GARRICK OHLSSON Piano

Transcription

1 presents GARRICK OHLSSON Piano Thursday, February 21, :30pm BRAHMS Eight Pieces, Opus 76 Capriccio in F-sharp minor Capriccio in B minor Intermezzo in A-flat Major Intermezzo in B-flat Major Capriccio in C-sharp minor Intermezzo in A Major Intermezzo in A minor Capriccio in C Major Variations on an Original Theme, Opus 21, No. 1 Variations on a Hungarian Song, Opus 21, No. 2 INTERMISSION Four Ballades, Opus 10 No. 1 in D minor No. 2 in D Major No. 3 in B minor No. 4 in B Major Variations on a Theme of Paganini, Opus 35 (Book I) This presentation is generously supported by Joan Kahr and the Bernard Osher Foundation. Garrick Ohlsson is represented by Opus 3 Artists 470 Park Avenue South, 9th Floor North, New York, NY opus3artists.com Hamburg Steinway Model D, Pro Piano, San Francisco 1

2 ARTIST PROFILES San Francisco Performances presents Garrick Ohlsson for the sixth time. He made his first appearance in erson and Tokyo string quartets, and in the spring will tour with the Takács Quartet and the Boston Chamber Players in Istanbul, Berlin, Munich, Warsaw, Luxembourg and Prague. Together with violinist Jorja Fleezanis and cellist Michael Grebanier, he is a founding member of the San Franciscobased FOG Trio. Mr. Ohlsson can be heard on the Arabesque, RCA Victor Red Seal, Angel, BMG, Delos, Hänssler, Nonesuch, Telarc, Hyperion and Virgin Classics labels. A native of White Plains, N.Y., Garrick Ohlsson began his piano studies at the age of 8, at the Westchester Conservatory of Music; at 13 he entered the Juilliard School, in New York City. He has been awarded first prizes in the Busoni and Montreal Piano competitions, the Gold Medal at the International Chopin Competition in Warsaw (1970), the Avery Fisher Prize (1994), the University Musical Society Distinguished Artist Award in Ann Arbor, MI (1998), and the Jean Gimbel Lane Prize in Piano Performance from the Northwestern University Bienen School of Music (2014). PROGRAM NOTES Pianist Garrick Ohlsson has established himself worldwide as a musician of magisterial interpretive and technical prowess. Although long regarded as one of the world s leading exponents of the music of Chopin, Mr. Ohlsson commands an enormous repertoire ranging over the entire piano literature and he has come to be noted for his masterly performances of the works of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, as well as the Romantic repertoire. To date he has at his command more than 80 concertos, ranging from Haydn and Mozart to works of the 21st century. This season he launches an ambitious project spread over two seasons exploring the complete solo piano works of Brahms in four different programs. The cycle will be heard in New York, San Francisco and Montreal with individual programs in London, Warsaw and a number of cities across North America. In concerto repertoire ranging from Beethoven to Brahms, Rachmaninoff, Barber and Busoni, he will return to the New York Philharmonic; Cleveland Orchestra; Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, Houston and Seattle Symphonies; and will conclude the season in Indianapolis with all the Rachmaninoff concerti programmed in one weekend. An avid chamber musician, Mr. Ohlsson has collaborated with the Cleveland, Em- 2 Eight Pieces, Opus 76 JOHANNES BRAHMS ( ) Brahms Eight Pieces, Opus 76 date from the summer of 1878 and consist of four intermezzos and four capriccios. Those are only general titles, and Brahms did not distinguish carefully between them. They are generally in simple ABA form: an opening theme, a countermelody in a contrasting tempo and mood, and a return to the opening material, often modified. Brahms used the title capriccio to indicate pieces in a more animated and fiery mood, and the Capriccio in F-sharp minor begins in a mood of suppressed turbulence that is only a little relieved by its central episode. The opening of the Capriccio in B minor has a distinctly Hungarian flavor as it dances along on staccato sixteenths; the middle section is marked più tranquillo. The title of the Intermezzo in A-flat Major may indicate its more relaxed mood Brahms marks it Grazioso, and the music flows gently along the ringing sound of rolled chords high in the right hand. Brahms performance marking Allegretto grazioso suggests the character of the Intermezzo in B-flat Major. The structure of this piece is unusual. Brahms introduces both themes the dotted melody at the be- ginning and a second idea based on chains of sixteenths and then repeats the entire opening section before extending these ideas in the second half, where they lead to a silvery, quiet close. We feel Brahms subtle rhythmic sense in the Intermezzo in