Program Notes - Lincoln Center`s Great Performers

The Program
Thursday Evening, March 3, 2016, at 7:30
Virtuoso Recitals
Piotr Anderszewski, Piano
BACH Partita No. 6 in E minor
Toccata
Allemande
Courante
Air
Sarabande
Tempo di Gavotta
Gigue
SCHUMANN Papillons (1830–31)
Introduction: Moderato
Waltz
Waltz: Prestissimo
Waltz
Waltz
Polonaise
Waltz
Waltz: Semplice
Waltz
Waltz: Prestissimo
Waltz: Vivo
Polonaise
Finale
Intermission
Please make certain all your electronic devices are switched off.
This performance is made possible in part by the Josie Robertson Fund for Lincoln Center.
Steinway Piano
Alice Tully Hall, Starr Theater
Adrienne Arsht Stage
Great Performers
BNY Mellon is Lead Supporter of Great Performers
Support is provided by Rita E. and Gustave M. Hauser, Audrey Love Charitable Foundation,
Great Performers Circle, Chairman’s Council, and Friends of Lincoln Center.
Public support is provided by the New York State Council on the Arts.
Endowment support for Symphonic Masters is provided by the Leon Levy Fund.
Endowment support is also provided by UBS.
MetLife is the National Sponsor of Lincoln Center
Mr. Anderszewski will sign CDs in the lobby immediately following the performance.
UPCOMING VIRTUOSO RECITALS:
Saturday Evening, April 9, 2016, at 7:30 in Alice Tully Hall
Richard Goode, Piano
ALL-BACH PROGRAM
Preludes and Fugues Nos. 1 and 11, from the Well-tempered Clavier, Book II
French Suite No. 5
15 Sinfonias
Partita No. 2
Italian Concerto
Sunday Afternoon, May 8, 2016, at 3:00 in David Geffen Hall
Murray Perahia, Piano
HAYDN: Variations in F minor
MOZART: Sonata in A minor
BRAHMS: Ballade in G minor
BRAHMS: Two Intermezzos, Op. 119
BRAHMS: Intermezzo in A major, Op. 118
BRAHMS: Capriccio in D minor
BEETHOVEN: Sonata No. 29 (“Hammerklavier”)
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Request Line at (212) 875-5766 to learn about program cancellations or to request a Great
Performers brochure.
Visit LCGreatPerformers.org for more information relating to this season’s programs.
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We would like to remind you that the sound of coughing and rustling paper might
distract the performers and your fellow audience members.
In consideration of the performing artists and members of the audience, those who must
leave before the end of the performance are asked to do so between pieces. The taking
of photographs and the use of recording equipment are not allowed in the building.
Great Performers I The Program
SZYMANOWSKI Metopes (1915)
The Isle of the Sirens
Calypso
Nausicaa
SCHUMANN Variations on an original theme (“Ghost Variations”)
(1854)
Theme: Leise, innig
Variation I
Variation II: Canonisch
Variation III: Etwas belebter
Variation IV
Variation V
BACH Partita No. 1 in B-flat major
Praeludium
Allemande
Corrente
Sarabande
Menuets I and II
Gigue
Snapshot
Great Performers
By David Wright
Timeframe
There is an elegant symmetry to this recital
program, in which works representing the
earliest and last stages of the Romantic era
are bookended by works of the composer
the Romantic masters revered above all:
J.S. Bach. Bach’s six partitas for keyboard
instrument are dance suites that open with
a non-dance movement—an elaborate
Toccata in No. 6 and a tuneful Praeludium in
No. 1—then proceed through a sequence of
dances prescribed a generation before Bach
by the Italian-French composer Lully, closing
with a lively dance of Irish origin variously
known as a gigue, giga, or jig.
ARTS
Robert Schumann is represented here by
one of his earliest compositions and his very
last one. The cycle of brief character pieces
linked by visual or literary associations
became a Schumann specialty, starting with
the volatile, imaginative Papillons, Op. 2.
