Piano
Bartók, Béla - Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion
Assai lento - Allegro Troppo
Lento, ma non Troppo
Allegro non troppo
By the time he composed his Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion in 1937, the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók was at the height of his powers in multiple realms. His compositions from the later part of the 1930s, which (as with many of his works) demonstrate his interest in the folk music he encountered in his ethnomusicological fieldwork, include his last two string quartets and his noted orchestral work Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta. He was also active as a performer at the piano, a role that included collaborating with his wife, Ditta Pásztory-Bartók. The Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion emerged at this dynamic moment for Bartók, and it was first performed in 1938 in Basel, Switzerland, with Bartók and his wife at the piano. In fact, Bartok initially intended to compose a work for just one piano and percussion, but he realized that balance issues with the "often rather penetrating timbre of the percussion instruments" necessitated the second keyboard. The straightforward form of the Sonata, which places it firmly in the realm of neo-Classicism, belies its novel sonic combinations. On the one hand, it is largely traditional in shape and scope, with a large and dynamic first movement, a slow second movement, and a brisk, lively third movement. On the other hand, it features several percussion instruments (all unpitched except for xylophone) divided between two performers. In the first movement's slow introduction, a quiet timpani roll underpins a chromatic, zig-zagging melody in the pianos. Propulsive, even frenetic energy then characterizes the main part of this extensive movement, which features the contrasting sections typical of a large-scale movement that can be understood in terms of sonata form. The pianos lead the way in this relentlessly driving movement, where moments of respite and lyricism are rare; percussion primarily adds timbral color. Percussive effects suggest a ticking clock at the start of the slow second movement, and the pianos introduce a winding melody somewhat reminiscent of (though less ragged than) the first movement's slow introduction. A motif with quick repeated notes, first in the pianos and then imitated by the xylophone and timpani, characterize the agitated middle section, and this motif returns for the movement's ominous end. An animated dialogue between the pianos and the xylophone figure into the march-like closing movement, particularly at the movement's opening and at conspicuous moments throughout, and the xylophone itself partakes in a kind of mini-dialogue with the timpani, the other percussion instrument to be highlighted extensively in this spry, athletic, and swirling finale. The conclusion, with its playful snare drum and surprising resolution in C major, is cheekily-even unsettlingly-subdued. The Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion is not technically part of Bartók's celebrated group of final compositions, which included the Concerto for Orchestra and a sonata for unaccompanied violin. But it did become an important document of the composer's final years. In 1943, two years before his death of leukemia, Bartók and his wife performed the piano parts in the American premiere of its orchestral version with the New York Philharmonic under the baton of Fritz Reiner. (It was described in the program as the Concerto for Two Pianos with Orchestral Accompaniment.) It was Bartók's last public performance.
Beethoven, Ludwig Van - Piano Sonata No. 23 in F minor, op. 57, “Appassionata”
During the summer of 1804 Beethoven spent two months vacationing in Döbling, following his standard practice of passing time in the country to enjoy the beauty of nature as fully as possible while composing. This particular summer, though, he did not work much during the first part of his stay. Indeed, he wrote to his brother on July 24 to say, "Not on my life would I have believed that I could be so lazy as I am here. If it is followed by an outburst of industry, something worthwhile may be accomplished." Not long afterward he did manage to accomplish "something worthwhile" in the composition of two of his most famous piano sonatas, the Waldstein, Opus 54, and the Appassionata. There is a well-known anecdote regarding the finale of the Sonata--one that contributed mightily to the image (propagated endlessly in films) of the way Beethoven worked. His friend Ferdinand Ries, who was with him at Döbling, told of one of their long daily walks:
He had been all the time humming and sometimes howling, always up and down, without singing any definite notes. In answer to my question of what it was, he said: "A theme for the last movement of the Sonata has occurred to me." When we entered the room he ran to the pianoforte without taking off his hat. I took a seat in the corner and he soon forgot all about me. Now he stormed for at least an hour with the beautiful finale of the Sonata.