A Major. His metric marking is 2/4, but so much of it is written in triplets that it is often difficult to determine what the meter is, for Brahms glides smoothly between duple and triple stresses. The Intermezzo in A minor opens with a solemn chordal melody, but this is almost a misdirection, for the music suddenly takes wing with more impetuous, urgent music. Brahms gives the Capriccio in C-sharp minor the precise marking Agitato, ma non troppo presto, and agitated it certainly is, pressing forward turbulently throughout. Again we are aware of Brahms fluid rhythmic sense. The initial metric marking is 6/8, but this is often pulsed as if the music is in 3/4, and later Brahms switches to 2/4, alternating this with 6/8 across the final pages. Brahms marks the beginning of the Capriccio in C Major Anmutig lebhaft : graceful and lively. The flowing opening gives way to a more chordal middle section, which rises to an extroverted, virtuoso climax. Two Sets of Variations, Opus 21 In 1861 Brahms published as his Opus 21 two sets of variations Variations on an Original Theme and Variations on a Hungarian Song which had been composed over the previous eight years. Brahms apparently wrote the central theme of the Variations on an Original Theme, Opus 21, No. 1 specifically as a theme to be varied. The theme, already full of characteristic Brahmsian nobility, is marked Poco Larghetto and set in 3/8 and in D Major on its first appearance. The unusual thing about this theme, however, is that rather than being in the expected eight-measure phrases, this theme is in two phrases of nine measures each, and each of these parts is to be repeated. The first four variations are straightforward and melodic, but Brahms marks the fifth Canone in modo contrario: the two hands are set in contrary motion, with the left following the right by two bars and playing the theme backwards. The cheerful D-Major tonality of the first variations gives way to stormy in D minor in Variations 8-9, which are much more dramatic. The eleventh variation, longest by far of this set, goes back to D Major and expands to become a significant finale rather just a final variation.

3 The song of Variations on a Hungarian Song, Opus 21, No. 2 may in fact not be a song at all: it was one of three Hungarian themes the violinist Eduard Remenyi sent to Brahms, but it has no name or text. The distinctive thing about the eight-measure theme is that it alternates measures of 3/4 with 4/4 (Brahms metric marking is 3/4 C). That sturdy, forthright tune is announced at the beginning, and thirteen variations follow. These variations are melodic rather than harmonic that is, Brahms keeps the melody clearly audible, rather than building variations on the harmonic line beneath them. The variations are also extremely concise: the entire piece spans just over six minutes. Each variation flows directly into the next, and Brahms retains the alternating 3/4 4/4 meter over the first eight. But beginning with the ninth he moves to some form of duple meter, and the thirteenth and final variation expands to become an imposing finale. Four Ballades, Opus 10 In the summer of 1854 Brahms wrote four short piano pieces that he called ballades. This was a very intense time for Brahms. He was very young (21) and only a few months earlier had come a catastrophe: his friend and mentor Robert Schumann had attempted suicide and was now committed to an asylum. Brahms was steadfast in his aid to the Schumann family, helping to support and organize the shattered household, visiting Robert in the asylum, and consoling Clara. And at a deeper level, Brahms was wrestling with a private demon: the collision between his own youthful love for Clara and his unwavering support for her husband. It was under these conditions that Brahms wrote the Four Ballades. Brahms would never wear his heart on his sleeve, so we should not look for autobiographical meaning in this music, but there is no question that these are four very intense pieces. The first and most famous of them blurs the meaning of the title even further because this ballade is in fact based on a literary ballad. Brahms had first encountered the old Scottish ballad Edward in Herder s translation, and on the first page of the music he made the connection clear: After the Scottish ballad Edward. That ballad tells a dark tale: young Edward comes home from the hunt with bloody hands and laments that he has killed his falcon, but it soon becomes clear that he has killed his father (and in some versions had done so at the instigation of his mother). This music has been much admired, and Brahms biographer Karl Geiringer hears a tragic power in it. The opening section alternates two somber