PROGRAM NOTES First and Second Rounds Written by musicologists Marissa Glynias Moore, PhD, Executive Director of Piano Cleveland (MGM) and Anna M. O’Connell (AMO) Composer Index BACH 03 LISZT 51 BÁRTOK 07 MESSIAEN 57 BEACH 10 MONK 59 BEETHOVEN 12 MOZART 61 BRAHMS 18 RACHMANINOFF 64 CHOPIN 21 RAMEAU 69 CZERNY 29 RAVEL 71 DEBUSSY 31 PROKOFIEV 74 DOHNÁNYI 34 SAINT-SAËNS 77 FALLA 36 SCARLATTI 79 GRANADOS 38 SCHUBERT 82 GUARNIERI 40 SCRIABIN 84 HAMELIN 42 STRAVINSKY 87 HANDEL 44 TANEYEV 90 HAYDN 46 TCHAIKOVSKY/FEINBERG 92 LIEBERMANN 49 VINE 94 2 2021 CLEVELAND INTERNATIONAL PIANO COMPETITION / PROGRAM NOTES he German composer Johann Sebastian Bach was one of a massive musical family of Bachs whose musical prowess stretched over two Johann Thundred years. J.S. Bach became a musician, earning the coveted role as Thomaskantor (the cantor/music director) for the Lutheran church Sebastian of St. Thomas in Leipzig. At St. Thomas, Bach composed cantatas for just about every major church holiday, featuring a variety of different voice types Bach and instruments, and from which his famed chorales are sung to this day in churches and choral productions. As an organist, he was well known for his ability to improvise extensively on hymn (chorale) tunes, and for reharmonizing (1685-1750) older melodies to fit his Baroque aesthetic. Many of these tunes also remain recognizable in church hymnals. Just as his chorales serve as a basis in composition technique for young musicians today, his collection of keyboard works entitled The Well-Tempered Clavier serves even now as an introduction to preludes and fugues for students of the piano. These span all of the major and minor keys, and became an inspiration for Chopin’s (and others’) collections of preludes for the piano. As well as a great teacher, Bach also proved himself an adept student; he travelled across Germany on foot to hear the great organists of the time perform, and meet with Handel (who was not home at the time). During his travels, his first wife passed away, and in 1721, he married Anna Magdalena Wilcke, who became a great influence on the composer’s works. She was also a musician, singing professionally before and after her marriage to Bach, and transcribing some of his (and her own!) works for performance or teaching purposes. J.S. Bach’s music underwent a revival in the 19th century, when proponents such as Mendelssohn revitalized his music. -AMO PRESENTED BY 3 English Suite No. 3 in G Minor, BWV 808 Works Featured in Second Round, Session 6 (Lovre Marušić) Johann Bach has formulated this “suite” or set of pieces around different dance types, Sebastian beginning with an imaginative prelude in florid counterpoint. Composed around 1713, the English Suites are quite reminiscent of French baroque dance and musical Bach conventions. Following the opening prelude, the performer will play through various dance types: Allemande, Courante, Sarabande, two Gavottes, and finally ending with a Gigue. The Allemande is an aristocratic type of dance which refers generally to several types of German dances. In Bach’s rendition, the music is characterized by streams of notes in a gentle four pulses per measure. The Courante, danced with running and gliding steps, is represented musically by the running notes (where the keys are generally adjacent) accompanied by a harmony which skips up and down the lower half of the keyboard. A Sarabande is in slow triple meter and has its origins in a sensual Spanish dance. Here, the performer adds in many ornaments to achieve a feeling both sleek and passionate. Gavottes are mid-tempo dances in a duple meter, with origins in rustic, hopping dances, where the dancer’s feet would step rather than slide. The two Gavottes contain similar rhythms (lots of long-short-short repeating at the beginning of phrases) yet have contrasting motives. The first is in a minor key, snooping around before breaking into the smoother, more extroverted melody. The concluding Gigue is not so much a jaunty “jig,” but a masterful exercise in Bach’s counterpoint in a surging compound meter (where a measure divided at larger pulses is four beats, and each of these four beats is divided in three rather than two or four). -AMO French Suite No. 5 in G major, BWV 816 Featured in First Round, Session 4 (Bowen Li) This piece is divided into a series of French Baroque style dances, although it was written three-quarters of a century after the heyday of courtly dance under King Louis XIV the “Sun King.” Bach takes the familiar dances, each of which have specific rhythmic or metrical characteristics that would originally be accompanied by specific dance steps. The Allemande (a word generally referring to a German-style dance) features a gentle surging of notes, characterized by a short pickup before the major figures (a note which falls right before the strong pulse in the measure). The Courante is immediately more effusive, in a quickly flowing triple meter. The Sarabande visits a more tender triple meter, featuring the characteristic trilled ornaments on important beats, and to emphasize moments of suspended dissonance before resolving to a more consonant place. The sprightly Gavotte is constructed in balanced phrases, which musically “rhyme,” giving it a feeling of perfect balance. 