Saturday, November 9th, 8:00 PM
Zipper Hall, Colburn School
‘Spielfreude’ is the compact German noun that describes the utter joy and pleasure of play, and by extension, playing an instrument. For the pianist, it usually begins at an early age via contact with the topography of the keyboard—with its white and black keys operating lovely hammers and causing a case of strings to resonate—and then works an enchantment upon the player. Training ensues, and sometimes the joy is quashed or sidelined; if one is lucky, however, tactile mastery is achieved to some degree and nourished with an education in harmony, counterpoint, improvisation and knowledge of style and musical genre (oh, plus those dreaded scales!). Then the magic expands and a world is at your fingertips.
Tonight’s program, which covers a century’s worth of music, is a very unofficial survey of all sorts of piano pleasure, running from the purely physical to the intellectual, from sensuality to visceral excitement, from the intimate to the extroverted. Hopefully, in this year of Piano Spheres’ 30th anniversary as a series, you’ll continue to enjoy the vision of a series that presents the music of our time, commissions specially designed for our concerts, lesser known modern composers and even the occasional conversation between bygone eras and our own that sheds light on the rich diversity of a musical aesthetic that we are privileged to enjoy in the 21st century.
CLICK TO BUY TICKETS
There are two artificial sets in the program. The first of them opens the evening, leading off with unbridled major/minor fun from György Ligeti’s early masterpiece “Musica ricercata” (1951-53), which exists as well in transcription as part of Ligeti’s popular Bagatelles for wind quintet. After this aperitif comes a soothing minimalist etude by Philip Glass from his set of twenty composed between 1991 and 2012. It begins like a nocturne, grows in grandeur and then returns to its original mood. The last piece in the group is from Henry Cowell’s Nine–Ings (1917-1922), all of which are brief meditations on the idea of motion. Here, “Fleeting” feels as much an indication of emotive fragility in tandem with its quiet scrabbling.
Quintes, by Casablancan-born Maurice Ohana, is the fourth of his twelve ‘etudes of interpretation’ (1981-82). It is in essence the unfolding of a long melody that is uniformly harmonized by the interval of a fifth, at times leaving traces of individual notes in the wake of its progress, sounding here and there like an improvisation as it invokes a vibe that is both ancient and modern, Western and non-Western. Ohana has expressed that he seeks ‘that magic enclosed by sounds that overwhelms us when it is manifested and which can’t be defined’.
I was introduced to Aldo Clementi’s B. A. C. H. (1973) by Daniel Rothman when the latter invited me to present a recital of 20th and 21st century music at the Italian Cultural Institute in Westwood several years ago. Clementi is a lesser known musical personality whose philosophical bent was among the more austere in an era of severe modes of musical thought. He has stated, for instance, that ‘to think of music as a discourse, even subconsciously, is fallacious’. His one-page work, published in the Italian anthology Piani Vibratili, testifies perhaps to this thought by proposing a potentially endless ‘machine’ made up of strands of two chromatic scales (ideally played at differing dynamic levels) and a ghostly melody that go through a cycle that the performer is to play at least three times but whose deployment messes with our sense of narrative direction. The musical
notes B, A, C and H (B = B-flat and H = B natural in German terminology) of the title allude to the chromatic and contrapuntal character of the music and are not presented in an emblematic way.
CLICK TO BUY TICKETS
Piano Spheres created the initiative ’30 for 30’ to commission multiple pieces distributed over this year’s season. Two of the three I launched follow on the program and are described below by their composers: –Sitting down to compose for an admired musician and prestigious series, I was flooded with thoughts; not all of them translated into music and I thus decided not to think. As the music came of its own accord, one may say it is what bodies know. “Freely” is therefore the performance instruction fixed atop the score. Indeed, I myself have never played the music the same way twice and I trust that Mark has considered and reconsidered the music’s phrases. More than likely we are listening to him play it again for the first time. Perhaps there is something of Spielfreude to this—what bodies know, what Mark’s body tells him—and I hope that is so. Why not after thirty years of playing music for each other? But the body knows a lot after thirty years. More than we think. This year alone we lost beloved members of the Piano Spheres family: Sarah Gibson, who was a mere eight when Mark played in its inaugural year, and Catherine Uniack, who was among those who made it happen. What Bodies Know is dedicated to Mark and the entire Piano Spheres community, and to keeping it alive.—Daniel Rothman
–SNAPSHOTS ‘24 takes its name from a series of short piano works that I have composed over the years that are each intended to capture and elaborate a brief musical idea in the spirit of Bach’s Inventions. The pieces all play with the arrangement of the piano into black and white notes, exploring various ways of pitting those pitch collections against each other. Whereas the previous Snapshots have all been collections of miniatures, SNAPSHOTS ’24 integrates the various ideas into an organic whole, building a larger formal arc and accentuating interrelationships between them.—Peter Knell
To close the first half of the program, I’ve chosen music by a composer very dear to my musical development. The excerpt “Je dors, mais mon coeur veille” (I sleep, but my heart keeps watch) is the penultimate movement of Olivier Messiaen’s vast piano cycle Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus, composed in 1944. The phenomenon of Christ’s birth is pondered in range of ‘regards’ or gazes/contemplations of the infant and what his presence will come to mean on Earth. The central motive of the movement is the ‘theme of love’ that has been used throughout the cycle; the composer bookends this music with a mellifluous wallowing in a single F-sharp major harmony. Messiaen describes it as a ‘poem of love, a dialogue of mystic love; [musical] rests play a great role here…It is the sleeping Jesus who loves us in his Sabbath and gives us pardon.”
