Alexander Melnikov, piano - The Friends of Chamber Music

the muriel mcbrien kauffman master pianists series
Alexander Melnikov, piano
Friday, March 4
SCHUBERT
8 pm
The Folly Theater
Fantasie in C Major, D. 760 (Op. 15) "Der Wanderer"
BRAHMS
7 Fantasien, Op. 116
Capriccio in D Minor: Presto energico
Intermezzo in A Minor: Andante
Capriccio in G Minor: Allegro passionato
Intermezzo in E Major: Adagio
Intermezzo in E Minor: Andante con grazia ed intimissimo sentimento
Intermezzo in E Major: Andantino teneramente
Capriccio in D Minor: Allegro agitato
INTERMISSION
SHOSTAKOVICH Preludes and Fugues, Op. 87
No. 1 in C Major
No. 2 in A Minor
No. 3 in G Major
No. 4 in E Minor
No. 5 in D Major
No. 6 in B Minor
No. 7 in A Major
No. 8 in F-sharp Minor
No. 9 in E Major
No. 10 in C-sharp Minor
No. 11 in B Major
No. 12 in G-sharp Minor
The Master Pianists Series is underwritten, in part, by the Muriel McBrien Kauffman Foundation
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program notes
Alexander Melnikov’s recital juxtaposes fantasies on the
first half with preludes and fugues on the second half. In
principle, this combination appears to cross from one
side of the aisle to the other, so to speak: proceeding
from one of the freest forms of composition (fantasy) to
the most rigorous and strictly-ordered (fugue).
More hands stretch across the aisle – or the
intermission – than one might initially think.
Schubert’s Fantasy has strong links to sonata form,
as well as perceptible thematic recurrences among its
four connected movements. Brahms was a master of
both counterpoint and form. Though the seven pieces
that comprise his Op. 116 Fantasien are essentially
tripartite miniatures, they are crafted with discipline and
imagination.
As for Shostakovich, he may have been honing
his contrapuntal skills in the fugues of Op. 87, but his
Preludes are another matter. They provided him–as they
did Bach and Chopin before him–with a blank canvas.
He experimented with texture, form, atmosphere, and
harmony, all the while using each Prelude to provide a
convincing link to the fugue that ensues.
Two of the compositions on Mr. Melnikov’s recital
resonate with this season’s theme of late works. Brahms’s
seven Fantasien inaugurated the glorious efflorescence
of keyboard music published as Op. 116 through Op.
119. These twenty pieces crowned his contribution to
the piano literature, and were Brahms’s last solo pieces.
Shostakovich’s "Preludes and Fugues" were also a swan
song. Even though he wrote them more than twenty
years before he died in 1975, they proved to be his final
compositions for solo piano.
Fantasie "Der Wanderer," D. 760, Op. 15
Franz Peter Schubert (1797-1828)
The Schubert that opens Mr. Melnikov’s recital this
evening is part of a family of related works. Two of
Schubert’s songs are called "Der Wanderer," the first on
a text by Friedrich Schlegel, and the second on a text
of Schmidt von Lübeck. The latter setting, composed
in 1816 when Schubert was still in his late 'teens, is
the one that concerns us. His original song title was
"Der Unglückliche" (The Unfortunate One), after the
poem; however, the poet later changed his title to "Des
Fremdlings Abendlied" (The Stranger's Evening Song).
When Schubert published the song in 1821 as part of his
Op. 4, he assigned the title "Der Wanderer."
One year later, he borrowed the song's melody,
using it as the theme for a set of variations in the slow
movement of a newly-composed fantasia for solo piano.
(He did the same thing in the "Trout" Quintet and
“Death and the Maiden” Quartet where he used two of
his songs as the basis for a single movement.) The piano
fantasia, which has become known as the "Wanderer"
Fantasy, is one of Schubert's most remarkable
accomplishments. Certainly it is one of his most
formidably difficult pieces for piano.
It owes much of that difficulty to Schubert's
inherently symphonic concept of the piano. Indeed,
where some historians classify the Fantasy as a free piano
sonata, and others as an elaborate set of variations, a
third group–including Franz Liszt, who orchestrated
the work as a piano concerto–viewed it as a prototype
for the symphonic poem. Schubert's melding of four
movements played without pause surely contributed to
this view. Doubtless Liszt learned much from Schubert's
musical unification of the Fantasy by use of shared
thematic material throughout. (The piano sonata that
Liszt was to compose would follow Schubert’s Fantasymodel.) The rhythmic unit of a dactyl (long-short-short)
dominates three of the movements, and forms the basis
for the stupendous concluding fugue that provides the
Wanderer Fantasy with its virtuosic end.