The Variations on an original theme,
WoO 24, was the last piece he worked on
before his commitment to an asylum in
1854; the work’s enigmatic ending has left
scholars debating whether Schumann finished the piece or left it incomplete.
The Romantic impulse remained strong in
the music of the Polish composer Karol
Szymanowski, but it was intensely colored
by influences including the innovations of
Debussy and Stravinsky, the folksong research
of Bartók, and his own travels through ancient
lands of the Mediterranean. His Metopes for
piano, named for the sculptural panels that
decorate the Parthenon and other ancient
buildings, illustrate episodes from The
Odyssey, specifically encounters between
Odysseus and various bewitching women.
1831
Schumann’s Papillons
Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of
Notre Dame is published.
1854
Schumann’s “Ghost
Variations”
Henry David Thoreau’s
Walden is published.
1915
Szymanowski’s Metopes
Kasimir Malevich paints
Black Square.
SCIENCE
1831
The Royal Astronomical
Society receives its royal
charter.
1854
Louis Pasteur begins studying
fermentation.
1915
Proxima Centauri, the closest
star to Earth after the Sun, is
discovered.
IN NEW YORK
1831
The University of the City of
New York is incorporated as
a secular institution.
1854
Astor Library at Lafayette
Place opens with 80,000
volumes.
1915
Two colonels purchase the
Yankees for less than
$500,000.
—Copyright © 2016 by David Wright
Notes on the Program
Great Performers I Notes on the Program
By David Wright
Partita No. 6 in E minor, BWV 830
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
Born March 21, 1685, in Eisenach, Germany
Died July 28, 1750, in Leipzig
Approximate length: 31 minutes
As Bach conceived it, the partita was an expanded version of the ubiquitous Baroque dance suite; it included an elaborate opening movement
and some non-dance pieces sprinkled in among the allemandes,
courantes, and sarabandes. Of Bach’s six keyboard partitas, the one in
E minor is the most sophisticated, even rarefied. It seems to take its
stylistic cue from the partita form itself: As the entire work is an elaborated dance suite, so each movement is an ornamented, complex, quite
unfootable meditation on a dance idea. By analogy with Shakespeare’s
plays, this is the late “fantasy play” of the partitas, like The Winter’s
Tale or The Tempest.
The closing Gigue is perhaps the most advanced movement of all. Its
fugue subject vividly suggests the hopping motions of people dancing a
jig, but instead of offering relief from complexity, this final movement
piles on still more of it; in the web of syncopations, each voice seems
to be dancing to a different drummer, and the chromatic harmonies are
almost like a prediction of Brahms’s late piano pieces and the
Schoenberg school.
Papillons, Op. 2 (1830–31)
ROBERT SCHUMANN
Born June 8, 1810, in Zwickau, Germany
Died July 29, 1856, in Endenich, Germany
Approximate length: 15 minutes
In 1831, like many other 21-year-olds of the time, Robert Schumann was
trying his wings in love and work, and avidly reading the Romantic novels
of Jean Paul Richter, whose exotic scenes and veiled symbols hinted at
profound truths about life. Schumann’s favorite of these was Flegeljahre,
whose title translates as “Adolescence” or perhaps “Wild Oats.”
“Do you recall,” Schumann wrote a friend, “the last scene of Die
Flegeljahre—the masked ball—Walt and the masks—Wina—Vult dancing—how the masks were exchanged—leading to the confessions, revelations, anger—the hurrying away—the conclusion and the brother’s
departure? I sat reading and re-reading....Then I drifted to the piano, and
my little Papillons, one after another, came into being.”
Great Performers I Notes on the Program
Papillons was the first of many Schumann works to be inspired by a masked
ball or carnival scene, with its rich symbolism of illusion and reality, darkness
and light, concealment and revelation. Here was life as the Romantics saw it:
a bittersweet quest for fleeting, butterfly-like beauty.
