Winner's Recital

Winner's Recital

19 July 2021 7.30pm Wigmore Hall Guildhall Wigmore Recital Prize Winner’s Recital Élisabeth Pion piano Guildhall School of Music & Drama Wigmore Hall is a no-smoking venue. No Founded in 1880 by the recording or photographic equipment may City of London Corporation be taken into the auditorium, nor used in any other part of the Hall without the prior Chairman of the Board of Governors written permission of the Hall Graham Packham Management. Wigmore Hall is equipped with a ‘Loop’ to help hearing aid users Principal receive clear sound without background Lynne Williams am noise. Patrons can use the facility by Vice-Principal and Director of Music switching their hearing aids over to ‘T’. Professor Jonathan Vaughan In accordance with the requirements of Please visit our website at gsmd.ac.uk City of Westminster, persons shall not be permitted to stand or sit in any of the gangways intersecting the seating, or to Wigmore Hall sit in any of the other gangways. 36 Wigmore Street, London, W1U 2BP If standing is permitted in the gangways Director at the sides and rear of the seating, it shall John Gilhooly be limited to the numbers indicated in the The Wigmore Hall Trust notices exhibited in those positions. Registered Charity No. 1024838 Facilities for Disabled People: www.wigmore-hall.org.uk For full details please email access@wigmore-hall.org.uk or call 020 7935 2141. Guildhall School is provided by the City of London as part of its contribution to the cultural life of London and the nation. Guildhall Wigmore Recital Prize Winner’s Recital Élisabeth Pion piano Mozart Piano Sonata in F major, K332 Lili Boulanger Prélude in D flat major Lili Boulanger Trois morceaux pour piano Messiaen Le baiser de l’enfant Jésus Ravel Ondine Beethoven Piano Sonata in F minor, Op 57, ‘Appassionata’ (1804–5) Monday 19 July 2021, 7.30pm Wigmore Hall Would patrons please ensure that mobile phones are switched off. Please stifle coughing as much as possible and ensure that watch alarms and any other electronic devices which may become audible are switched off. Guildhall Wigmore Recital Prize The Guildhall Wigmore Recital Winners: Prize annually awards an exceptional Guildhall School musician with a 2020 Élisabeth Pion piano Wigmore Hall recital. 2019 Ema Nikolovska mezzo-soprano This recital by Élisabeth Pion, who won Dylan Perez piano last year’s Guildhall Wigmore Prize, was 2018 Ming Xie piano originally scheduled to take place in June 2020. Like so many other events, however, 2017 Michael Petrov cello it was lost to the lockdown. Guildhall Erdem Misirlioglu piano School is deeply grateful to John Gilhooly 2016 Marina Koka piano and Wigmore Hall for rescheduling this recital. We look forward to a wonderful 2015 Jean-Selim Abdelmoula piano concert tonight, and to many future 2014 Joshua Owen Mills tenor concerts stemming from this collaboration Rodrigo de Vera piano between Guildhall School of Music & Drama and Wigmore Hall, which has been 2013 Martin Hassler baritone running since 2009 and which we look Marek Ruszczynski piano forward to extending long into a post- 2012 Mihkel Poll piano COVID future. 2011 Alexandra Dariescu piano 2010 Jonathan Sell baritone Tomasz Lis piano 2009 Sasha Grynyuk piano Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) Piano Sonata in F major, K332 (1783) 1 Allegro The slow movement is a lyrical song of 2 Adagio ravishing beauty – like an opera aria that 3 Allegro assai in a stroke halts the narrative in order to home in on the innermost turmoil of a Clear, transparent, rooted in the real world single character. The finale opens with rather than in literary-inspired (or even an ebullient toccata to show off pristine drug-induced) fantasy, Mozart’s piano music fingerwork. Contrast comes in a more may appear straightforward in outline but poignant minor-key tune, and there are it lacks nothing in terms of profundity. comic touches too that evoke the world Unearthing this level of expression in music of opera buffa. of such apparent simplicity is a lifetime’s work for a musician, bearing out the adage that Mozart’s piano music is too easy for amateurs and too difficult for professionals. The F major sonata, K332 – the twelfth of Mozart’s 18 piano sonatas – is the last of three (beginning with K330) written in the summer of 1783, some think in Salzburg during his visit back home from Vienna to introduce his new wife, Constanze, to his father Leopold and sister Nannerl. This is the time both of his ‘Linz’ Symphony (No 35) and the birth of his first child, Raimund Leopold, who died in infancy. The sonata’s first movement contains a wealth of contrasting ideas: an elegant pastoral opening theme (with a playful horn-call complement), a dramatic minor-key idea under a cloud of Sturm und Drang and an innocent, serenade-like second subject with a lightly strummed