chordal themes. These explode in the violent middle section, marked Allegro, and the return of the quiet opening material is unsettled by the triplets that now murmur deep in the pianist s left hand. The second ballade, marked Andante, is inevitably referred to as a lullaby, and its gentle song is softly blurred by the syncopated accompaniment Brahms marking is espressivo e dolce. But this piece is not in simple ternary form, and suddenly pounding chords push the music in entirely new directions, which include a section encrusted with grace notes. Brahms marked the third ballade Intermezzo, but it is in fact a scherzo, marked Allegro and flashing unevenly along a 6/8 meter. The chordal trio section bears some relation to the scherzo theme itself, and the actual return of that theme is quite impressive: Brahms insists on a dynamic of triple piano, and this mercurial movement almost whispers its way to the close. Brahms structure in the Andante con moto is original. The flowing opening section gives way to a murmuring episode that the composer marks Col intimissimo sentimento, but over the final pages Brahms begins to fuse elements of these two different kinds of music. Variations on a Theme of Paganini, Opus 35, Book I Niccolò Paganini published his 24 Caprices for Solo Violin in 1820, and the theme of the final caprice, full of angular leaps and coiled energy, has haunted composers ever since. Among those who have written extended works based on this sprightly theme are Paganini himself (12 variations), Liszt (Transcendental Etudes), Schumann (Paganini Variations), Rachmaninoff (Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini) and more recently Witold Lutoslawski and Boris Blacher. Brahms composed his Variations on a Theme of Paganini in 1863, shortly after moving from Hamburg to Vienna, and published them as two books of 14 variations each. These variations are extremely compact: each set consisting of the theme, 14 variations, and a blazing finale lasts only about 11 minutes. Brahms himself described them as exercises ( Studies for Pianoforte ) and gave the two sets the slightly academic title of Books, but this is ingenious and excit- ing music, pleasing for the verve of the writing for piano and for the sheer exhilaration of hearing Paganini s theme put through so many transformations. It is also fiendishly difficult for the performer, and Brahms Paganini Variations are regarded as one of the supreme tests for pianists. Clara Schumann, one of the finest pianists of the 19th century, found them so difficult that she called them Hexenvariationen ( Witches Variations ), implying that it would take supernatural powers to solve all the technical problems they present. The Paganini Variations may succeed brilliantly as concert music, but there is at least an element of truth in Brahms description of them as exercises. Each variation presents the pianist with a particular technical problem: some are written in thirds, some in sixths, some in octaves; some present several rhythms simultaneously, while others require difficult trills or staccato or legato passages; still others require awkward hand-crossings. The music itself is quite varied, ranging from gentle passages that Brahms marks molto dolce to an explosive variation marked Feroce, energico. The Paganini Variations can be enjoyed on many levels: for the virtuosity of the playing, the ingenuity of the variations, and the beauty of the music as Paganini s theme is made to sing in ways its creator never dreamed of. Program notes by Eric Bromberger Don t miss Garrick Ohlsson s second program of Brahms! Thursday, March 28 7:30pm 3

4 presents GARRICK OHLSSON Piano Thursday, March 28, :30pm BRAHMS Piano Sonata No. 2 in F-sharp minor, Opus 2 Allegro ma non troppo, ma energico Andante con espressione Scherzo: Allegro Finale: Introduzione; Allegro non troppo e rubato Six Piano Pieces, Opus 118 Intermezzo in A minor Intermezzo in A Major Ballade in G minor Intermezzo in F minor Romance in F Major Intermezzo in E-flat minor INTERMISSION Three Intermezzi, Opus 117 No. 1 in E-flat Major: Andante moderato No. 2 in B-flat minor: Andante non troppo e con molto espressione No. 3 in C-sharp minor: Andante con moto Variations and Fugue in B-flat Major on a Theme by Handel, Opus 24 This presentation is generously supported by the Bernard Osher Foundation Garrick Ohlsson is represented by Opus 3 Artists 470 Park Avenue South, 9th Floor North, New York, NY opus3artists.com Hamburg Steinway Model D, Pro Piano, San Francisco 1