Metopes, Op. 29 (1915)
KAROL SZYMANOWSKI
Born October 3, 1882, in Tymoszówka, near Kiev, Ukraine
Died March 29, 1937, in Lausanne, Switzerland
Approximate length: 17 minutes
Born in a district of the Ukraine that had recently been part of Poland, influenced by composers as diverse as Debussy, Wagner, Scriabin, and Stravinsky,
and well-versed in the ancient and modern literatures of both Europe and Asia,
Karol Szymanowski possessed enough culture for six ordinary artists. As one
might expect, his music is rich in associations and unclassifiable. The cataclysm of World War I, which disrupted the careers of many European musicians, proved to be a particularly fruitful period in Szymanowski’s life; enforced
isolation in his Ukrainian hometown allowed him to digest the many impressions of his reading and his travels, especially his visits to Italy, Sicily, and
North Africa just before the war.
The rich mythology of that mid-Mediterranean region inspired a suite of three
pieces titled Metopes, which Szymanowski composed in 1915. A metope
(pronounced “MET-uh-pee”) is a panel, often decorated with sculpture,
between two vertically grooved elements (triglyphs) in a Doric frieze, the most
famous example being the 92 metopes that once ringed the outside wall of
the Parthenon.
Mythological figures were often the subject of metopes, and for his piano
pieces Szymanowski selected three that evoked ancient songs and dances,
affirming a continuity of human art and beauty amid the stress and upheavals
of the war years. In Isle of the Sirens, a seductive siren song, decorated with
trills and bird calls, builds to a peak of passion. Calypso is a sensuous portrait
of the goddess nymph, daughter of Atlas, who fell in love with Odysseus
when he was shipwrecked on her island and detained him there for seven
years. Another shipwreck brought Odysseus to the coast of Phaeacia, where
he encountered the princess Nausicaa doing laundry and playing games with
her handmaidens on the beach; Szymanowski’s Nausicaa dances and frolics
before withdrawing shyly into the shadows.
Great Performers I Notes on the Program
Variations on an original theme, WoO 24 (“Ghost Variations”) (1854)
ROBERT SCHUMANN
Approximate length: 12 minutes
In 1854, following his suicide attempt in the Rhine River, Schumann was committed to the asylum in Endenich, Germany, where he would end his days.
Before his institutionalization, he completed the task of making a “fair copy”
(i.e., ready for publication) of this theme and five variations. Clara Schumann
felt that many of her husband’s later works were impaired by illness, and was
reluctant to see them published—perhaps these variations most of all, being
associated with such terrible events. This music did not see print until 1939,
and is still rarely played.
Schumann said he had a vision in which this theme was sung to him by an
angel. But in fact, the angel was Schumann himself, who forgot that he had
used versions of this theme in several previous works. The first three variations preserve the theme intact, decorating it with piano figurations or putting
it in dialogue with itself in canon, one of Schumann’s favorite techniques. The
fourth variation fractures the theme and harmonizes it in surprising ways. In
the fifth variation, nothing much is left of the theme but its bass line. Some
commentators admire this “dying away” ending as an innovation in variation
form. Others believe the piece is incomplete, ending in the middle of a musical
journey that Schumann embarked on, but wasn’t able to finish.
Partita No. 1 in B-flat major, BWV 825
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
Approximate length: 17 minutes
Of Bach’s six keyboard partitas in this form, the most “modern” for its time is
No. 1 in B-flat major, whose melodiousness and sparkle resembles Scarlatti and
even anticipates the style galant of Bach’s son Johann Christian. It opens with
a Praeludium based on a “sunrise” motive, passed from voice to voice to
charming effect, and closes with the delightful Giga, whose rapid hand-crossing makes it the most Scarlatti-esque movement of all; the composer’s power
of suggestion is at its height here, creating a pointillist musical landscape out
of single notes, without so much as a two-note chord in the entire movement.
David Wright, a music critic for Boston Classical Review, has provided
program notes for Lincoln Center since 1982.
