have been in four movements - Mozart began a minuet on the back page of the opening allegro and then tore out the remainder, if indeed he ever completed it.  Critic Alfred Einstein conjectured that a stand alone minuet, K. 409, might be the missing movement but the instrumentation does not match (the K. 409 contains flutes while the K. 338 does not).  It's more likely that Mozart felt the minuet, at least as he had envisioned it, would not fit in with the rest of the symphony's boisterous character and so decided to discard it.  While enjoyable, this is not a major work.  Listening to it, one has the sense Mozart was happily killing time until he was finally able to leave town.

After intermission, the program concluded with the Piano Concerto No. 25 in C major, K. 503 (1786).  This is the last of Mozart's masterful subscription concertos and its stately elegance - Mozart included both trumpets and timpani in the orchestration - epitomizes perfectly the Classical ethos.  It begins with a long first movement in sonata form that is characterized by quick shifts from major to minor keys.  The second movement andante is also in sonata form but lacks a development section.  The final section, an allegreto, opens with ballet music adapted from Idomeneo and then quickly moves to a more introspective mood.  (Unlike the K. 453, this was a work Mozart had written for his own use and so had not bothered to put on paper the cadenza he intended to play; Ms. Uchida therefore performed her own.)  It was as though in this work the composer wished to show off, in the most stately fashion imaginable, everything he had learned of the concerto form.

Mozart's music, along with Schubert's, is Mitsuko Uchida's specialty and in her dual roles of pianist and conductor she displayed a profound understanding of the composer's work throughout her performance.  She had already played this same program on Friday evening with the Cleveland Orchestra at Severance Hall and her sold out appearance yesterday evening at Carnegie Hall was a huge success with the appreciative audience.

Juilliard Piano Recital: Beethoven, Chopin, Granados, Scriabin and Liszt

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.

Juilliard Violin Recital: J.S. Bach: Sonatas and Partitas

On Tuesday afternoon I walked down to Juilliard to hear a violin recital given by the students of Lewis Kaplan.  The program, a windfall for anyone with an interest in Baroque music, consisted of the complete Sonatas and Partitas of J.S. Bach.

The Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin (BWV 1001–1006) were composed over a number of years and completed by 1720; they remained unpublished, however, until 1802,  Though we in the twenty-first century are accustomed to thinking of Bach as the greatest of the Baroque composers, a giant whose work is as essential a part of the repertoire as that of Mozart and Beethoven, that sad truth is that he was largely forgotten by the public for a century after his death.  These pieces might very well have been lost in the eighty odd years that elapsed between their composition and publication if the autographs had not been passed down within the Bach family to grandson Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst Bach.  It was only when the virtuoso Joseph Joachim began playing them regularly in his recitals that their true value at last came to be recognized.

Compositions for solo violin were not Bach's invention.  He had a number of precedents in the works of such well know composers as H.I.F. Biber and Johann Georg Pisendel.  The most immediate influence on Bach, though, may have been the solo partitas of Johann Paul von Westhoff, a composer with whom Bach had actually worked while in Weimar.  But certainly Bach raised the genre to an entirely new level and in so doing revealed possibilities for the instrument that modern composers are still exploiting.  The absence of accompaniment, or continuo, meant that the violin writing was forced to take on added complexity in order to make up for this lack of additional instrumentation and to necessarily become polyphonic so as to make the composition whole.

The works were not performed in catalog order at this recital as they usually are.  When at intermission I spoke with Mr. Kaplan and asked him if there were a reason for this, he mentioned that some of the musicians were also performing in an opera being staged at Juilliard that same evening and needed to play their pieces first.  Each work was divided among several violinists, with each playing one or two movements and their place then taken by another performer.

In the order of appearance, the first work was the Sonata No. 1 in G minor, BWV 1001.  The adagio and allegro were performed by Erika Mitsui and the siciliana and presto by Agnes Tse.  Next was the Partita No. 2 in D minor, BWV 1004 with Leerone Hakami playing the allemanda and corrente, Haemin Lee the sarabanda and giga, and Iris Chen the famous ciaconna.  This was followed by the Partita No. 1 in B minor BWV 1002 which is distinguished by having four pairs of movements.  In this work each movement has its own variation, or double, played at a much faster speed than the original.  James Luo performed the allemanda and corrente and their doubles, and Seohee Min the sarabande and tempo di borea (a form of bourée) and their doubles.

The first piece to be performed after intermission was the Sonata No. 2 in A minor, BWV 1003 whose grave and fuga were played by Lifan Zhu and the andante and allegro by Chisa Kodaka.  Next was the Sonata No. 3 in C major, BWV 1005.  The adagio and fuga were played by Momo Wong and the largo and allegro assai by Gabrielle Chou.  Finally, the recital ended with the Partita No. 3 in E major, BWV 1006.  Daniel Yue played the preludio and loure, Momo Wong the gavotte en rondeau and the menuets, and Lifan Zhu the bourée and gigue.

It goes without saying that the Bach solo violin works are among the most demanding in the violin repertoire.  There are any number of double and triple stops contained in these works and advanced bowing techniques are required.  I was incredibly impressed by the virtuosity of the Juilliard musicians who performed these works so admirably at Tuesday's recital.