4 2021 CLEVELAND INTERNATIONAL PIANO COMPETITION / PROGRAM NOTES A Bourree is a simple and light dance, and in baroque operas of the time, a Bourree’s music would be associated with rustic folk. Under Bach’s watchful eye, this joyful dance Works is a little more complicated than meets the eye! The Loure is something of a slow Gigue, a slow compound-meter dance. The name of the dance derived from a pleasant Johann precursor to a small type of bagpipe called a musette, and thus would be associated Sebastian with pastoral scenes of shepherds playing upon their pipes for the entertainment of their flock—or to catch the eye of a maiden. Bach includes a rousing finale in the Bach form of a Gigue, a fast compound meter (12 eighth notes per 4 quarter notes in a bar), reminiscent of the danced gigue, in which hopping, leaping and skipping are all available to the performer. In each half of Bach’s Gigue, he begins by writing each hand individually, shortly thereafter joined by the other hand, and then he introduces a third melody between the two hands, all interlocking in counterpoint. -AMO Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, BWV 903 Featured in First Round, Session 6 (Llewellyn Sanchez-Werner) A Fantasy or Fantasia is a piece which is meant to sound improvised, or off the cuff, as if the composer simply sat at the keyboard and started musing aloud on the keys. Like many fantasias, this virtuosic display begins in a flurry of notes, exploring up and down the keyboard in a single, concentrated line which then expands into densely packed chromatic chords which are indicated to be arppeggiated (originally meaning performed in the style of a harp, in that the block of notes is to be rolled from top to bottom or bottom to top rather than all sounding simultaneously). A moment marked “recitative” interrupts this impassioned flurry. Bach uses various musical devices to create a rhetorical argument, which is spoken in short bursts punctuated by chords. These short interjections become longer and more complicated, as the rhetoric becomes more complicated, and chords that would normally feel cadential are then packed one after another to seek through all sorts of harmonic locations before arriving in a consonant D Major. The Fugue then follows, in a thorny, or “chromatic” manner. Each fugue “voice” is introduced, one at a time, beginning with the same melodic and rhythmic material, but then branching out as each hand takes on more melodic or accompanying figures. Ultimately, three separate “voices” sound in cerebral dialogue. The moniker given to this piece “Chromatic” means that many accidentals are added into the key, which makes it harmonically and melodically exciting in both sections of the work. Bach bursts forth from the end of the Fugue into a brief clap of thunder down the keyboard. -AMO PRESENTED BY 5 Fantasia and Fugue in A Minor, BWV 904 Works Featured in First Round, Session 3 (Vitaly Starikov) Johann Much like BWV 903, this piece is divided in two sections, an opening Fantasy or Sebastian Fantasia and followed by a contrapuntal Fugue. However, this Fantasia, rather than feeling like a long string of notes in one instrumental sounding line, is already densely Bach packed with chords, and the exploratory, improvised, feeling comes from the way in which the composer reaches from one chord to the next, with different notes in the chords moving at different times, often stepwise (meaning the pianist is playing adjacent notes on the keyboard). Like an organist holding down pedals that arc through the melody, the Fantasia challenges the pianist to blur harmonies from one to the next and then precisely change chords to create the alarming dissonances. The contrasting fugue, instead of being breathlessly linked as the Fantasia’s phrases are, uses silence as melodic device, inserting rests (notes which are silent, but can take on rhythmic qualities) into the melody. The three intertwining “voices” in the Fugue complement each other by fulfilling different roles in an interlocking manner. The challenge for the performer in playing a Fugue is ensuring that each part of the motive of the Fugue is noticeable and balanced by the accompanying figures (when they are meant to be accompanying). Bach’s prowess in composing a Fugue is demonstrated in this piece as he uses three motives, all introduced in one voice, before another voice joins in.