7 Fantasien, Op. 116
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Brahms began his career writing giant, quasisymphonic works for solo piano. Between 1852 and
1863 he composed three expansive piano sonatas and five
substantial sets of variations. In his maturity, however,
he favored miniatures, including over 200 songs, a form
in which he was to excel. The miniatures were informed
by Schubert’s well-known skills as one of music’s
greatest song writers. The songs of both Schubert and
Brahms, these compact miniatures, were elegant for their
expressiveness and among the greatest of their works.
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program notes
With the exception of the two Rhapsodies of Op. 79,
all Brahms’s subsequent piano pieces are collections of
shorter movements. Most of the individual pieces adhere
to some variant of ternary form. Despite that apparent
structural simplicity, he was at the absolute height of
his powers in this music. His mastery of the craft never
lapsed, and he found astounding variety of mood and
texture.
The Op. 116 collection marked a clear turn from the
virtuosic toward the philosophical. Like Brahms’s other
late works, these are intensely personal statements that
reveal a good deal about who he was as a human being
as well as a pianist. The modest scale of each individual
movement belies the heightened expressivity that
characterizes each one.
Craftsmanship and musical integrity trump flashy
technique in all seven of the Op. 116 pieces. While this
music is by no means easy, it does not have the surface
glitter of the works of Liszt or Chopin, nor the fingerbusting technical demands of Brahms’s own early sonatas
or the ‘Handel’ Variations.
What makes this repertoire difficult to perform is a
combination of Brahms’s unusual physical approach to
the keyboard and the emotional content of each piece.
Textures tend to be rich and full, often dense, lending an
orchestral sonority to the music. It is not orchestral in the
way that the Brahms’s piano concerti are; rather more in
the sense of suggesting different orchestral instruments: a
horn solo, a duet for violas, cellos, which are embedded
within the keyboard texture. (There are exceptions, of
course, such as the Intermezzo in E Major Op. 116, No. 4,
which is relatively spare and transparent.)
Throughout all these pieces, Brahms balances pulse
with rhythmic complexity. He employs hemiola and other
polyrhythms, and switches meter frequently. Syncopation
and contrapuntal interweavings are common; sometimes
two melodic lines unfold at once. Harmonies are often
ambiguous, occasionally with a delayed resolution to a
cadence. Collectively, Op. 116 demonstrates Brahms’
romantic imagination at its best. Always, he is a master of
form and counterpoint, paradoxically freeing himself from
both to establish a unique sound world and expressivity
within each piece.
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Brahms vacillated about the title for Op. 116,
eventually settling on Fantasien. In his character pieces,
he only employed five titles: Ballade, Capriccio, Romanze,
Rhapsodie, and Intermezzo. All seven of the Op. 116
Fantasien are Capriccios and Intermezzi. The Capriccios
tend to have faster tempi and a more outgoing character,
while the Intermezzi are more meditative, even private.
Though Op. 116 is rarely performed in its entirety,
there are indications that Brahms conceived of the set as
a suite (although obviously not one with every movement
in the same key, as is usually the case in a suite). The
tonal progression is carefully planned. Both the opening
and closing Capriccios are forceful D minor essays, sturdy
bookends to the set. The G Minor Capriccio, Op. 116,
No. 3 combines the monumental Brahms of his youthful
keyboard works with nobility and drama, inserting a
chordal middle section between the nervous broken
chords of the outer parts. All three Capriccios share a
motivic reliance on descending chains of thirds.
Of the Intermezzi, No. 2 in A Minor unfolds almost
like a sarabande, revealing the secrets of its delicate
chromaticism only gradually. Nos. 4, 5, and 6 are a trilogy
centered on the key of E major, almost as if they formed a
giant slow movement in three parts.
The Op. 116, No. 5 Intermezzo begins in E minor
and resolves in E major, but its distinction is the odd,
inconclusive gesture across bar lines that forms its
narrative. A quirky, stealth-like atmosphere dominates,
providing the framework of a static rhythmic pattern that
eludes harmonic resolution. Brahms presents a series of
interrupted thoughts probing the edges of late romantic
harmony.
The final cadence in E major provides a transition
to the deeply expressive Intermezzo in E Major Op. 116,
No. 6. In its opening phrase, it combines a chorale texture
with rich chromaticism, The middle section heightens
the harmonic ambiguity with a series of descending triads
beneath a fluid upper melody; we hardly know toward
what tonality Brahms is leading us. The reverent return to
E major is at first tentative, but ultimately transcendent.
program notes
The set concludes with a whirling D minor Capriccio
that reminds us what a fine pianist Brahms was. His
central section unites contrary motion with crossrhythms, inner voices, and volatile harmonic shifts that
emphasize diminished seventh chords. Brahms’ reprise of
the opening section modifies his material as if it were a
toccata. A virtuoso coda in 3/8 meter enables the pianist
to conclude Op. 116 with a brilliant fortissimo flourish.
