Recitals

Van Cliburn Competition Silver Medalist

SUNDAY, JULY 12, 2009 4:00 PM PORTLAND INTERNATIONAL PIANO FESTIVAL MILLER HALL, WORLD FORESTRY CENTER

Yeol Eum Son

PROGRAM
Schumann Fantasiestcke, Op.12 Des Abends Aufschwung Warum Grillen In der Nacht Fabel Traumeswirren Ende vom Lied White Lies for Lomax Spanish Rhapsody

Bates Liszt

INTERMISSION
Chopin Fourteen Waltzes

Program subject to change Yeol Eum Son appears by arrangement with the Van Cliburn Foundation, Inc. 2525 Ridgmar Boulevard, Suite 307, Fort Worth, Texas, 76116 www.cliburn.org Generously sponsored by Judy and Hank Hummelt

PROGRAM NOTES
ROBERT SCHUMANN
(Born June 8, 1810, in Zwickau; died July 29, 1856, in Endenich) Fantasiestcke (Fantasy Pieces), Op. 12 Robert Schumanns father was a small town bookseller who encouraged his sons inclination toward the arts. At the age of six, the boy began to play the piano and to compose, and by the time he was fourteen, he was a published poet. At eighteen, he entered the University of Leipzig as a law student, but music proved too strong a calling for him to resist. In his third year, he left his law studies with the intention of becoming a pianist. He became a pupil of Friedrich Wieck, one of that epochs great teachers. Wieck told Schumanns mother that with two or three years of work, Roberts natural talent and artistic imagination could make him a superlative performer, but one of his hands suered an injury from an unknown source, and he turned instead to a career as a composer, conductor, and critic. In 1834, Schumann fell in love with another of Wiecks pupils, and the two considered themselves secretly engaged to marry, until family disapproval successfully separated them for a time. In 1835, Schumann fell in love again, this time with Wiecks star pupil, his own sixteen year old daughter Clara, who had made her public debut when she was nine. She became a published composer at age twelve, and grew up to be one of the greatest pianists of her time. Her father did everything he could to break up the relationship developing between the two, but they found ways of communicating despite him, and ve years later, on the eve of Claras twenty rst birthday, they married. Schumann composed most of his piano music before 1840, the year of his marriage to Clara. The bulk of this work consisted of collections of intimate miniatures that express the Romantic imagination. The Fantasiestcke, Op. 12, composed in 1837, is an early group of pieces that Liszt admired greatly, and that Schumann always counted among his best works. One of his nest and most representative groupings, these eight pieces do not make straightforward or brief musical statements, but are extended and developed works that represent Schumanns

highest level of eloquence. After he composed them, he gave them suggestive or evocative titles, but he once remarked, Isnt the music itself descriptive enough? Schumann used the title Fantasiestcke for several unrelated works, almost as though this title had a specic generic meaning for him, like the designation of a form. In the works to which he gave this name, he followed in the style he found in Mendelssohns Lieder Ohne Worte. He composed two sets of Fantasy Pieces for piano, and two more for piano with other instruments. He seems to have borrowed the word from his literary idol, E. T. A. Homann who, in 1814 and 1815, published a four volume collection of stories and sketches entitled Fantasy Pieces in the Manner of Callot (the seventeenth-century French artist whose engravings and etchings captivated the Romantics). In this book, Homann created the ctional Johannes Kreisler, the inspiration for Schumanns Kreisleriana, originally subtitled Fantasies for Piano. Schumann published the eight Fantasy Pieces of Op. 12 in 1838. This generic hybrid of a work, which incorporates an element of a large-scale cycle, constitutes the last appearance of anything like etudes. The pieces could be said to have a symphonic element because of their large structural units, and because of how Schumann developed the thematic material within them as the works progressed. Within the cycle, Schumann also displays his expertise with variation form. The works often are organized in ternary form with the central trio-like sections providing contrasts, especially in key and thematic content. They also are linked by tonality: D-at Major, F Major, F minor, and C Major. Each piece has a characteristic title indicative of the fantastical and visionary title of the whole set, and many of the pieces have programmatic associations. (1) The gentle Des Abends (In the Evening) is a quiet and lyrical nocturne, which Schumann said is to be played with great tenderness. (2) Aufschwung (Soaring) has an aggressive opening and contains alternating lyrical and brilliant sections. It is constructed in a very fast rondo-like structure. Its lyrical middle section uses longer rhythmic patterns. (3) Warum (Why) is slow and delicate, and quite straightforward.

