Elisabeth Leonskaja Piano Cuarteto Casals Sophie Bevan Soprano
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Tuesday 31 May 2016 6.30 pm Chamber Music Season/ Song Recital Series London Pianoforte Series/ Introducing James Baillieu In the presence of HRH The Duke of Kent, KG Royal Patron In honour of the Friends of Wigmore Hall Elisabeth Leonskaja piano Cuarteto Casals Vera Martínez-Mehner violin • Abel Tomás violin Jonathan Brown viola • Arnau Tomàs cello Sophie Bevan soprano Alice Coote mezzo-soprano Allan Clayton tenor Henk Neven baritone James Baillieu piano RAM Singers Hiroshi Amako tenor • William Blake tenor James Geidt bass • Michael Mofidian bass WIGMORE HALL 115TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATORY CONCERT There is a complimentary drink for every member of the audience at the intervals of tonight’s concert Please go to the following designated areas: Bechstein Room: Front Stalls Rows AA–K (Please use the doors on either side of the stage) Restaurant: Rear Stalls Rows L–X; Balcony Rows A–D We are grateful to The Monument Trust for essential additional support for our expanded vocal series. COUGHING CAN BE VERY DISTURBING FOR BOTH THE ARTISTS AND OTHER MEMBERS OF THE AUDIENCE. PLEASE SUPPRESS ANY COUGHING AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE. COUGH LOZENGES ARE ON SALE IN THE FOYER OR MAY BE OBTAINED FROM THE USHERS. Would patrons please ensure that mobile phones are switched off Please also ensure that watch alarms and other electronic devices which can become audible are switched off. Wigmore Hall is equipped with a ‘Loop’ to help hearing aid users receive clear sound without background noise. Patrons can use this facility by switching their hearing aids over to ‘T’. Lithograph of Franz Schubert by Josef Teltscher PROGRAMME: £5.00 1 Franz Schubert (1797–1828) Like the exposition, the development unfolds with infinite spaciousness. After building to a fortissimo climax – a hint, ELISABETH LEONSKAJA perhaps, of human anguish in this quietest and most inward of sonata movements – the music hovers hauntingly around 960 (1828) Piano Sonata in B b D D minor, with the opening bars of the main theme, in hushed Molto moderato preparation for the recapitulation. In this context the theme’s Andante sostenuto momentary appearance, ppp, in a chromatically shadowed Scherzo. Allegro vivace e con delicatezza B flat has an effect of luminous strangeness, as if the home Allegro, ma non troppo – Presto key is distantly glimpsed through a gauze. By the summer of 1828 Schubert’s precarious health had The mood of ethereal tranquillity deepens in the Andante deteriorated to the point where he was frequently plagued sostenuto, a nocturnal barcarolle in C sharp minor. As so by headaches, giddiness and attacks of nausea. Yet he not often in Schubert’s piano music, the texture of the opening only kept up a more-or-less active social life but continued theme suggests string chamber music, above all the famous to work at a feverish rate, almost as if he sensed that time Adagio of the String Quintet: it is not hard to imagine second was running out. In September – a mensis mirabilis if ever violin and viola intoning the floating, almost becalmed there was one – he completed four visionary masterpieces melody against delicate pizzicatos from the other strings. that crowned his work as a composer of instrumental music: In the hymnic central episode, set in the warmly contrasting the C major String Quintet, and three piano sonatas (D958, key of A major, the rich textures seem to evoke a trio or D959 and D960) which he intended to publish as a set with quartet of cellos. When the main theme returns it acquires a a dedication to the famous composer-virtuoso Johann new murmuring accompanying figure deep in the bass. Nepomuk Hummel. When Diabelli finally published the Before the coda finally resolves into C sharp major, Schubert sonatas in 1839 Hummel was dead. Instead Diabelli conjures another of his unearthly visions with a deflection to dedicated them to a new champion of Schubert’s music, the fathomlessly remote key of C major. Robert Schumann. With its nonchalant shifts of register and delicious harmonic The first two of the sonata trilogy, in C minor and A major, sideslips, the Scherzo forms a mercurial interlude between are overtly indebted to Beethoven’s example. In the final the timeless contemplation of the Andante and the more sonata, in B flat, D960, the Beethovenian influence is at corporeal world of the finale. The minor-keyed trio, with best oblique: a distant recollection of the ‘Archduke’ Trio, its lumpen offbeat bass, sounds like a skewed, cussed perhaps, in the serene opening theme; and, in the way the Ländler. Launched by a held octave G, the rondo finale finale approaches B flat via C minor, an echo of Beethoven’s begins with a Hungarian-tinged dance tune which feints at last work, the rondo he