Already in August of 1804 Beethoven offered the Sonata for publication, but it was not accepted for two years. In the meantime the manuscript underwent an adventure from which it still shows the signs. Beethoven took the manuscript with him on an autumn journey to Prince Lichnowsky's estate in Silesia. His visit ended abruptly when the French officers who were the Prince's guests begged Beethoven to play something for them when he was not at all in the mood. One of them jokingly threatened arrest if he did not do as they requested. Beethoven took the threat seriously and stormed out, walking by night to the nearest city and then taking the post carriage back to Vienna. On this journey the weather turned as stormy as Beethoven's spirits. The rain soaked into his trunk, which contained the F-minor Sonata. Upon arriving in Vienna, Beethoven showed the still-damp manuscript to Count Razumovsky's librarian and his wife. She, a fine pianist, was struck by the music and carried it over to the piano, where she began to play through it in spite of Beethoven's erasures and corrections and the streaks of ink caused by the rain water. Beethoven, struck with admiration at her ability to decipher the messy manuscript, yielded to her entreaties to give it to her (which he did once it was returned from the publishers. To this day it bears the traces of Beethoven's sodden retreat from Silesia. According to Czerny, Beethoven considered Opus 57 his greatest sonata. The nick-name, Appassionata, however, does not come from the composer. It was added by a publisher who made a four-hand arrangement in 1838-more than a decade after the composer's death. The Sonata opens in a hushed mood of mystery with an F-minor arpeggio that falls, then rises, and finally pauses after a trill. The mystery deepens with the answer to this gambit, which is in essence a repetition, but one half-step higher, in G flat. The move upward by a semitone (or its inversion, moving downward) recurs frequently throughout the movement- and the entire Sonata. In fact, the echo of the descending figure five steps higher (D flat to C) inaugurates the explosion that really gets the Sonata under-way, and it comes back at many points-most crucially to bring the original theme back at the recapitulation. The middle movement, a straightforward variation set whose course is easy to follow after the storms of the opening Allegro movement, is itself in the key of D flat. A rich hymn like chordal progression in the bass register provides the material for the variations, which grow progressively faster in motion and more elaborate in decoration as they move up to the highest reaches of the instrument. But the end comes as a shock: instead of closing with the expected D-flat chord, Beethoven leaves the movement hanging with the tonic note D flat in the melody, but harmonized in an unexpected dissonance that will force it to move down to C as the chord changes to F minor for the tonic of the last movement. Thus the melodic link of D flat to C not only ties passages together within a movement, but actually links the middle movement to the finale. This last Allegro is almost unremittingly stormy, with a perpetuo moto of sixteenth notes. (Is this what Ries heard as "howling, always up and down, without singing any definite notes"?) Its conclusion is a still-more-energetic Presto with chords pounded out at great speed before the perpetuo moto takes off at a furious headlong pace to the end.
Brahms, Johannes - Theme and Variations in D minor, op. 18b
Brahms's Theme and Variations in D minor is taken from the second movement of his Opus 18 String Sextet in B flat. The String Sextet is the earliest Brahms chamber music work to be heard in performance with any frequency. We know little about when Brahms actually composed the work, since his lifelong habit of revising and keeping a work to himself until he was satisfied meant that many compositions were written long before they were published. He finished it in the autumn of 1860, but it may have been underway for a year or more. The work is fresh and relaxed, though tinged with resignation, and redolent of the magnificent surrounding forest in which Brahms took lengthy strolls. We know even less about Brahms's arrangement of the second movement for solo piano--except that he probably wanted to play it himself. The second movement is a set of variations in D minor that allows Brahms to ring all sorts of imaginative changes on the varied ways of scoring six stringed instruments which sets a different challenge for a piano arrangement. The theme and first three variations follow the old Baroque practice of gradually increasing the level of activity from one section to the next. With the fourth variation Brahms turns to D major for a flowing section with simple melodic outline. The fifth variation creates the sound of bagpipes with a drone and a skirl, the high-pitched sound of a bagpipe. The minor key returns in the last variation for a backward glance to the opening. Brahms hints at the old Baroque genre of the Folia, best known from Corelli's variations on a traditional bass line, though its history actually goes back to the beginning of the seventeenth century. Quite possibly Brahms's piano arrangement of this movement suggested to Rachmaninoff his later Variations on a Theme of Corelli.