Preludes & Fugues, Op. 87, Nos. 1-12
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)
The 48 Preludes and Fugues of Bach’s Well-Tempered
Clavier (WTC), Books I and II constitute a major pillar of
the keyboard literature. Every pianist who achieves a
moderately advanced level studies at least a couple of
them. Bach’s textural variety and imagination in the
Preludes and his contrapuntal mastery in the fugues have
inspired and challenged performers and composers for
more than 250 years.
While many composers after Bach wrote preludes and
fugues, Shostakovich was the first to embark on a complete
cycle of 24, in each of the major and minor keys of the
chromatic scale, matching Bach’s pattern for his WTC.
This large undertaking came to fruition during a turbulent
period in his career.
Cultural politics in the Soviet Union
Charcoal of Johannes Brahms by Zoe Matthiessen
On February 10, 1948, Josef Stalin’s chief lieutenant,
Andrei Zhdanov, issued a resolution condemning Dmitri
Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev, and other prominent
Soviet composers. Their `crime’ was their failure to write
music that complied sufficiently with the Soviet Union’s
definition of socialist realism. Shostakovich had already
been the target of Stalin’s formal censure in 1936, after
a now infamous editorial in Pravda lambasted his opera
Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. After that early
debacle, Shostakovich was `rehabilitated,’ and had lived
more or less according to Soviet party doctrine for more
than a decade, including the crucial years of the Second
World War. Consequently, he was deeply wounded by the
1948 resolution. He reacted by withdrawal, declining to
release new compositions for several years other than film
scores and some Soviet choral music.
Notwithstanding his official disfavor in the wake of
the Zhdanov decree, Shostakovich remained an important
propaganda figure to the Soviet authorities because of his
international celebrity. In 1950, he was asked to head a
Soviet delegation to several music festivals in Communist
East Germany, including the bicentennial celebrations
observing the 200th anniversary of Bach’s death. One of
his responsibilities was serving as a juror for the 1st
International Bach Competition in Leipzig.
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program notes
There he heard the Russian pianist Tatiana Nikolaeva play
many of Bach’s Preludes and Fugues. She had learned and
memorized the entire Well-Tempered Clavier and played
the works with formidable command and mastery. She
won first prize in the competition.
Impressed by her performances, and inspired by
Bach’s wondrous music still lingering in his mind’s ear,
Shostakovich soon began writing his own preludes and
fugues. He had ambivalent feelings about fugues, that most
intellectually rigorous of musical forms. In the 1930s, he
wrote them as an exercise to break through his writer’s
block. As he told a Soviet journal in 1951, his focus on
the fugue was a “technical exercise with the aim of
perfecting his mastery in the polyphonic genre (along the
lines of the polyphonic studies undertaken by RimskyKorsakov or Tchaikovsky in their time).”
The project consumed him. Normally he worked
on several compositions simultaneously. Between
October 10, 1950 and February 25, 1951, he focused
almost exclusively on the Preludes and Fugues, sharing
each new pair with Tatiana Nikolaeva on a continuous
basis. He organized them not in ascending chromatic
order, as Bach had done, but in a sequence of
alternating major and minor keys following the circle
of fifths, as Chopin had done in his Op. 28 Preludes.
(Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes, Op. 34, written in 1932-33,
also conformed to this tonal sequence.)
In Soviet Russia, all new compositions had to be
submitted for peer review in order to secure permission
for public performance and publication. Shostakovich
played through the first half of the cycle – the same 12
Preludes and Fugues Mr. Melnikov performs – for the
Union of Composers on March 31, 1951. By all accounts
his performance was sub-standard, but even so, the
reaction was unusually harsh. His colleagues objected that
he was not conforming with recent ‘realistic’ works; he
had not imbued the Russian contrapuntal style with
energy and innovation appropriate to contemporary
Communist trends. Nikolaeva and another Russian
pianist, Maria Yudina, defended Shostakovich’s new
pieces, to no avail.
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Despite this dismal inaugural reception,
Shostakovich’s Preludes and Fugues circulated
underground in manuscript form. Emil Gilels
programmed some of them on his recitals in Finland,
Sweden, and Siberia–and ultimately in Moscow. It was
Nikolaeva, however, who was finally able to persuade the
Soviet authorities that this music was worthy of being
performed. Publication of Op. 87 was approved in
August 1952. Nikolaeva gave the first public performance
of the complete cycle in Leningrad on December 23rd
and 28th, 1952.