accompaniment. Along with elegance there is dynamism, underlined by a cross-rhythm device and outlined by sforzando accents that presage Beethoven. Lili Boulanger (1893–1918) Prélude in D flat major (1911) This beautiful miniature was one of Lili Boulanger’s first compositions, written aged 17 in March 1911. For reasons unknown, Boulanger left no performance indications on the manuscript – devolving all choices of tempo, articulation, phrasing and mood to the performer. The sound-world is not alien, though. The vast submerged bells of Debussy’s ‘La cathédrale engloutie’ (published the previous year in Book 1 of his Préludes) appear in the anchored bass chords; while the first four chords in the right hand, rising chromatically, suggest the upward resolution of the angst-ridden ‘Tristan’ chord at the opening of Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde. (Three years later, Boulanger would begin her song ‘Si tout ceci n’est pas qu’un pauvre rêve’ with a similar reference to Tristan.) The glinting central passage, beginning with a rocking figure in the right hand, introduces some deft touches of rhythmic suppleness, leading to a climax of descending octaves (more bells!), returning us to the atmosphere of the opening. Lili Boulanger (1893–1918) Trois morceaux pour piano (1914) 1 D’un vieux jardin (Of an Old Garden) The lively Cortège, with its carefree, 2 D’un jardin clair (Of a Bright Garden) babbling accompaniment, was originally 3 Cortège (Procession) composed for violin and piano and later arranged for solo piano. Written in the The music of Lili Boulanger has enjoyed a manner of a light salon piece, it captures resurgence in recent years, prior to which a playful, childlike spirit. her reputation was overshadowed by that of her elder sister Nadia. By contrast with Nadia – who enjoyed a celebrated 70-year career as teacher and mentor to countless many hundreds of composers and musicians, among them Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter, Daniel Barenboim and John Eliot Gardiner – Lili died of intestinal tuberculosis at the age of only 24, by which time her potential was abundantly clear but tragically unfulfilled. These three pieces were written in 1914 in the months before the outbreak of the First World War while Lili was in residence at the Villa Medici in Rome, having become the first woman to win the Prix de Rome composition prize with her cantata Faust et Hélène. D’un vieux jardin opens in a lightly nostalgic but relatively breezy vein before turning towards darker harmonies. The left hand then outlines a descending tread leading to a conclusion that suggests this ‘old garden’ has not yet yielded all its secrets. Less complicated than its predecessor, as the ‘bright garden’ of its title might suggest, D’un jardin clair opens with a rising–falling figure that features throughout. This figure also shows more than a passing resemblance to the opening of Debussy’s piano Prélude ‘Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air’. Olivier Messiaen (1908–92) Le baiser de l’enfant Jésus (from Vingt regards sur l’enfant Jésus) (1944) Messiaen’s Vingt regards sur l’enfant Jesus ‘Le baiser de l’enfant Jésus’ (The Kiss is often translated as Twenty Gazes of the of the Child Jesus) is the 15th of the 20 Child Jesus. It is in effect a cycle of 20 contemplations, in which Messiaen recalls contemplations or reflections on aspects of an engraving of the child Jesus embracing the Nativity, calling to mind key figures – the young St Thérèse of Lisieux. Here the the Virgin Mary, angels, prophets, shepherds theme of God appears as a serene lullaby, but also considering the Cross, the Heavens, later adorned by filigree, trilling decoration and concepts such as the Word made flesh in the right hand. After a swirling cadenza and the Omnipotent Word. passage the pace picks up and, later, constellations of chords build in intensity Messiaen’s works display a regular to the joyous ecstasy of the kiss itself, preoccupation with a range of themes followed by a coda representing a ghostly and techniques – among them number ‘shadow of the kiss’, which ultimately finds symbolism, birdsong, irregular or non- rest in divine slumber. Western rhythms, and the musical scales of his own devising (the so-called ‘modes of limited transposition’, which he described in The Technique of My Musical Language, published in 1944, the year he composed the Vingt regards). But towering above all these influences and inspirations was the composer’s deeply felt Catholic faith. For Messiaen, this was ‘the first aspect of my work, the noblest, and doubtless the most useful and valuable; perhaps the only one I won’t regret at the time of my death’. Like many of Messiaen’s piano works, Vingt regards was written with the particular pianistic talents of Yvonne Loriod in mind.

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