Busoni, Ferruccio - Berceuse, K. 252, from Elegien, K. 249
Ferruccio Busoni composed his Berceuse for piano in 1907, under the conviction that experimentation with musical expression could best be carried out in small character pieces. It was ultimately published in memory of his mother, who died in October 1909, and later arranged for chamber orchestra under the title Berceuse élégiaque. Berceuse means "lullaby," and this one is typical in its gently rocking rhythms, but far more striking is its sustained mood of somber pensiveness, its "elegiac" quality. It is conceived in what Hugo Leichtentritt called "polyphonic harmony," in which the linear treatment of the different lines produces new effects of great subtlety in unexpected combinations, to be heard more horizontally (that is, as moving lines) than vertically (simply as chords). The overall colors of the work are mauves and browns, capturing the subdued and darkened mood of the composer.
Debussy, Claude - Estampes
Pagodes
La soirée dans Grenade
Jardines sous la pluie
The early 1900s were happy years for Debussy. He called it his "time of spring," just after his marriage to Lily Texier and before artistic success had tipped over into full-blown fame. It was during this time, in 1903, that Debussy wrote a series of three short piano pieces gathered under the title of Estampes or "engravings." The reference to visual art, explicitly stated here but implied in so much of Debussy's music, gives an indication of his aesthetic direction. Estampes is one of only three works Debussy dedicated to a visual artist, in this case his friend Jacques-Émile Blanche. But the composer consistently proclaimed his love of painting, and one of his pupils reported that Debussy always regretted having not explored a career in the visual arts instead of music. Like the composer's later Images for orchestra, the three episodes in Estampes are vehicles for the imagination, postcards that carry the listener to remote locales. 'The melodies and atmospheric pedal effects of "Pagodes" clearly place this work in the exotic cultures of the Far East, but the implied geography is ambiguous. 'The theme, built on the pentatonic scale, is harmonized in seconds and fourths instead of the more Western thirds and sixths. It builds to several climaxes, each falling back to gentle waves of black-note pentatonicism. Bell-like resonance in the piano's lowest register signals the work's conclusion. Debussy's first-hand knowledge of Spain consisted of a single day spent at San Sebastian, yet the Spanish composer Manuel de Falla bestowed authenticity on Debussy's "La soirée dans Grenade" when he declared that it represented "the images in the moonlit waters of the albercas adjoining the Alhambra." This nocturne in habanera rhythm imitates the languorous strumming of Spanish guitar and the clicking of castanets in a mesmerizing evocation of Spanish music and atmosphere. Jacques-Emile Blanche recalled that one summer evening a storm rose while the assembled party, which included Debussy, was in the garden. 'This experience inspired the final piece from Estampes, "Jardins sous la pluie," which emulates an Impressionist interplay of light and water through rain, mist, and clouds. Amid the layering of simultaneous melodies, Debussy quotes two French children's songs, "Do, do l'enfant do" and "Nous n'irons plus au bois."