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(4) The capricious Grillen (Whims) is characterized by its humor, conveyed subtly by means of rhythm. The central section of this piece is in a chorale-like style. (5) In der Nacht (In the Night), reputed to have been Schumanns favorite, is a strong and passionate selection. It consists of a theme made up of small phrases over agitated broken chords in the accompaniment. In a letter to Clara written on April 21, 1838, Schumann gave an elaborate description of this piece based on the story of Hero and Leander, but he emphasized that in no way was the musical meaning of the section secondary. (6) Fabel (Fable) is the only piece in the set that does not use dance form. The introduction is slow; later, lyrical sections alternate with a capricious sound in faster, more episodic passages. (7) Traumeswirren (Troubled Dreams), an extremely fast selection, is unpredictable in feel. (8) The nal piece, Ende vom Lied (End of the song), is a lively piece with good humor and a feeling that is almost epic, even though it is a short work. It has a quiet chordal coda. Schumann told Clara, then his anc, of the thoughts of their marriage that he had had while composing this selection, but he also confessed that ultimately he felt pain that dampened his hopes. Eric Frederick Jensen, a recent biographer of Schumann, suggests that this piece may have had a more specic meaning than Schumann was willing to reveal in writing. In answer to his letter, Clara responded that the piece reminded her of the music of Johann Rudolf Zumsteeg, a composer of popular songs. Schumann, in turn, was pleased with her discernment, which leads Jensen to believe that Schumann may have quoted Zumsteeg in the piece. Fantasiestcke, however, was completed during a period when Schumann and Clara were estranged. The British pianist, Anna Robena Laidlaw, who lived in Knigsberg, played at a Gewandhaus Concert in Leipzig in July of 1837, when Schumann heard her and made her acquaintance. He dedicated the Fantasy Pieces of Opus 12 to her. After Schumann died, a ninth piece, Feurigst (Fiery), was appended to the set. Not published until 1935, it is generally considered not to match the other pieces well, and is rarely performed with them.

MASON BATES

(Born January 23, 1977 in Philadelphia) White Lies for Lomax Recently awarded both a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome and an American Academy in Berlin Prize Fellowship, Bates moves uidly between the worlds of concert music and electronica. Busy with both commissions and performance engagements, he is a member of the acclaimed Young Concert Artists, and his music has been described by the San Francisco Chronicle as lovely to hear and ingeniously constructed. In the six-minute bluesy, moody White Lies for Lomax, Bates evokes the idea of the Blues without actually recreating them. Bates defers to the sounds of an Alan Lomax eld recording playing o-stage, which Bates brings into an encounter with fragments of his own opening thematic lines, to conclude this brief homage. Bates has written: It is still a surprise to discover how few classical musicians are familiar with Alan Lomax, the ethnomusicologist who ventured into the American South (and elsewhere) to record the soul of a land. Those scratchy recordings captured everyone from Muddy Waters to a whole slew of anonymous blues musicians. White Lies for Lomax dreams up wisps of distant blues fragments more ction than fact, since they are hardly honest recreations of the blues and lets them slowly accumulate to an assertive climax. This short, but dense homage ends with the sounds of a Lomax eld recording oating in from an o-stage radio, briey crossing paths with the cloudlike remnants of the works opening. The seemingly recent phenomenon of sampling grabbing a sound-bite from a song and incorporating it into something new is in fact a high-tech version of the very old practice of allusion or parody, and the inclusion of a eld recording of early blues musicians at the end is a nod to that tradition. Bates suggests that in the nal minute of this work, an o-stage boombox can be used to play (a CD of ) the eld recordings that Alan Lomax made of the early Blues musicians. Bates notes, If it is not possible to secure a boombox, this component of the work can be left out. It makes for a magical nal minute, but it is not absolutely necessary.

