PROGRAM NOTES

SERGEI RACHMANINOFF (1873 - 1943) Rachmaninoff Etude Tableau, Op.33

Rachmaninoff composed the Op. 33 Études-Tableaux at his Ivanovka estate in Tambov, Russia between August and September 1911, the year after completing his second set of preludes, Op. 32. Rachmaninoff biographer Max Harrison calls the Études-Tableaux "studies in musical composition"; while they explore a variety of themes, they investigate the transformation of rather specific climates of feeling via piano textures and sonorities. They are less predictable than the preludes and compositionally mark an advance in technique.

This masterful set of etudes or study pictures represents range of emotions not on an individual level but on a national scale: the nostalgia, the festiveness, the pain, and the passion of the Russian people is ever present throughout this work. The sincerity and the directness of the expression in this music are accessible to everyone who wishes to express the essence of being human. In Rachmaninoff's Etudes-Tableaux one can find the full range of expression that exists in each of these three styles: the festiveness, the heartache, nostalgia for childhood, the great depression and despair at both individual and collective levels. These treasures of musicality mask the formidable pianistic challenges entailed in much the same way as a beautiful rose hides its thorns. Thus, the full performance of these miniatures, which together form a beautiful almost symphonic cycle, is an emotional representation of Rachmaninoff’s birth country, his loves, his religion, the books that have influenced him and the paintings he had loved.

FRANZ LISZT (1811 - 1886) Fantasia quasi Sonata apres une lecture du Dante, S.161/7

Liszt was concerned with the larger questions of life and the struggle between good and evil. He consulted a church official before escaping from Paris with the Countess. She was not the only married woman he lived with, and he was notorious for his disdain for societal convention. Nevertheless, at the age of fifty-one he entered a monastery, and soon afterwards took holy orders and moved into apartments in Vatican City.

Liszt composed the “Dante” Sonata after reading Dante’s Divine Comedy. The work is subtitled Fantasia Quasi Sonata, implying that it is improvisatory rather than in strict sonata form. The “Dante Sonata” is an epic poem at the piano with highly contrasting episodes taking on themes of hell and heaven in different keys: At first we hear satanic trumpets in tritone relationships, then the cries of the damned in chromatic layers. Eventually, as the cries grow more urgent, the chorus of paradise breaks out. Things quiet down and we hear the heavenly harps; but, ravishingly, from afar come again the cries of the damned, begging for mercy. The piece wages war back and forth between bliss and hellfire, at last finding resolution in a massive D-major chord. This piece is considered one of the most difficult piano works in the literature.

MAURICE RAVEL (1875 - 1937) Poeme Choregraphique (La Valse)

La valse, a choreographic poem for orchestra, is a work written by Maurice Ravel between February 1919 and 1920; it was first performed on 12 December 1920 in Paris. It was conceived as a ballet but is now more often heard as a concert work. The work has been described as a tribute to the waltz.

Ravel denied that it reflects post-World War I Europe, saying: “While some discover an attempt at parody, others categorically see a tragic allusion in it – the end of the Second Empire, the situation in Vienna after the war, etc... This dance may seem tragic, like any other emotion... pushed to the extreme. But one should only see in it what the music expresses: an ascending progression of sonority, to which the stage comes along to add light and movement.”

La Valse is the most unexpected of the compositions of Ravel, revealing to us heretofore unexpected depths of Romanticism, power, vigor, and rapture in this musician whose expression is usually limited to the manifestations of an essentially classical genius.

SAMUEL BARBER (1910 - 1981) Piano Sonata in E-flat minor, Op.26

As one of America’s foremost composers of the twentieth century, Samuel Barber always gracefully avoided being drawn into the doctrinaire world of the compositional “isms” of his time, particularly serialism. Instead, all of his works, from music for solo piano to opera, comprise a lush lyricism, often freely atonal, but more often flagrantly and unfashionably tonal. Barber was not composing for the academy, but rather for audiences, musicians and critics who embraced his more conservative idiom.

The Piano Sonata, commissioned by Irving Berlin and Richard Rodgers, was a landmark event at the premiere in January 1950. The pianist was none other than Vladimir Horowitz, for whom Barber wrote the work. And it was the first time a pianist of world stature had premiered a major piano work by an American composer. The pianist and several critics hailed it as the first important piano sonata written by an American, and Horowitz – not a great aficionado of contemporary music – continually played and promoted it. “Barber is one of the few American composers who know how to write for the piano,” he wrote. “…Either they [American composers] write music that is very pianistic, but has no substance, or write music that has substance but isn’t pianistic.” Barber finished the first movement in short order but took almost two years to finish the Sonata, in part because he succumbed to the cultural and political distractions of Italy while he was supposed to be working on it during a stay at the American Academy in Rome. Upon his return to the United States, he doggedly set about completing the remaining three movements, experiencing periodic creative blocks while Horowitz nagged him. The Sonata is technically difficult and combines Barber’s romantic lyricism with passages of chromatic complexity. Nevertheless, the structure and thematic development of all four movements are characteristically transparent. The opening movement in modified Sonata Allegro form is dominated by a heavy, chordal main theme, while the bitonal Scherzo is almost the reverse image, with rapid, feathery chromatic pyrotechnics, punctuated by a few blue notes. The somber third movement is in passacaglia form, most tonally coherent, romantic and lyric. The final movement, a fugue that can almost be called a fugal toccata, may have been inspired by the composer’s having just purchased a complete Bach edition. Barber attributes its angry mood, however, to a phone call from Mrs. Horowitz, complaining about the delay in delivering the Sonata and calling him a “constipated composer.” “That made me so mad,” wrote Barber, “that I ran out to my studio and wrote that [fugue] in the next day.”