Eugene Ugorski and Konstantin Lifschitz - Home

USA/RUSSIA
Eugene Ugorski and
Konstantin Lifschitz
WHEN
Monday 21 February
WHERE
Albany Entertainment Centre
This performance is 1 hour and 45 minutes including interval
11 February–7 March
perthfestival.com.au
2
EUGENE UGORSKI AND
KONSTANTIN LIFSCHITZ
MONDAY 21 FEBRUARY
ALBANY ENTERTAINMENT CENTRE
This performance is 1 hour and 45 minutes including interval
Johannes Brahms (1833–1897)
Scherzo for Violin and Piano in C minor, WoO 2 ‘FAE
Sonata’ (1853)
Johannes Brahms (1833–1897)
Violin Sonata No.3 in D minor, Op.108 (1888)
i.Allegro
ii.Adagio
iii. Un poco presto e con sentimento
vi. Presto agitato
INTERVAL
Ernest Chausson (1855–1899)
Poème for violin and piano, Op.25 (1896)
César Franck (1822–1890)
Violin Sonata in A major (1886)
i. Adagio sostenuto – Presto – Adagio
ii. Andante con variazioni
iii.Presto
Program Note
1853 was an auspicious year for the 21-year-old Johannes
Brahms. In April he met the great violinist Joachim, and
during an eight-week stay with Joachim in Göttingen over
the summer the two struck a deep and enduring musical
friendship. On Joachim’s suggestion, in September Brahms
travelled to Düsseldorf and met Robert and Clara Schumann.
Joachim was booked to travel to Düsseldorf in October, and,
as a surprise, Schumann, Brahms and a fellow composer Albert
Dietrich decided to contribute a movement each to a sonata
for violin and piano to present to Joachim. The resultant work
was named the ‘FAE Sonata’ after Joachim’s motto: ‘Frie aber
einsam’ (free but alone), and Brahms’s contribution was the
Scherzo in C minor.
If the galloping and brilliant Scherzo shows us Brahms at his
most youthful and eager, his Violin Sonata No.3 in D minor
is the utterance of a composer at the height of his fame and
power. First sketched while Brahms was on holiday at the
alpine Lake Thun in the summer of 1886 and completed in
1888, the work is cast in four concise movements, as distinct
from the three-movement structure of his two earlier violin
sonatas. The first movement is noteworthy for its development
section, which takes place entirely over a pedal note in the
bass that lasts for 46 bars. Both the melancholy but tender
second movement and the whimsical third demonstrate
Brahms’s ability to capture deep feeling within relatively short
musical spans, while the final movement, a turbulent and
relentless sonata rondo, is truly symphonic in scope.
For all their technical mastery and emotional depth, Brahms’s
late works were not universally welcomed in late 19th-century
Europe outside the newly formed German Empire.
This was an age of intense nationalism, and across Europe –
and particularly in France – composers were eager to escape
from the Austro-Germanic artistic hegemony.
Cesar Franck (1822–90), a native of Liege in Frenchspeaking Belgium who had settled in Paris in 1834, by the
1880s had become the focus of a particularly nationalistic
group of younger composers at the Paris Conservatoire.
Interestingly, Franck’s reputation as a bastion of French music
sits oddly with much of his oeuvre, which seems to stand
quite comfortably within the Austro-Germanic tradition. His
justly famous Sonata for Violin and Piano in A major (1886)
is perhaps his most ‘French’ piece. The opening bars feature
a sensuous, ambiguous sonority on the piano and a dreamy,
wandering violin line, and the work as a whole is notable for its
gorgeous melodies and sonorities. The Sonata was written for
the wedding of the violinist Eugene Ysaye, and in the ecstatic
two-part canons of the work’s closing movement it is difficult
not to hear a song of joy for the newly married couple.
Ernest Chausson (1855–99) was one of Franck’s circle at the
Paris Conservatoire, and his Poème Op.25 (1896), originally
for violin and orchestra, was also dedicated to Eugene Ysaye.
The work’s program is derived from a short story by Ivan
Turgenev entitled ‘The Song of Triumphant Love’. The story
concerns two young friends who love the same woman. One,
an artist, wins her hand, and the other, a violinist, travels to
the East to allow his broken heart time to mend. Years later
the musician returns, and after dinner with his friend and his
wife, plays a long and passionate song of happy and satisfied
love that he learned on the isle of Ceylon. Chausson’s Poème
is a realisation of that fictional performance. With its daring
and voluptuous harmony, laced with the scent of the Orient,
Chausson’s work departs decisively from the Austro-Germanic
19th-century lingua franca and illustrates powerfully how,
under the influence of nationalism, musical language fractured
and styles proliferated as the 20th century approached.
Note by Paul Hopwood
PERFORMER BIOGRAPHIES
Eugene Ugorski
Born in 1989 in St Petersburg, Eugene
Ugorski is being hailed as one of the
most exciting young violinists of today.
Having made his orchestral debut with
the San Diego Symphony Orchestra at
the age of eight, Ugorski has already
performed concerts with orchestras
in Western Europe, Russia, Canada,
the USA, South America and the Far
East, working with conductors such as Valery Gergiev, Andrey
Boreyko, Eri Klas, Keith Lockhart and Roberto Minczuk.
