Sunday Morning Coffee Concerts

Transcription

1 The Program Sunday, May 7, 2017, at 11:00 am Sunday Morning Coffee Concerts Dénes Várjon, Piano BEETHOVEN Sonata No. 27 in E minor (1814) Mit Lebhaftigkeit und durchaus mit Empfindung und Ausdruck Nicht zu geschwind und sehr singbar vorzutragen BARTÓK Elegie No. 1 ( ) LISZT Sonata in B minor ( ) Lento assai Allegro energico Grandioso Cantando espressivo Andante sostenuto Quasi adagio Allegro energico Presto Andante sostenuto Lento assai This program is approximately one hour long and will be performed without intermission. Please join the artist for a cup of coffee following the performance. Please make certain all your electronic devices are switched off. Refreshments provided by Zabar s and zabars.com This performance is made possible in part by the Josie Robertson Fund for Lincoln Center. Steinway Piano Walter Reade Theater

2 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 with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. Endowment support for Symphonic Masters is provided by the Leon Levy Fund. Endowment support is also provided by UBS. American Airlines is the Official Airline of Lincoln Center Nespresso is the Official Coffee of Lincoln Center NewYork-Presbyterian is the Official Hospital of Lincoln Center UPCOMING GREAT PERFORMERS EVENTS: Sunday, May 14 at 5:00 pm in Alice Tully Hall Carolyn Sampson, soprano Joseph Middleton, piano Fleurs Songs by SCHUMANN, PURCELL, STRAUSS, BRITTEN, FAURÉ, DEBUSSY, and others Sunday, May 21 at 11:00 am in the Walter Reade Theater Esther Yoo, violin (New York recital debut) Robert Koenig, piano MENDELSSOHN: Sonata in F major DEBUSSY: Sonata for violin and piano GLAZUNOV: Grand Adagio, from Raymonda TCHAIKOVSKY: Valse-scherzo in C major For tickets, call (212) or visit LCGreatPerformers.org. Call the Lincoln Center Info Request Line at (212) to learn about program cancellations or to request a Great Performers brochure. Visit LCGreatPerformers.org for more information relating to this season s programs. Join the conversation: #LCGreatPerfs 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.

3 Great Performers I Notes on the Program Notes on the Program By Kathryn L. Libin Sonata No. 27 in E minor, Op. 90 (1814) LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Born December 16, 1770, in Bonn, Germany Died March 26, 1827, in Vienna Approximate length: 13 minutes When Beethoven published his first set of piano sonatas in Vienna in 1796, he dedicated them to his teacher, Joseph Haydn. A great many piano sonatas were in circulation at that time, including those produced by Haydn and Mozart, and Beethoven s youthful efforts more or less followed the pattern established by the older composers. But over the course of his career and the composition of 32 sonatas, Beethoven transformed the sonata genre into a brilliant and complex new medium for the piano. He expanded the technical demands on the instrument, experimented with innovative structural designs, and infused the sonata s traditional framework with the profoundest expression. Beethoven s piano writing reflected the nearly continuous technological innovation applied to the piano itself during this period, particularly the strengthening of its tone. As Beethoven s own hearing diminished, he seems to have demanded increasingly rich sounds, textures, and colors from the instrument. The Sonata in E minor, Op. 90, dates from This year opened propitiously for Beethoven, with recent premieres of his Seventh and Eighth Symphonies to rapturous acclaim and a highly successful spring revival of his opera Fidelio. The sonata the first that Beethoven had written in four years was dedicated to a member of the Lichnowsky family, longtime patrons of the composer, but it actually seems to have been intended for the talents and sensibility of Beethoven s prize pupil, the Archduke Rudolph, who made his own copy of the work. After the stormy energy of many of his earlier sonatas, Beethoven s Op. 90 introduces a more concentrated structure only two movements, the second a rondo and an atmosphere of greater intimacy and reflection. The passionate intensity of the E-minor first movement gives way to one of the warmest and most graceful movements, in the parallel E major, that Beethoven ever composed. Yet he had achieved a similar atmosphere of warm sincerity in his beautiful E-major aria for Leonore and the newly composed overture to Fidelio; E major, in the spring of 1814, seems to have been associated in Beethoven s mind with an intoxicating blend of humanity, love, and heroism.