About the music
Shostakovich told his Union of Composers’
colleagues that his Op. 87 was not a cycle, and that
pianists could choose any group from them to play
independently. Nikolaeva always maintained that the
work was a cycle, and continued to perform it as such
until her death. Shostakovich did indicate that each
Prelude and Fugue was an indissoluble unit, following
each Prelude with the marking attacca (without pause).
A large architectural logic underlies each half
(We are hearing just the first half of Op. 87 on tonight’s
program). The Preludes are echoes and pre-echoes of
Shostakovich’s instrumental writing in larger works:
symphonic movements, string quartets, and concerti.
Dance rhythms recur frequently; he opens with a
Sarabande in C major and concludes with a sober
Passacaglia in G-sharp minor. Along the way we hear a
French overture (Prelude No. 6 in B Minor), a minuet in
arpeggios (No. 5 in D Major), a gigue (No. 7 in A Major),
and a gavotte (No. 11 in B major).
The Fugues have just as much variety.
Shostakovich seems at pains to emphasize imagination
rather than didactic intent. Among the dozen that we
hear, all are three- or four-part fugues except No. 9 in E
Major, which is in two voices; this limitation gives it the
character of a Bach Invention rather than a fugue.
biography
Different characteristics can be heard in
each fugue of the subjects: a quasi-Russian
folk song, fanfares of surprising delicacy,
syncopations. Occasionally, as in the Prelude
and Fugue No. 10 in C-sharp Minor, the
subject of the fugue grows out of figuration
from the Prelude, now dramatically slowed
down. This sophisticated compositional
technic, strongly unites the two
movements. Listeners who know Shostakovich’s
chamber music and symphonies will
recognize many hallmarks of his style, such
as spare textures, occasional biting sarcasm,
and quirky manipulation of tonality. This
extraordinary collection is a vivid reminder
that Shostakovich began his career as a
performing pianist and retained a high level
of virtuosity throughout his life. Yet he
never sacrificed musical substance for the
sake of bravura. These Preludes and Fugues
always have a clearly-defined direction. As
often as not, they take us deep into this
elusive composer’s soul.
Program Notes by Laurie Shulman ©2015
Found a word or phrase that you are unfamiliar with? Check
out our extensive Glossary beginning on page 118
to discover the meaning.
Alexander Melnikov
A
lexander Melnikov graduated from the Moscow Conservatory under
Lev Naumov. His most formative musical moments in Moscow include his
early encounter with Svjatoslav Richter, who thereafter regularly invited him to
festivals in Russia and France. He was awarded important prizes at such eminent
competitions as the International Robert Schumann Competition in Zwickau (1989)
and the Concours Musical Reine Elisabeth in Brussels (1991).
Known for his often unusual musical and programmatic decisions, Alexander
Melnikov discovered a career-long interest in historical performance practice at
an early age. His major influences in this field include Andreas Staier and Alexei
Lubimov, with whom he collaborated on numerous projects. Mr. Melnikov
performs regularly with such distinguished period ensembles as the Freiburger
Barockorchester, Concerto Köln, Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin and Orchestre
des Champs-Élysées.
Together with harpsichordist Andreas Staier, Alexander Melnikov developed a
program that sets excerpts from Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier in musical dialogue
with Shostakovich's 24 Preludes and Fugues. The artists have also recently added
a unique all-Schubert program of four-hand pieces to their repertoire. Intensive
chamber music collaborations with partners include cellists Alexander Rudin and
Jean-Guihen Queyras, as well as the baritone Georg Nigl.
Alexander Melnikov’s association with the label Harmonia Mundi arose through
his regular recital partner, violinist Isabelle Faust, and in 2010 their complete
recording of the Beethoven Sonatas for Violin and Piano won both a Gramophone
Award and Germany’s ECHO Klassik Prize. This CD, which has become a
touchstone recording for these works, was also nominated for a Grammy. His
recording of the complete Preludes and Fugues by Shostakovich was awarded the
BBC Music Magazine Award, Choc de classica and the Jahrespreis der Deutschen
Schallplattenkritik. In 2011, it was also named by the BBC Music Magazine as one
of the “50 Greatest Recordings of All Time.”
As a soloist, Alexander Melnikov has performed with orchestras including the
Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Philadelphia
Orchestra, NDR Sinfonieorchester, HR-Sinfonieorchester, Russian National
Orchestra, Munich Philharmonic, Rotterdam Philharmonic, BBC Philharmonic
and the NHK Symphony, under conductors such as Mikhail Pletnev, Teodor
Currentzis, Charles Dutoit, Paavo Järvi, Philippe Herreweghe and Valery Gergiev.
For more information visit www.artsmg.com/Piano/AlexanderMelnikov
Alexander Melnikov appears courtesy of Arts Management Group
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