5th Anniversary Turina Earl Wild (Freccia, RPO) Chopin Dame Moura Lympany• Ruth Slenczynska Ravel Ralph Votapek • Nadia Reisenberg Liszt Ruth Slenczynska Fauré David Korevaar Mozart Ann Schein Mendelssohn Shura Cherkassky Hummel Albert Wong Paderewski Earl Wild (Fiedler, LSO) Ivory Classics 5th Anniversary Joaquin Turina (1882-1949) In Paris, October 1907, Turina had a fateful encounter with Falla and Albeniz, where he conceived his artistic credo “to fight bravely for the national music of our country.” He studied piano with Moszkowski and theory and composition with Vincent d’Indy in the Schola Cantorum. A fierce proponent of his native Andalusia, Turina was no less a formalist he was greatly influ- enced by the Schola Cantorum and the ‘cyclic’ experiments in music from Franck, d’Indy and Chausson. Turina wrote his Rapsodia sinfónica 1 in 1931, deliberately exploiting light tex- tures, piano and strings, somewhat in the manner of Liszt’s Malediction, where the piano and a solo violin have a concertante role. The piece is in two sections, the first a lushly scored Andante that segues to an Allegro vivo that imitates the rapid repeated notes and tremolo figurations from Spanish guitar music and “deep song.” The form is a rondena in 3/4 and 6/8, quickly alter- Joaquin Turina nating (using hemiola) to achieve, a bravura, the flavor of the Andalusian countryside. Earl Wild 1 & 15 is considered by many to be the last of the Romantic pianists and is internation- ally recognized as one of the great virtuoso pianist/composers of all time. Born on November 26, 1915, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Earl Wild’s technical accomplishments are often likened to what those of Liszt himself must have had. Born with absolute pitch he started playing the piano at three. He studied with the great pianist Egon Petri (1881-1962). In 1942, he was soloist with Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony. Since then he has performed with virtually every major conductor and symphony orchestra in the world. Rachmaninov was a friend and an important idol in his life. It’s been said that – 2 – Earl Wild, “is the incarnation of Rachmaninov, Lehvinne and Rosenthal rolled into one!” One of the few American pianists to have achieved inter- national as well as domestic celebrity, he has the singular honor of having performed at invitation of six Presidents of the United States, beginning with Herbert Hoover. In 1939, Earl Wild was the first classical pianist to give a recital on the new medium of Television. He is one of the world’s most recorded pianists, having recorded hundred’s of discs on 20 different record labels since 1939. Fryderyk Chopin (1809-1849) Chopin’s fifty-one mazurkas are his paean to his native Poland. Wilhelm Fryderyk Chopin von Lenz called the mazurkas “the diary of his soul’s journey through the socio-political territories of his Sarmatian dream-world.” Chopin played the basic 3/4 meter with much flexibility, clouding the opening beat by raising the dampers and using the soft pedal simultaneously at the beginning of each bar, prolonging and subduing the sound, an effect that Meyerbeer was con- vinced was in 2/4. The Mazurka in A minor from the Op. 17 (c. 1832) 2 set opens with soft chords for three bars in the left hand, followed by a triplet figure in bar four. At bar 18 we realize Chopin uses enharmonic modulation and ornamental variations in the form of a melancholy study, what has led this piece to be called “Das Trauergesicht,” the Mourner’s Face. Its Trio sec- tion is an earthy, punctuated, peasant dance. A lovely passage, unisono, takes us back to the main theme. Dame Moura Lympany 2 was born in Saltash, Cornwall, Great Britain on August 18, 1916. As a child she revealed remarkable musical gifts. In1929, she auditioned to enter England’s Royal Academy of Music. At fif- teen Ms. Lympany continued her studies with Paul Weingarten and Mathilde Verne - later studying with the great Tobias Matthay. In 1940, Ms. Lympany Dame Moura rocked the piano world with a stunningly well-received première of the Lympany – 3 – Soviet-Armenian composer, Aram Khachaturian’s Piano Concerto. After the Second World War, Dame Moura was able to resume her international career and became somewhat of a musical ambassadress, representing Great Britain on countless cultural missions. She gave her first New York recital on November 28, 1948. Today Dame Moura lives in Monte Carlo. Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) Increasingly, estimates of Ravel’s musical craft discard the epi- thet “impressionist” and embrace his severe, disciplined classicism, the clear workmanship that motivated Stravinsky to call him “the ultimate clockmaker.” Curiously, Ravel’s early impulse was to rebellion against the Establishment, joining the Société des Apaches. By 1917, the tolls of World War I had created a reaction Le Tombeau de Couperin in Ravel, who turned back to a quieter time, to the world of the clavecinistes and Francois Couperin (1668-1733) as embodiments of a spiritual serenity and poise the world had destroyed. Even though this music honors the dead of the Great War, as well as the passing of the composer’s mother, there is little, overt sentimentality or mourning evident. The piano suite Le Tombeau de Couperin, is in six move- ments, the Menuet 12 and the Toccata 3 comprising the last two sections. Each is etched out of grace- ful, wistful porcelain or lacquer, in the manner of Debussy’s Poissons d’or and Ravel’s own Mother Goose. Nicolas Slonimsky calls the bass in the Menuet “recessive,” seeing only a formulaic classicism in the cadences at every fourth bar. While the music-box atmosphere of the piece alternates tonic and dominant, the mid- dle section becomes aggressive, until Ravel superimposes his gentle, modal opening on the martial air of the trio. The harmonic construction echoes something of Fauré. The Toccata, which owes much to Debussy, is a lightly deft perpetuum mobile in quasi-pentatonic harmony. The episodes and middle section have ele- ments of the water-piece Jeux d’eau and the later piano concertos. The quickness of the piece accelerates and the atmosphere becomes even more rarified, threatening, like so many of Ravel’s dance-forms, to explode in beauty and pain. Ralph Votapek 3 was born in Milwaukee in 1939 and began his musical studies at the age of nine. – 4 – He studied at Northwestern University and subsequently attended both the Manhattan and the Juilliard School of Music. Although his princi- pal teachers were Rosina Lhevinne and Robert Goldsand, he also stud- ied with Nadia Reisenberg and Rudolf Serkin. In 1959, he won the Naumburg Award. Mr. Votapek won the Gold Medal at the first Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in 1962. The prize offered him a Carnegie Hall debut recital, a contract with famed impresario Sol Hurok, and an RCA Victor recording contract. Since 1962, Mr. Votapek has maintained a versatile and remarkable performance and recording career. Mr. Votapek has toured South America every other year for the past three decades. He has appeared with virtually every major American orchestra and legendary conductor such as Kubelik, Steinberg, Krips, Leinsdorf and Fiedler. Mr. Votapek has held the title of Artist-in-Residence at Michigan State University for over 30 years. Ralph Votapek 12 13 Nadia Reisenberg & was born in Vilnius, Lithuania, on July 14, 1904 and died in New York City on June 10, 1983. Ms. Reisenberg studied at the St. Petersburg Conservatory with Leonid Nikolayev. At the onset of the Russian Revolution Ms. Reisenberg and her family traveled first to Warsaw, then London and Berlin. In 1922 they immigrated to the United States where she became a pupil of Alexander Lambert (a Liszt pupil) and the legendary Josef Hofmann. In the period between November 1938 and March 1939 she performed a historic series of all 27 Mozart Piano Concerti (plus the two con- cert rondos), in sequence over WOR radio in NYC with Alfred Wallenstein conducting. She was a gift- ed performer with a rare sensitivity and musical elegance who recorded many discs for Westminster throughout the 1950’s. Nadia Reisenberg’s career as a teacher and virtuosa spanned over sixty years. Franz Liszt (1811-1886) Liszt conceived his 12 Transcendental Études in 1851 as a complement to the piano studies of Chopin and the violin Caprices of Paganini, as well as a Rosetta Stone for his own fusion of technique and rhetor- ical figuration. Robert Schumann said of Liszt’s Etudes that whoever “masters them, as they should be mastered, in an easy, entertaining way, so that they glide past us like different scenes in a marionette show, may travel confidently all over the world and will return with golden laurels, a second Paganini-Liszt.” – 5 – The Études d’Exécution Transcendante No. 5, Feux Follets 4 the so-called “Will o’ the Wisp” étude, combines ornament and color, applied in a supple alchemy of dynamic gra- dations of touch. While it begins with a kind of staggered motion, once it erupts forward, it punishes the performer with rapid figures in the fingers and wrists. The coda must be pearly magic. Fryderyk Chopin (1809-1849) Chopin did not invent the concert or salon Albert Wong, Earl Wild & Ruth Slenczynska waltz, but he refined the popular dance-form to a degree that Schumann claimed, “such a wave of life flows through them that they seem to have been improvised in the ballroom.” The Waltz in A-flat Op. 64, No. 3 5 from the set of three, Op. 64, was first composed in 1840, but its publication was withheld until 1847, with a dedication to Baroness Katarzyna Branicka, at a time when his final illness managed to allow Chopin some days of rest and repose at the square d’Orleans in Paris.