5 ARTIST PROFILES San Francisco Performances presents Garrick Ohlsson for the seventh time. He made his first appearance in son has collaborated with the Cleveland, Emerson and Tokyo string quartets, and in the spring will tour with the Takács Quartet and the Boston Chamber Players in Istanbul, Berlin, Munich, Warsaw, Luxembourg and Prague. Together with violinist Jorja Fleezanis and cellist Michael Grebanier, he is a founding member of the San Francisco-based FOG Trio. Mr. Ohlsson can be heard on the Arabesque, RCA Victor Red Seal, Angel, BMG, Delos, Hänssler, Nonesuch, Telarc, Hyperion and Virgin Classics labels. A native of White Plains, N.Y., Garrick Ohlsson began his piano studies at the age of 8, at the Westchester Conservatory of Music; at 13 he entered the Juilliard School, in New York City. He has been awarded first prizes in the Busoni and Montreal Piano competitions, the Gold Medal at the International Chopin Competition in Warsaw (1970), the Avery Fisher Prize (1994), the University Musical Society Distinguished Artist Award in Ann Arbor, MI (1998), and the Jean Gimbel Lane Prize in Piano Performance from the Northwestern University Bienen School of Music (2014). PROGRAM NOTES Pianist Garrick Ohlsson has established himself worldwide as a musician of magisterial interpretive and technical prowess. Although long regarded as one of the world s leading exponents of the music of Chopin, Mr. Ohlsson commands an enormous repertoire ranging over the entire piano literature and he has come to be noted for his masterly performances of the works of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, as well as the Romantic repertoire. To date he has at his command more than 80 concertos, ranging from Haydn and Mozart to works of the 21st century. This season he launches an ambitious project spread over two seasons exploring the complete solo piano works of Brahms in four different programs. The cycle will be heard in New York, San Francisco and Montreal with individual programs in London, Warsaw and a number of cities across North America. In concerto repertoire ranging from Beethoven to Brahms, Rachmaninoff, Barber and Busoni, he will return to the New York Philharmonic; Cleveland Orchestra; Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, Houston and Seattle Symphonies; and will conclude the season in Indianapolis with all the Rachmaninoff concerti programmed in one weekend. An avid chamber musician, Mr. Ohls- 2 Piano Sonata No. 2 in F-sharp minor, Opus 2 JOHANNES BRAHMS ( ) For the first of his works to be published, Brahms chose the two piano sonatas, both composed while he was still a few months short of his 20th birthday. The Piano Sonata in F-sharp minor is a big-boned and dramatic piece of music, and throughout its span one feels the young composer attempting to constrain his own impetuous and spirited music within the frame of the piano sonata as handed down by Beethoven. One of its most distinctive features is the young composer s effort to unify it around one controlling theme-shape. This shape appears at the beginning of the second movement, marked Andante con espressione. Brahms composed this movement first, and Brahms drew the shape of its principal theme from the song Mir ist Leide by the Minnesinger Kraft von Toggenberg; in the song, this theme sets the words: It makes me sad, that winter has bared the wood and heath. Brahms uses this theme as the basis of a variation movement: he offers three variations, the last of which grows into a huge extension of the melody before fading to the quiet close. Brahms then uses the initial four notes of this theme as the basis for the dramatic opening gesture of the first movement and for the main theme of the third movement, a scherzo: he works outward from the slow movement as he builds the rest of this sonata. A quick tour of that sonata: the opening movement is extremely dramatic, with hammered octaves and much chordal writing. The slow movement follows, leading without pause into the scherzo. The basic theme-shape here is drawn directly from the melodic theme of the slow movement it rushes nimbly along a 6/8 meter. The last movement opens with a long introduction full of swirls, trills, and runs before launching into the main section, a smoothly flowing Allegro non troppo e rubato. At the end Brahms springs another surprise: the movement s florid introduction now returns, and the sonata spirals to its close in a great shower of arabesques and delicate runs. Six Piano Pieces, Opus 118 Brahms composed the six pieces of his Opus 118 in the years and published them under the utterly neutral title Klavierstücke ( piano pieces ) that makes clear that this is a gathering of six different pieces rather than a unified set. Brahms specifies that the Intermezzo in A minor should be molto appassionato, and passionate it certainly is, with the right-hand melody