Eugene Ugorski was launched onto the international scene
following an invitation from Gergiev to perform at the Moscow
Easter Festival in 2005. The concert was an enormous success
and was broadcast around the world. As a result Gergiev
immediately invited him to perform with the Rotterdam
Philharmonic that season.
In the 2007/8 season, Ugorski returned to Rotterdam to
perform in four special concerts celebrating the New Year.
Other highlights of the season included debuts with the BBC
Symphony Orchestra, BBC Philharmonic Orchestra
and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. He also made
a trip to South Korea for his debut with the Seoul
Philharmonic Orchestra.
3
Highlights of the 2008/9 season included two concerts with
the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra at the Hollywood
Bowl, a performance of Paganini Violin Concerto No.1 with
the Houston Symphony Orchestra under Hans Graf and his
Japanese debut with the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony
playing Lalo’s Symphonie Espagnole. European appearances
included his debut with the Strasbourg Philharmonic Orchestra
and a tour of the Netherlands with the Royal Liverpool
Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Vassily Petrenko playing
the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto.
Konstantin Lifschitz completed his studies at the Gnessin
School of Music in 1994 with a performance of Bach’s
Goldberg Variations. The concert was recorded by the
Japanese record label Denon, and upon the release of the
album, the critic Edward Rothstein of The New York Times
wrote that it was ‘the most powerful pianistic interpretation
since Gould’. In 1995, Lifschitz received an Echo Klassik Award
as ‘European Young Artist of the Year’ on the strength of this
recording. In 1996, the Goldberg Variations recording was
nominated for a Grammy Award.
Recently, Ugorski made his debut with the London
Philharmonic Orchestra, DSO Berlin, Tampere Philharmonic,
Malmö Symphony, Bournemouth Symphony, RTÉ Dublin
and with the Vienna Kammerphilharmonie at the Vienna
Konzerthaus. He also returned to the Rotterdam Philharmonic
taking over concerts at the last minute from an indisposed
Leonidas Kavakos playing the Stravinsky concerto with
Robin Ticciati.
Among the many eminent orchestras with which he has
appeared are the New York Philharmonic (under Mstislav
Rostropovich), the Chicago Symphony, the San Francisco
Symphony, the Academy of St Martin in the Fields (under
Sir Neville Mariner), the Moscow Philharmonic (under Yuri
Simonov), the New Amsterdam Sinfonietta, the Danish
National Radio Symphony Orchestra (under Christopher
Hogwood), the Berlin Symphony Orchestra, and the
Beethoven Orchestra of Bonn (under Dietrich FischerDieskau).
As a recitalist, Ugorski first collaborated with pianist Konstantin
Lifschitz at the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Festival in Germany
to great acclaim, and in September 2009 the pair played
four concerts at the Enescu Festival in Romania. In January
2010, the duo released a recital DVD for VAI of works by
Bach, Brahms, Strauss, Szymanowski, Ravel and Tchaikovsky.
Future engagements together include debuts at the Wigmore
Hall in London, the Beethovenfest in Bonn, Tivoli Festival in
Copenhagen and the Lucerne Festival.
Eugene Ugorski began studying the violin at the age of six
with Professor Vesna Gruppman. He continues to study with
Vesna as well as with Igor Gruppman, one of the world’s most
respected concertmasters.
Konstantin Lifschitz
Known the world over for his exquisite
musical sensibility, nuanced playing
and poetic, profound and stirring
interpretations, Konstantin Lifschitz has
been performing for audiences since the
age of nine in the great concert halls and
centres for culture in the United States,
Europe, Israel, Australia, New Zealand,
Brazil, South Africa, Singapore, Korea,
Hong Kong, China, Japan and his
native Russia.
A continually expanding range of pieces – including some 800
works from the solo, concerto and chamber music repertoire,
as well as a substantial and growing collection of works which
he has transcribed for the keyboard – express not only the
vastness of Maestro Lifschitz’s musical language but his deep
devotion to the extensive body of existing literature by the
great composers.
Born in Russia in 1976, Kosntantin Lifschitz was five years
old when he was accepted into the preparatory class at the
Gnessin School of Music in Moscow, where he was taught by
Tatyana Zelikman, one of Russia’s most famous piano teachers.
In 1989, at the age of 13, he presented a landmark recital in the
October Hall of the House of Unions in Moscow. The capacity
crowd’s overwhelming enthusiasm, along with local critical
acclaim, established him as a major artist, ready to take his
place alongside the elite of legendary Russian pianists. The
following year, a grant from the Russian Culture foundation
enabled him to fulfil a series of concert engagements in Paris,
Munich, Milan and other European music centres.
In 2003, he became a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music
in London, which followed his being made an Associate two
years earlier by the Committee of Royal Musical Institutions.
Konstantin Lifschitz is dedicated to performing chamber music
with his colleagues and peers. His collaborators include the
violinists Maxim Vengerov, Gidon Kremer and Leila Josefowicz
and the cellists Mstislav Rostropovich, Misha Maisky and Lynn
Harrell. In addition to his vast repertoire of hundreds of pieces,
he has more than 20 solo albums to his credit.
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