4 Great Performers I Notes on the Program Elegie No. 1, Op. 8b ( ) BÉLA BARTÓK Born March 25, 1881, in Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary Died September 26, 1945, in New York Approximate length: 8 minutes Béla Bartók grew up in a musical home and took his first piano lessons with his mother; he ultimately became a piano virtuoso of international reputation who presented hundreds of public concerts during a decades-long career. Bartók s decision to remain in his native Hungary in order to study at the Budapest Academy of Music placed him in direct lineage with Franz Liszt, whose influence there was still palpable. Indeed, Bartók performed Liszt s B-minor Sonata in his 1901 debut concert in Budapest, demonstrating his powerful technique and mastery of the piano at an early age. In later years, Bartók would perform an extraordinary amount of Beethoven s music in concert, including concertos as well as solo and chamber sonatas, and in the 1920s and 1930s he programmed many works by Bach. Like Bach, Beethoven, and Liszt, Bartók expanded the boundaries of keyboard timbre and technique; he cultivated the piano s potential as a percussion instrument and a vibrant, even fearsome form of expression that Hungarian critic Aladár Tóth called intensivity. Bartók s Két Elégia ( Two Elegies ) are early works, dating from 1908 and 1909, representing elements of the composer s new, more austere piano style as well as robustly Romantic passages in homage to Liszt. Indeed, it has been noted that the opening motive of Elegie No. 1, with its unsettling gravity, refers to Liszt s Les Préludes, while an energetic, pianissimo fugal section in the middle of the work is reminiscent of the fugato writing in Liszt s B-minor Sonata. Bartók s composition of the Elegie is linked to disappointment; having fallen deeply in love with a young violinist, Stefi Geyer, and written a violin concerto for her, he heard from her in February 1908 that she could not continue in a relationship with him. He wrote to her, I finished the score of the violin concerto on the 5th of February, the very day you were writing my death sentence I don t know whether to destroy it or to keep it locked away until it is found after I die and the whole pile of papers, my declaration of love, your concerto, my best work are thrown out. Sonata in B minor, S.178 ( ) FRANZ LISZT Born October 22, 1811, in Doborján, Hungary Died July 31, 1886, in Bayreuth, Germany Approximate length: 28 minutes The pianist who most dominated the 19th century was Franz Liszt, a towering genius of the instrument who not only transformed the way people listened to piano music as a rapt, attentive audience devoting an evening to a single

5 Great Performers I Notes on the Program artist on stage but also created modern virtuosic techniques that have never been surpassed, along with the repertoire to exploit them. His extensive concert tours in the 1830s and 40s dazzled audiences from Paris to St. Petersburg, and ensured that generations of composer-pianists would have to come to grips with his influence. Liszt s B-minor Sonata, the most original, powerful, and intelligent sonata composed after Beethoven and Schubert, in Alfred Brendel s words, was composed in Liszt dedicated it to Robert Schumann, who never heard it; the other great pianist of the era, Clara Schumann, dismissed it as gruesome and merely a blind noise. The sonata superbly illustrates Liszt s compositional principle of thematic transformation, in which a small number of musical ideas are subject to processes of alteration, including varying the original rhythm and meter, adding ornamentation, changing mode, register, accompanimental texture, or tempo. The entire enormous work contains only six themes, three of which appear in the introduction. Liszt employs an ingenious structure in which the work s four linked movements the Introduction/Lento-Allegro energico, an F-sharp major Andante sostenuto, a Fugato/Allegro energico, and the closing Presto- Prestissimo also represent the sections of a sonata first-movement structure (exposition, central development sections, recapitulation/coda). The hushed motive of the opening acts as a unifying thread, articulating the important structural joints and closing the work with immense dignity. The sonata received its official premiere on January 22, 1857 in Berlin, when Liszt s son-in-law Hans von Bülow famously unveiled the first Bechstein piano to the public. After hearing the work privately on an earlier occasion, Richard Wagner wrote to Lizst, The sonata is beautiful beyond belief: grand, deserving of love, profound and noble sublime, as you are. Musicologist Kathryn L. Libin teaches music history and theory at Vassar College. Copyright 2017 by Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Inc.