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus - Piano Quartet in Eb Major, K. 493
Allegro
Larghetto
Allegretto
Mozart virtually created the genre of the piano quartet with his two contributions to the medium, K. 478 in G minor and K. 493 in E-flat major. The first, completed on October 16, 1785, had been written in response to a commission for three such works from the publisher Franz Anton Hoffmeister. Mozart's Quartet had not sold well. The public expected such works to be, by convention, essentially solo piano pieces with some of their thematic lines copied out for stringed instruments, which would therefore essentially be playing along with the piano, doubling its melodies, with little or nothing to play by themselves. Despite Hoffmeister cancelling the contract due to the failure of the first quartet, Mozart did write another piano quartet about nine months later--the first work he completed after his extended labor on the opera Le nozze di Figaro. 'The Second Quartet was published by Hoffmeister's rival, Artaria. Although Mozart's piano quartets are the earliest to remain in the repertory, he did have a model for K. 493 in the form of a set of quartets by Johann Schobert (d. 1767), whose Opus 7 included a Piano Quartet in E-flat that has striking harmonic parallels with Mozart's opening and which apparently served as a catalyst for the younger composer's imagination. But, of course, despite a modest bow to an older composer, K. 493 is pure Mozart throughout. And like its G-minor predecessor, this is a work that begins moving chamber music out of the home and into the concert hall. The E-flat Quartet does not contain the rich emotional depths of the earlier quartet (depths that Mozart invariably plumbs when composing in the key of G minor), but it is serene and witty, with the piano leading the dialogue and providing decorative figuration in contradistinction to the strings' plainer fare. The slow movement is lavish in its lyricism, while the finale is filled with jesting repartee led again by the piano, whose conversational crosscurrents bring a smile with their epigrammatic wit.
Schumann, Robert - Symphonic Etudes, op. 13
A large percentage of the music of Robert Schumann is in some way autobiographical, none more so than the compositions that were inspired by his infatuation with one girl or another. Clara Wieck, whom he eventually married, was preeminent among these girlfriends in terms of the number of compositions or themes she inspired, but Clara first emerged as a rival to an earlier fiancée, Ernestine von Fricken. Ernestine boarded with the Wiecks in Leipzig starting in late April 1834, when she was seventeen. By the end of August she and Schumann, then twenty-four, became secretly betrothed. Not long after, Ernestine's father, concerned about the apparently serious relationship growing between his daughter and the unknown young composer, took her away to Asch. Ernestine's father, an amateur flutist and composer, had given Schumann a com-position, a theme and variations for flute in C-sharp minor. How much attention Schumann would have paid had he not been interested in marrying the daughter is perhaps debatable, but he did write his own set of variations-_for piano--on the father's theme. By September 23, he had already written some "pathetic" variations (by which, of course, he meant "full of pathos or feeling"). In the course of the following spring, Schumann's romantic interest began to be drawn away from the distant Ernestine to Clara Wieck, a brilliant young pianist not quite sixteen years of age. He was with her daily, and on November 25 they exchanged their first kiss. The completion of the Symphonic Etudes took the entirety of 1836. A visit from Chopin in September fired Schumann into composition once again "with great gusto and excitement," though he did not conceive the present finale until later in the year, after he had met the young English composer William Sterndale Bennett, who eventually received the dedication of the work and who arrived in Leipzig for the first time on October 29. Schumann found himself drawn to Stern-dale Bennett, whom he considered the brightest light on the English scene. This friendship gave him an idea for a finale that would honor the young Englishman and serve also as a compliment to his nationality. He selected a romance from the then-popular opera Der Templer and die Jüdin by Heinrich Marschner, based on Scott's Ivanhoe. The romance is sung to the words "Wer ist der Ritter Hochgeehrt? . . . Du stolzes England freue dich (Who is the highly honored knight? . . . Proud England rejoice!), which Schumann borrows as the basis of a massive and powerful finale into which the original theme is inserted several times. The title, stressing the symphonic quality of the work, is entirely appropriate, for Schumann's keyboard conception is far grander than anything previously attempted in richness of texture, contrapuntal interplay of the lines, and virtuosic demands. At least one etude, the third (which is one of the few not specifically identified as a variation), is concerned with translating violin technique to the piano, and others involve lay. ers of different textures that suggest division into different orchestral choirs. Whether in its published form, as twelve variations with finale, or in its enlarged form, with the addition of the posthumous variations, the Symphonic Etudes mark the beginning of an epoch in romantic keyboard music.