FRANZ LISZT SINAE LEE - Piano

Années de pèlerinage (Years of Pilgrimage) FRANZ LISZT SINAE LEE - Piano

NI6192 Années de pèlerinage (Years of Pilgrimage) FRANZ LISZT SINAE LEE - Piano

Années de pèlerinage experiences (in the case of Liszt, within (The Years of Pilgrimage) Switzerland and Italy) as source materials for Liszt and the Literatization of Music their own creative work. The titles in the first volume with their accompanying quotations Franz Liszt’s Années de pèlerinage consists from Byron, Schiller and Senancour explain of some 26 separate piano compositions, the subject matter: Chapell de Guillaume Tell; published in three volumes (in 1855, 1858, and Au lac de Wallenstedt (“...thy contrasted lake. 1883 respectively) and which extend over his With the wild world I dwell in, is a thing Which lifetime. Together, they constitute one of the warns me, with its stillness, to forsake Earth’s most ambitious and comprehensive projects troubled waters for a purer spring); Pastoral; in nineteenth century piano-music. In these Au bord d’un source (“In murmering coolness works, Liszt was to discover a new kind of the play of young nature begins”); Orage; Vallee musical impressionism, at once sophisticated d’Obermann (“Vast consciousness of Nature and intensely personal. The choice of title everywhere overwhelming and impenetrable, comes from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s universal passion, indifference, advanced Recorded and Mastered By Bob Whitney for the Apprenticeship, a novel whose central theme of wisdom, voluptuous abandon, all the desires Royal Conservatoire of Scotland artistic self-realization made a deep and lasting and all the profound torments that a human & © 2012 Royal Conservatoire of Scotland impression on the composer. heart can hold, I have...suffered them all in this Issued under exclusive licence to Wyastone Estate Limited memorable night...); Eclogue; Le Mal du Pays; and Cover Image ©Royal Conservatoire/KK Dundas Design by www.0427.co.uk Liszt came from a new generation of Romantic Les Cloches de Geneve (“I live not in myself, but artists, who in conscious emulation of the I become Portion of that around me”). These 9 Royal Conservatoire of Scotland 100 Renfrew Street medieval wandering minstrels, stressed the pieces are thus a Romantic traveller’s itinerary of Glasgow G2 3DB value of travel as a means of acquiring artistic Swiss sights and sounds and their associations. +44 (0)141 332 4101 maturity, and they often used their traveling Nothing quite like them had been attempted www.rcs.ac.uk Calder Debussy Prize, Bach Prize, Governors’ Between June and July 2011, she performed the before and they remain extraordinary fresh and to each piece can be understood as a solution to Recital Prize, Concerto Competition Prize, Ian D entire series of the Années de Pèlerinage by original. They have a pristine poetry eminently three interrelated problems. Firstly, there was the Watt Award and the Dunbar-Geber Prize. Sinae Liszt in UK and in Korea, celebrating the 200 suitable to the folk material and evocations of problem of Liszt’s early piano pieces. They were also has been in demand for prize adjudications. anniversary of his birth. This recording was the natural world - water effects, storms, Alpine partly inspired by French Romanticism, with its Recent adjudications include Yamaha Music made in the recording studio at RCS, straight horns and bells. The Vallee d’Obermann, the tradition of thematic and motivic manipulation, Foundation of Europe Piano Scholarships at after giving recitals at RCS in June 2011. most significant in the collection, shows Liszt and relied heavily on the improvisatory skills of the Royal Northern College of Music (RNCM), A as having already mastered the technique of the virtuoso performer. The rhetorical gestures Ramsay-Calder Debussy Prize and Walcer Prize Sinae studied piano with Hwa-Young Yi, Hyoung- thematic transformation that would be the of the performer were supposed to create the at the RCS. Joon Chang in Korea and Philip Jenkins in UK. mainspring of the symphonic poems composed effect of musical speech. The challenge for Liszt Since 2001, Sinae has been teaching piano as 20 years later. was to be able to “consolidate” these rhetorical In 2006, Sinae recorded Karol Szymanowski’s a Lecturer in the department of Keyboard and gestures within a more formal syntactical complete piano works on 4 CDs, released by the Collaborative Piano at RCS. The 2nd and 3rd volume of Années de system without weakening their expressive Divine Art Record Company. These recordings pèlerinage focus on well known pieces of Italian impact. By the time Liszt composed Années mark the first complete CD set in the world art. The titles of the 2nd volume are: Sposalizio de pèlerinage, he had succeeded in turning containing the late published Prelude in C sharp (after Raphael’s Marriage); Il Penseroso (The this early style of improvisational speech into minor. This recording of Szymanowski’s entire Michelangelo figure, prefaced with his quatrain a “language” set down as text. Secondly Liszt output in this genre is her début recording and that begins, Grato m’e il sonno”); Canzonetta attempted to adopt the classical ideal of the has received highly acclaimed reviews from del Salvator Rosa; 3 Petrarch Sonetts; Apres “sonata” without adhering to its traditional Gramophone (Recommended Recording), une lecture du Dante. A supplement of lighter formal scheme. The sonata principle, though BBC Music Magazine (Benchmark Recording), pieces, Venezia e Napoli, was added, making not abandoned, was modified to such a degree MusicWeb International (Recording of the an effective folkloric coda. The treatment as to be unrecognizable at first glance. Finally, he Month, November 2006), Pianist Magazine however is startling. Il Penseroso’s novel wished to elevate the status of programme music (Recommended Recording), All Music Guide harmonies anticipate Wagner’s Tristan by 20 (which he regarded in Franz Brendel’s phrase, as (Classical Editors’ Best of the Year2007) and Res years. Sposalizio has a Debussy-like texture and at the “forefront of historical evolution”) from its Musica. Some of the pieces from her Szymanowski has a strong resemblance to the 1st Arabesque. somewhat unsophisticated pictorial reputation CDs have been broadcasted on BBC Radio 3, Liszt was not attempting to portray these Italian to the level of poetic and philosophical sublimity. Radio New Zealand and Busan KBS TV. masterpieces in any merely imitative way but In doing so Liszt had outlined a similar kind rather, suspends them as it were in a musical of visionary conception of the “Artwork of the medium that reflects Liszt’s own psychology. Future” as Wagner had done in his own vision of The idea of an underlying literary programme the Gesamtkunstwerk (Total Art Form). Part of Années de pèlerinage’s fascination lies world literature and art into his own musical throughout that the cantilena derives at root SINAE LEE Piano in the way “literary” themes are incorporated language. In so doing he was enhancing and not from the inflections of the sigh motif in the into the musical fabric of each composition. eroding the expressive potential of instrumental melodic contour of the first line of the cantilena. South Korean-born Sinae Lee leads a busy life This “literization” of music seemed to offer the music. This close relation between the m usic However, the crucial point for the work’s claim as a soloist, chamber musician and lecturer composer a much needed escape, away from and its accompanying literary text can be most to rank as poetic art is, to use Hegel’s words, based in Glasgow, UK. Since her UK début with the era of the juste milieu (as Schumann called clearly illustrated in the Sonetto 47 del Petrarca that the melody - a “free resounding of the soul” the Royal Scottish National Orchestra (RSNO), the artistically shallow and culturally decadent from the 2nd volume. The piece is built on - “uplifts” us above the mere “natural force of playing Brahms Piano Concerto No.1, she has also years leading up to the 1848 revolutions) and formal elements unmistakably inspired by the emotion” as expressed in the sigh motive. And played with the Korean Symphony Orchestra, towards the dawning of a “New Poetic Age.” Petrarch poem on which it is based, and whose again to quote Hegel, the “poetic dimension of St. James Orchestra, Glasgow Orchestral The crucial point about Années de pèlerinage essence is captured in the music. For example, music” resides in giving melodic expression to Society, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (RCS) is not so much that the music is programmatic, the image of the phoenix by the chromatic “the language of the soul,” we might say that Wind Emsemble and RCS Orchestra. She has but rather that by taking his subjects from the harmonies of the very opening bar, the love the composer has, in a manner of speaking, frequently appeared in concerts in New York, writings of Petrarch and Dante, the paintings of pangs that sustains the original sonnet by the retraced the process of literization in the music. St. Petersburg, Riga, London, Edinburgh and Raphael, or the spectacle of the Swiss mountain ‘sigh’ motive of bar 6, the distinct tone employed The formal elements that immediately reflect Glasgow as well as in her native cities in Korea valley tinged with reminiscences Senacour’s by Petrarch, poised between ecstasy and lament the poem - the chromatic harmony and the sigh such as Seoul, Suwon and Busan. In Korea, novel Obermann, Liszt was able to give each by the cantilena of bar 14 - half elegiac, half motive - convincingly motivate both the melody she studied piano at Yewon School and Seoul of the pieces an expressive depth and poetic rapturous. As in the poem, the aesthetic crux that makes up the piece and the principle of Arts High School. After obtaining a Bachelor quality unattainable by other means. Insofar as of the music is in the way image and emotion coloristic transposition by which it develops. of Music with Distinction at Seoul National he held good to this claim, these works attained give rise to a structure conveying both of University, Sinae was offered a place to study a level that justified the term ‘poetic’ as used these elements at once. And the most cursory Dr Robert Marshall at Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (RCS) with by Schumann to distinguish art in the strong encounter with the music shows this was Lecturer in Creative and Contextual Studies a full scholarship awarded by the Inches Carr sense from non-art (mere craft). It was not the precisely Liszt’s intention. The harmonization of Trust. A year later she obtained MMus with ‘literization’ of the music per se which was the sigh motif mirrors the chromatic harmonies Distinction at RCS. While studying in Seoul, “poetic”, but rather the substance that attached of the opening. The form as a whole is made she won many prestigious prizes, such as the itself to each work when Liszt succeeded, as it up largely of transpositions of the cantilena Chung-Ang Daily Newspaper competition, and were, in picking up the thread of the literary text into a complex of distant, conflicting tonalities the Korean Music Association for Overseas that lay behind each the pieces. In other words, organized less according to harmonic logic than competitors. Her prizewinning career had Liszt seems to have been looking for a new kind in an effort to project a multi-coloured radiance, continued in UK where she won the London of relationship between literature and music as foreshadowed in embryo by the opening, Intercollegiate Beethoven competition as well by somehow projecting these masterpieces of the musical image of a phoenix. Still, we sense as numerous RCS Prizes including A. Ramsay- Années de pèlerinage (Years of Pilgrimage) Franz Liszt Sinae Lee - Piano NI6202

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Années de pèlerinage (Years of Pilgrimage) Franz Liszt Sinae Lee - Piano NI6202