wrote to replace the Grosse Fuge in C minor before resolving into the ‘proper’ key of B flat. In his B flat Quartet, Op. 130. But in spirit the sonata is utterly another of Schubert’s gloriously leisurely structures there un-Beethovenian. The profound contemplative ecstasy of are several other memorable themes, including a gliding the first two movements is, with the G major Sonata, D894, cantabile over a rippling accompaniment, and a mock-heroic and parts of the String Quintet, the consummation of a F minor outburst that dissolves into a skittish dance. Only at quintessential Schubertian experience first glimpsed in his 1815 setting of Goethe’s ‘Wandrers Nachtlied’. the very end is the main theme’s ambiguity resolved, with the octave G slipping to G flat and then to F, the dominant of The soft, deep trill, on a dissonant G flat, that intrudes on B flat, before the brilliant, quasi-orchestral send-off. the sublime calm of the opening immediately illustrates a Although he could hardly have known that this would be his crucial difference between Beethoven’s and Schubert’s last instrumental work (with only the String Quintet as a methods. Where Beethoven would have integrated the trill possible rival), Schubert, like Beethoven in the Op. 130 into the music’s argument, for Schubert it remains finale, bowed out with mingled robustness, lyrical something ‘other’: remote, mysterious, an extreme contrast tenderness, and wry, quizzical grace. in sonority and register with everything that surrounds it. Only once, in the transition from exposition to development (heard only if the exposition is repeated), does the trill erupt Interval in fortissimo violence. But while the trill’s function remains There is a complimentary drink for every member of the audience at the intervals essentially colouristic, like a distant timpani roll, the note of tonight’s concert G flat does prefigure an important tonal area in the Please go to the following designated areas: movement: in the leisurely expansion of the main theme that Bechstein Room: Front Stalls Rows AA–K follows the opening statement, and in the F sharp minor (Please use the doors on either side of the stage) theme (F sharp being the enharmonic equivalent of G flat) in Restaurant: Rear Stalls Rows L–X; Balcony Rows A–D the piano’s tenor register that opens the second group. Please check that your phone is turned off, especially if you used it during the interval. 2 CUARTETO CASALS darting B minor Scherzo, with its thistledown imitative textures, is a more edgy relative of Mendelssohn’s ‘fairy’ 887 (1826) String Quartet in G D movements. In extreme contrast, the easy-paced trio is an Allegro molto moderato etherealised Ländler, beginning pianissimo as a cello solo, Andante un poco mosso then flowering into a cello-violin duet. Scherzo. Allegro vivace – Trio. Allegretto Allegro assai As in the ‘Death and the Maiden’ Quartet, the finale is an obsessive tarantella. Yet with its weird, lightning shifts Schubert’s growing reputation in and around Vienna in the between major and minor – like a demonic parody of those in mid-1820s was based above all on his songs, part-songs the first movement – it is somehow even more disturbing. In it and piano miniatures – works easily saleable in the Schubert uses the rhythms and patterns of Italian comic flourishing domestic market. Yet, with a creative self- opera (shades at one point of the ‘Largo al factotum’ from confidence that belied his outwardly unassuming Rossini’s The Barber of Seville) to strange, almost nightmarish demeanour, he was determined to establish himself as a ends. The G major Quartet as a whole is the composer’s most composer of large-scale instrumental works in the consistently violent and tonally unstable large-scale work: a Viennese line of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. In 1824 world away from the more familiar, gemütlich, lyrical Schubert composed two magnificent string quartets, in Schubert, but a searing expression of an equally crucial A minor (‘Rosamunde’) and D minor (‘Death and the aspect of his musical persona and, dare one say, of the Maiden’) in preparation, he told a friend, for a ‘grand protest and despair within the man himself. symphony’. The symphony in question, the ‘Great’ C major, was extensively sketched during a summer holiday in the Austrian Alps in 1825 and finished in essentials the Interval following year. In 1826, too, he composed another large- There is a complimentary drink for every member of the audience at the intervals scale string quartet, destined to be his last, written within of tonight’s concert eleven days in June. While less well known than the Please go to the following designated areas: A minor and D minor quartets, this G major work is his Bechstein Room: Front Stalls Rows AA–K (Please use the doors on either side of the stage) most ambitious and revolutionary work in the genre.