6 Great Performers I Meet the Artist Meet the Artist Dénes Várjon As a soloist and chamber musician, Dénes Várjon brings sensational technique and deep musicality to his performances. As a soloist, he has appeared at Carnegie Hall, Vienna s Konzert haus and London s Wigmore Hall, and participates in leading international festivals from Marlboro to Salzburg and Edinburgh. As a chamber musician, he works regularly with such pre-eminent partners as Steven Isserlis, Joshua Bell, Kim Kashkashian, Jörg Widmann, Leonidas Kavakos, András Schiff, Heinz Holliger, and Miklós Perényi. Mr. Várjon also performs with leading ensembles, including the Budapest Festival Orchestra, Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra, Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra, Chamber Orchestra of Europe, and Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, and has worked with conductors Georg Solti, Sándor Végh, Iván Fischer, Ádám Fischer, Heinz Holliger, Horst Stein, Leopold Hager, and Zoltán Kocsis, among others. Mr. Várjon also appears frequently in recital with his wife, pianist Izabella Simon. In the past decade, the two have organized and led several chamber music festivals, the most recent being at the Franz Liszt Music Academy in Budapest. Mr. Várjon has recorded on the Naxos, Capriccio, Hungaroton, Teldec, EMC, and PAN-Classics Switzerland labels, including Sándor Veress: Hommage à Paul Klee (Teldec) with Schiff, Holliger, and the Budapest Festival Orchestra, and Hommage à Géza Anda (PAN-Classics Switzerland). A graduate of the Franz Liszt Music Academy, Mr. Várjon is currently a professor there. Lincoln Center s Great Performers Initiated in 1965, Lincoln Center s Great Performers series offers classical and contemporary music performances from the world s outstanding symphony orchestras, vocalists, chamber ensembles, and recitalists. One of the

7 Great Performers most significant music presentation series in the world, Great Performers runs from October through June with offerings in Lincoln Center s David Geffen Hall, Alice Tully Hall, Walter Reade Theater, and other performance spaces around New York City. From symphonic masterworks, lieder reci-tals, and Sunday morning coffee concerts to films and groundbreaking productions specially commissioned by Lincoln Center, 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 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 Andrew C. Elsesser, Associate Director, Programming Regina Grande Rivera, Associate Producer Nana Asase, Assistant to the Artistic Director Luna Shyr, Senior Editor Olivia Fortunato, Programming Assistant Mary E. Reilly, Program Content Coordinator Mr. Várjon s representation: Classical Concert Agency

8 Arts in the Middle Students from South Bronx Academy for Applied Media Several studies have examined how exposure to the arts in middle school strongly impact a student s social skills and development as well as likelihood to graduate from high school. In 2013, Lincoln Center Education launched a pilot program in partnership with the New York City Department of Education aimed at this specific issue. Called Arts in the Middle, it focuses on arts education as a potential catalyst for improved student engagement and success in and out of school, as well as parent engagement, teaching practices, and school and community culture. Through Arts in the Middle, Lincoln Center Education is working with more than a dozen underserved New York City middle schools that have little to no arts programs. LCE is supporting schools with efforts to hire a part-time or full-time arts teacher, in addition to deploying its own roster of skilled teaching artists to help in the classroom and provide professional development for teachers and family engagement. Early results of these efforts to support educators and students are showing positive results. Metis Associates, hired by LCE to evaluate short- and longterm effectiveness of the program, has documented increased parent engagement, which can have an impact on student success. Some schools have also noted that students are becoming vibrant and vocal participants when the arts are integrated into classrooms. If results continue in this direction, Lincoln Center Education hopes to develop an adaptable model of the program that can be disseminated nationally to bring arts education to underserved communities. As our partnership with the New York City Department of Education continues to grow, so, too, does our commitment to supporting whole communities by providing thoughtful programs for students and families around New York City s five boroughs, said Russell Granet. Arts in the Middle is just one of many ways Lincoln Center Education is leveraging highquality arts programs to improve the lives of all New Yorkers. 4 decades of thinking like an artist Jean Taylor Learn more about Lincoln Center Education and its work at home and abroad: LincolnCenterEducation.org