The second half of the program begins with a homage to the great Arnold Schoenberg in honor of the 150th anniversary of his birth. I have never had occasion to perform the two pieces of Op. 33, written in 1929 and 1931 respectively, and it seemed imperative to do so. They are the last of his solo piano works and continue the tradition of short non-programmatic pieces such as typified by the various Klavierstücke of Brahms. Op. 33a begins with a chain of six chords, unfurled melodically and in themselves containing the configurations of a chromatic series that will be constantly re-envisioned as smaller units or combined as contrapuntal strands. The discourse in Op. 33b is perhaps more linear and transparent in its polyphony, relying less on the explosive contrasts of its companion piece and thriving on jaunty, dotted-not motifs.
CLICK TO BUY TICKETS
Hans Werner Henze’s Cherubino (1980-81) evokes Mozart’s love-struck teenager from The Marriage of Figaro in a short suite built in part on motives from the arias “Voi che sapete”, Cherubino’s serenade to the married Countess, and—in the last movement—“Non più andrai”, in which Figaro tells the youth it’s time to prepare for a new chapter as a soldier as per the directives of the Count who wishes him out of the house and out of his hair. Do not listen, however, for an obvious transcription, for Henze’s use of these thematic fragments is oblique and couched in a dramatic extrapolation of the character’s moods. The choice of this piece is also a nod to one of the hats I wear as an opera coach.
We come to the second of my assembled sets, whose unity derives from the way composers have made use of indigenous material and style. Roy Harris’ Streets of Laredo (1946) begins with exuberant swagger but soon veers toward a slower, minor version of the melody to allude to the predicament of the moribund cowboy described in the text. The original melody returns in a tempered version that acts as a kind of positive benediction. Alberto Ginastera’s Danza de la moza donosa (Dance of the Graceful Girl) from 1937 is a haunting, uplifting song; at first melancholic and shy, it assumes passionate sweep before a return to its opening mood. To finish the group of pieces is Béla Bartók’s sixth Bulgarian dance (found in the final volume of his graded pedagogical opus for pianists entitled Mikrokosmos). It is constructed on a 3 + 3 + 2 rhythmic pattern that reflects one aspect of his pioneering work in the documentation of authentic Hungarian, Bulgarian and Rumanian folk music.
The final commission of the evening is described below by the composer: In this musical meditation on three simple notes, the rhythm is always moving forward while the pitch remains static. I intentionally worked with extremely limited pitch material to create a sense of meditative stasis. The pitches were derived from the opening line of Helen Reddy’s iconic song I Am Woman. When the pitch material finally expands, so does the rhythm, transitioning to unmetered tremolos that continue to expand before the ending “coda.” At its conclusion, we finally hear the full three-note“ I Am Woman” theme played on its own and no longer embedded in the meditative accompaniment. In writing this piece, I was thinking a lot about music as a healing agent. Can living in a certain sonority offer a healing experience for the performer or audience? Can it incite a deeper breath? Can it offer a sense of release? — Hannah Rice
I made the acquaintance of Francisco Cortés Álvarez when I played in his ensemble piece Operación Tamarindo for Green Umbrella in the spring of 2024. Curious to know more about his solo piano repertoire, he brought my attention to his recent work Canicas e ilusiones (2020, Marbles and Hopes) which brings this concert to a close. Here are his words on the piece: In the Mexico City metropolitan area, sometimes humble and apparently harmless stands in street markets, fairs, or public plazas offer the opportunity to win appealing prizes through a simple game.
The mechanics are simple: The player throws some marbles on a board with many numbers, and a certain number of points are awarded depending on where the marbles landed. The initial throws are free and quickly the host pretends to “count” the points and says a random number that somehow happens to be close to the 100 imaginary points needed to win. Then the host spouts “Wow, nice luck!” and the player gets confident, lowers their guard, and suddenly believes it is possible to reach a hundred points and maybe get a new flashy cellphone. But the following throws cost money, each of them costs more than the previous, and the counts do not add as much anymore, adding an average of 3 to 4 points per throw the 100 is way farther than expected.
With each marble throw the victim increases their hopes while the swindler encourages them to keep playing; that way the victim gradually gets blinded, and once blinded with each marble throw falls deeper into the trap. Canicas e Ilusiones was commissioned by and is dedicated to Santiago Piñeirúa for his album México Actual, and was written with the support of the “Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte” by FONCA.– Francisco Cortés Álvarez
Notes by Mark Robson—Nov 2024
CLICK TO BUY TICKETS