Lucas Debargue, Piano
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Sunday, February 12, 2017, 3pm Hertz Hall t n e m n i a t r e t n E c i s u M Y N O S — e d e o r B x i l e F Lucas Debargue, piano Domenico SCARLATTI (1685 –1757) Sonata in C Major, K. 132 Frédéric CHOPIN (1810 –1849) Ballade No. 4 in F minor, Op. 52 Maurice RAVEL (1875 –1937) Gaspard de la Nuit , ree Poems for Piano Ondine: Lent Le Gibet: Très lent Scarbo: Modéré INTERMISSION Nicolas MEDTNER (1880 –1951) Piano Sonata in F minor, Op. 5 Allegro Intermezzo: Allegro Largo — Finale: Allegro risoluto Funded, in part, by the Koret Foundation, this performance is part of Cal Performances’ 2016/17 Koret Recital Series, which brings world-class artists to our community. Additional support made possible, in part, by Patron Sponsors Will and Linda Schieber. PROGRAM NOTES Sonata in C Major, K. 132 tioned by Pepys, Milton, Addison, and Swi, Domenico Scarlatti oen disdainfully because of the frequently Domenico Scarlatti, born in Naples in the same scurrilous nature of its content. e form, hav - year as Handel and Bach, was the son of the ing adopted a more refined demeanor, became celebrated Italian opera composer Alessandro popular in Germany during the late 18th Scar latti. A pupil of his father, Domenico held century, when it attracted no less a literary lu - important positions in Naples and Rome, in - minary than Goethe, whose tragic narrative cluding that of maestro di cappella at the Vati - Erlkönig furnished the text for one of Schubert’s can. In addition to his sacred music, he was most beloved songs. Chopin seems to have known for his operas and the quality of his been the first composer to apply the title to a harpsichord playing, at which he bested Handel piece of abstract instrumental music, appar - in a friendly contest in 1709. (Handel was held ently indicating that his four Ballades hint at a superior at the organ, however.) Around 1719 dramatic flow of emotions such as could not be Scarlatti was engaged as music master by the appropriately contained by traditional Classical Princess Maria Barbara of Portugal and moved forms. (Such transferral of terms between artis - to Lisbon. When Maria Barbara married the tic disciplines was hardly unknown during the heir to the Spanish throne in 1729, Scarlatti Romantic era. Liszt, the first musical artist in accompanied her to Madrid, where he spent the history with enough nerve to keep an entire rest of his life, helping to found the Spanish public program to himself, dubbed his solo school of instrumental composition. His works concerts “musical soliloquies” at first, and in Madrid were confined almost exclusively to later gave them the now-familiar designation, instrumental music, notably some 600 sonatas “recitals.”—“How can one recite at the piano?” for harpsichord (or Exercises , as they were called fumed one British critic. “Preposterous!”) upon their publication in 1738) composed for Brahms, Liszt, Fauré, Grieg, Vieuxtemps, and Maria Barbara. ese splendid pieces pioneered Frank Martin all later provided instrumental such keyboard techniques as crossing hands, works with the title Ballade. runs in thirds and sixths, leaps wider than an oc - In the Ballades, “Chopin reaches his full tave, and rapid repeated notes. ough forward- stature as the unapproachable genius of the pi - looking in their musical style and expressive anoforte,” according to Arthur Hedley, “a mas - content, the sonatas were conservative in their ter of rich and subtle harmony and, above all, use of the one-movement, binary dance form a poet—one of those whose vision transcends of the Baroque era. the confines of nation and epoch, and whose mission it is to share with the world some of the Ballade No. 4 in F minor, Op. 52 beauty that is revealed to them alone.” ough Frédéric Chopin the Ballades came to form a nicely cohesive A “ballad,” according to the Random House Dic - set unified by their temporal scale, structural tionary , is “a simple, narrative poem of popular fluidity, and supranational idiom, Chopin origin, composed in short stanzas, especially composed them over a period of more than a one of romantic character and adapted for decade. He once suggested to Robert Schu - singing.” e term was derived from an ancient mann that he was “incited to the creation of the musico-poetic form that accompanied dancing Ballades” by some poems of his Polish compa - (“ballare” in medieval Latin, hence “ball” and triot Adam Mickiewicz (1798 –1855), whom he “ballet”), which had evolved into an independent met and played for in Paris around 1835. e vocal genre by the 14th century in the exquisitely English composer and author Alan Rawsthorne refined works of Guillaume de Machaut and noted, however, that “to pin down these other early composers of secular music. e