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FRANZ LISZT

(Born October 22, 1811, in Raiding, Hungary; died July 31, 1886, in Bayreuth) Spanish Rhapsody, S. 254 Liszt, who developed his reputation mainly as a pianist, identied with the cult of virtuosity current in his day. He patterned his highly developed technique on that of the violinist Paganini, (and like Paganini, created the impression that his music was a kind of sorcery), as he developed a completely new style of playing. Until Liszts time, pianists appeared with other musicians or an orchestra, but Liszt established what has come to be called a recital (featuring one player alone for the length of a complete concert). Liszt also developed a new style of composing for the piano. He used fast and highly colored register changes, scales in many intervals and in chords, dense chords, wide intervallic leaps, and arpeggios over the whole range of the piano, as well as cadenzas. In 1845, Liszt made a concert tour of Spain, for which he wrote a Fantasy on Spanish Airs. In that work, he used the Jota Aragonesa, a folk tune that Glinka also used as the melodic basis for a Fantasy in the same year. In 1863, Liszt reused the Fantasy on Spanish Airs for the second part of his Spanish Rhapsody, and before it, he placed a passacaglia (a variation form) based on La Folia. La Folia was associated in early seventeenth-century Spain with wild singing and dancing. In the latter seventeenth century, and in the eighteenth century, La Folia was a single isometric harmonic pattern usually accompanied by a theme. It was frequently used as an ostinato, a short musical pattern repeated throughout a composition. For its publication in 1867, Liszt subtitled the Spanish Rhapsody Folies dEspagne et Jota Aragonesa. In this work, Liszt treats the two Spanish melodies very much like those he used in his Hungarian Rhapsodies. This well-developed work opens with an introduction of piano ourishes. The theme of La Folia appears in a low register, and after this comes a series of variations, the last of which makes a link to the theme of the Jota Aragonesa.

FRDRIC CHOPIN

(Born March 1, 1810 in Zelazowa Wola, Poland; died October 17, 1849 in Paris) Fourteen Waltzes When Chopin made an early trip to Vienna (then the musical capital of his part of the world), the city was dancing to waltzes by Joseph Lanner and the elder Johann Strauss. During Chopins lifetime, the waltz became very popular in two very distinct forms: one was as a dance, but the second was as a concert piece. Chopins published waltzes can be divided into two groups. Those intended for (or at least suitable for) actual ballroom use were generally brilliant and highly ornamented. The second type of waltz that Chopin published was a more introspective, often rather melancholy miniature set piece (that would not be construed as a type of fashionable Viennese waltz). When Chopin visited Vienna, he thought the Viennese waltz was entirely foreign to his nature, and initially seemed surprised with the dignity that the Viennese imbued it: They actually call waltzes works. When the Polish-born composer returned to Paris, he exclaimed, I have acquired nothing of that which is specially Viennese by nature, and accordingly I am still unable to play waltzes, yet he nevertheless seemed to take to the form readily enough, and reconceived it in his own distinctive way. Chopins waltzes, with their clear triple meter, are frequently harmonically simpler than his other works. Many of the waltzes are in three-part form (ABA). The earliest waltzes were composed in minor keys, while the middle waltzes were mostly in major keys, and many of the later waltzes were again in minor keys. Chopins waltzes are each independent, even though some share the same opus number. The early waltzes were fairly modest structures: brief and simple in form, with middle sections called Trios. Chopin did not follow any single formal pattern in his waltzes, although usually they have several sections, with the rst containing the waltz proper, and that part is recapitulated in the end. In the central sections, he often uses brief contrasting passages. Op. 18, the Grand Valse brillante in E-at Major, is the rst waltz Chopin published, although it was actually the fth waltz that he composed. Although written between 1831 and 1832, and rst performed in 1833, it was not published until 1834. Its main theme is perhaps the most

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well known, and most recognizable of all his waltzes. The musicologist James Huneker commented famously that the eervescent quality of this waltz was actually vulgar, but most listeners have felt its joyous character to be entirely convincing. Chopin did not really intend his colorful waltzes for dancing, although some were eventually danced (in particular the Op. 18; Op. 34, No. 1; Op. 42; and Op. 64, No. 1). Chopins waltzes were among the brightest and most charming works he composed: they were masterpieces

of renement and elegance. The three waltzes of Op. 64 were the last published in his lifetime, and they are among the shortest waltzes he composed. They were thus not considered eective for dancing, but Chopin would not have wished them to be. The rst is the charming and energetic Minute waltz (which actually takes around two minutes to play) a work in three-part form that has claimed much popularity due to its comparative technical ease. In tonights concert, you will hear the full range of Chopins work in the genre. Program notes by Susan Halpern 2009