—Copyright © 2016 by David Wright
©MG DE SAINT VENANT LICENSED TO VIRGIN CLASSICS
Meet the Artist
Great Performers I Meet the Artist
Piotr Anderszewski
Recognized for the intensity and originality of his interpretations, Piotr
Anderszewski has given recitals in recent seasons at Carnegie Hall,
London’s Barbican Centre and Royal Festival Hall, Vienna’s Konzerthaus,
and St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Concert Hall. He has also appeared with
the Chicago and London Symphony Orchestras, the Philadelphia
Orchestra, and the Orchestra of the Royal Concertgebouw, and has
directed from the keyboard with orchestras such as the Scottish
Chamber Orchestra and Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen.
Highlights of the 2015–16 season include appearances with the Berlin
Philharmonic and Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Camerata
Salzburg, and Lausanne Chamber Orchestra, as well as recitals at the
Lucerne Festival at the Piano, Leipzig Gewandhaus, Berlin Philharmonie,
and London’s Wigmore Hall.
Mr. Anderszewski has been an exclusive artist with Warner Classics/
Erato (previously Virgin Classics) since 2000. His recording of
Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations received a number of prizes, including a
Choc du Monde de la Musique and an ECHO Klassik award. He has also
recorded a Grammy-nominated CD of Bach’s Partitas Nos. 1, 3, and 6 and
a critically acclaimed disc of works by Chopin. Mr. Anderszewski’s affinity
with the music of his compatriot Szymanowski is captured in a recording
of the composer’s solo piano works that won the Gramophone Award in
2006 for Best Instrumental Disc. His recording of solo works by
Schumann received an ECHO Klassik award in 2011 and two BBC Music
Magazine Awards in 2012, including Recording of the Year. His 2014 disc
of Bach’s English Suites Nos. 1, 3, and 5 won Gramophone and ECHO
Klassik awards in 2015.
Mr. Anderszewski has been the subject of two award-winning documentaries by Bruno Monsaingeon: Piotr Anderszewski Plays the Diabelli
Variations (2001) and Piotr Anderszewski, Unquiet Traveller (2008).
Great Performers
Lincoln Center’s Great Performers
Celebrating its 50th anniversary, Lincoln Center’s Great Performers offers classical and contemporary music performances from the world’s outstanding
symphony orchestras, vocalists, chamber ensembles, and recitalists. Since its
initiation in 1965, the series has expanded to include significant emerging
artists and premieres of groundbreaking productions, with offerings from
October through June in Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall, Alice Tully Hall,
and other performance spaces around New York City. Along with lieder
recitals, Sunday morning coffee concerts, and films, Great Performers offers
a rich spectrum of programming throughout the season.
Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Inc.
Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (LCPA) serves three primary roles: presenter of artistic programming, national leader in arts and education and community relations, and manager of the Lincoln Center campus. A presenter of
more than 3,000 free and ticketed events, performances, tours, and educational activities annually, LCPA offers 15 programs, series, and festivals including American Songbook, Great Performers, Lincoln Center Festival, Lincoln
Center Out of Doors, Midsummer Night Swing, the Mostly Mozart Festival,
and the White Light Festival, as well as the Emmy Award–winning Live From
Lincoln Center, which airs nationally on PBS. As manager of the Lincoln
Center campus, LCPA provides support and services for the Lincoln Center
complex and the 11 resident organizations. In addition, LCPA led a $1.2 billion
campus renovation, completed in October 2012.
Lincoln Center Programming Department
Jane Moss, Ehrenkranz Artistic Director
Hanako Yamaguchi, Director, Music Programming
Jon Nakagawa, Director, Contemporary Programming
Jill Sternheimer, Director, Public Programming
Lisa Takemoto, Production Manager
Charles Cermele, Producer, Contemporary Programming
Mauricio Lomelin, Producer, Contemporary Programming
Regina Grande, Associate Producer
Amber Shavers, Associate Producer, Public Programming
Luna Shyr, Senior Editor
Jenniffer DeSimone, Production Coordinator
Olivia Fortunato, House Seat Coordinator
Mr. Anderszewski’s representation:
IMG Artists
www.imgartists.com