Ballades to definite stories is gratuitous and ballad was well established in England as a misleading, for in suggesting extra-musical medium for the recitation of romantic or fan - connotations the attention is distracted from tastic stories by at least the year 1500; it is men - the purely musical scheme which is… com - Opposite: photo by Evgeny Evtyukhov PROGRAM NOTES pelling in itself and completely satisfying.” Rather ner of Rembrandt and Callot.” (Jacques Callot than obscuring the essential nature of these pieces, was a 17th-century French etcher and engraver the apparently opposing views of Schumann and whose masterpiece is a series of grotesque en - Rawsthorne lead directly to the very heart of gravings depicting the Miseries of War .) Ravel’s Chopin’s achievement: the near-perfect melding biographer Scott Goddard noted that Bertrand of Romantic fantasy and feeling with an Apollo - “had the uncanny ability of writing intimately nian control of form and figuration. By no other and precisely of people who lived, and of things composer in the history of the art has the delicate that were done, in the dim, irreclaimable past. balance between emotion and intellect been so Gaspard de la Nuit consists of a number of finely achieved as by Chopin—heart and head are minute tales of life in Medieval Europe, and weighed perfectly in his, the most precisely cali - never was the raconteur’s art used with a more brated of all musical scales. certain skill than in those paragraphs, where, in e Ballade No. 4 (F minor, Op. 52) dates ten lines, oen in as many words, the atmos - from the summer of 1842, when Chopin was phere of a moment is caught and the quality of staying with George Sand at her country villa a mood crystallized. Gaspard is the personifi - in Nohant, near Châteauroux, some distance cation in human form of the Prince of Dark - south of Paris in the province of Berry; she and ness.” Ravel, who had a pronounced taste for the Delacroix, a house guest at the time, provided exotic, came to know Bertrand’s poems through the work’s first audience. e composer per - his long-time friend and musical ally, the pianist formed the Ballade with great success at his Ricardo Viñes, and during the summer of 1908, public concert with Pauline Viardot at the Salle he created musical analogues of three of them. Pleyel in Paris on February 21, 1842; Breitkopf Bertrand’s extravagant verses inspired from und Härtel issued the score that same month. Ravel music that the composer said requires e composition was dedicated to Baroness de “tran scendent virtuosity” to perform, and Rothschild, one of Chopin’s earliest and most which is, according to the esteemed French ardent Parisian patrons. No poetic source is pianist Alfred Cortot, “among the most aston - known for the Fourth Ballade, nor is one really ishing examples of instrumental ingenuity ever needed for this music of drama and authority contrived by the industry of composers.” that is so richly expressive of feelings hardly e first piece, Ondine , one of musical capturable by words. e pianist and scholar Impres sionism’s greatest aquatic evocations, Paul Badura-Skoda spoke of the music’s “real concerns the legendary water nymph who falls explosive power”; Chopin’s biographer Casimir in love with a mortal, is disappointed by him, Wierzynski called it “a true musical novel, and then returns beneath the waves. In Le Gibet boundlessly rich.” It is a fitting capstone to this (“e Gallows”), a solemn bell-tone sounds superb collection of masterworks, of which throughout. “It is the clock that tolls from the Frédérick Niecks wrote, “None of Chopin’s walls of the city beyond the horizon,” explains compositions surpass in masterliness of form Bertrand’s poem, “and the corpse of a hanged and beauty and poetry of content his Ballades. man that is reddened by the setting sun.” Scarbo , In them he attains, I think, the acme of his a tour-de-force of piano virtuosity, depicts a power as an artist.” fantastic dwarf who, wrote Bertrand, “shines in the sky… hums in the shadow of my alcove… Gaspard de la Nuit, ree Poems for Piano scratches the silk of my bedcurtains with his Maurice Ravel nail… and pirouettes on one foot.” Aloysius Bertrand was a master of the macabre, a sort-of French Edgar Allan Poe. Bertrand Piano Sonata in F minor, Op. 5 (1807 –41), born in Paris, published a set of Nicolas Medtner spectral tales in 1835 titled Gaspard de la Nuit To a small group of faithful followers, Nicolas (Gaspard [Kaspar] of the Night ) in which he Medtner was the creative and pianistic equal sought to recreate in literary terms “the man - of his two famous Russian contemporaries, PLAYBILL PROGRAM NOTES Alexander Scriabin and Sergei Rachmaninoff; Society to allow the composer to record many to most music lovers he is almost unknown.