soaring over rolling accompaniment. The structure of this particular piece is unusual: rather than setting it in ternary form, Brahms repeats two separate sections, then allows the music to trail off to a quiet close. The Intermezzo in A Major is a lullaby, and that gentle mood prevails throughout. The thunderous beginning of the Ballade in G minor seems to bring back the world of the young, heaven-storming Johannes, who in fact had written a collection of four Ballades for piano at the age of 21. Now, at age 60, Brahms fuses that powerful earlier manner with a greatly refined technique. The Allegro energico opening moves easily into the gorgeous middle section in B Major; the return of the opening plunges briefly into a wrong key, but matters quickly recover, and the music pounds ahead with all its original strength. Much of the Intermezzo in F minor s atmosphere of disquiet comes from Brahms blurring of meter. He sets this piece in 2/4

6 but then writes so continuously in triplets that the actual meter feels like 6/8; at points, the duple and triple pulses pull against each other. The Romance in F Major is built on a dignified chordal melody that makes its way with a disarming simplicity, but the real surprise comes in the center section, where the music rocks along cheerfully. Brahms marking for the Intermezzo in Eflat minor is largo e mesto ( slow and sad ), and the pianist s hands seem to inhabit different worlds at the beginning: the right hand has the spare melodic line while the left accompanies with quiet flurries of 32nd-note runs. The central section staccato, muttering, and dark suddenly flares to power and incorporates the somber melody from the very beginning. Three Intermezzi, Opus 117 Brahms wrote the Three Intermezzi of his Opus 117 during the summer of 1892, spent at Bad Ischl, in the Alps near Salzburg. It is a cliché to call Brahms late music autumnal, but there is something darker still about these three intermezzi: they are spare, haunting, moving almost bleak. Brahms himself called them lullabies of my pain. The first intermezzo in fact is a lullaby. At the top of the music Brahms wrote two lines of a German translation of the old Scottish ballad Lady Anne Bothwell s Lament: Variations and Fugue in B-flat Major on a Theme by Handel, Opus 24 Brahms was fascinated by variation form throughout his life. From his early piano works through the magnificent passacaglia that concludes his final symphony, he returned continually to what was for him one of the most demanding and rewarding of musical forms. The Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Handel, one of Brahms finest sets of variations, was written in Hamburg in 1861, when the composer was 28. Brahms chose the original theme from the last movement of the Suite No. 1 in Bflat Major from Handel s Suites de pièces de clavecin, published in London in Handel s theme falls symmetrically into two four-bar phrases and naturally presents great opportunities for variation: Handel himself wrote five variations on it. In his version, Brahms first states Handel s theme, creates 25 variations, and then concludes with a tremendous fugue derived from Handel s original theme. The varia- tions themselves are extremely ingenious, and Brahms complicates his task by composing some of them not just as variations but also to conform simultaneously to other music forms: Variation 6 is a baroque canon, No. 19 a siciliana The Handel Variations figured prominently in an unusual context. On February 6, 1864, three years after this music was written, Brahms and Wagner spent an evening together at the villa the latter had rented outside Vienna. Wagner later had derisive things to say about Brahms, but this evening proved cordial, and on that occasion Brahms played his Handel Variations for Wagner. One would expect the proponent of Zukunftmusik the music of the future to have no use for so ancient and constrained a form as the theme-and-variations, but Wagner was generous enough to recognize what the younger composer had accomplished. It shows what can still be done with the old forms by somebody who knows how to handle them, he said. Program notes by Eric Bromberger Balou, my boy, lye still and sleep, it grieves me sore to hear thee weep. The calm outer section gives way to a more agitated middle episode before the return of the opening material and the quiet close. The second intermezzo hides its theme inside a quiet cascade of arpeggios only gradually does the ear make out the long line of melody within this flow. This music is some of the most wistful Brahms ever wrote, and Brahms biographer Karl Geiringer suggests that this music portrays a man as he stands with the bleak, gusty autumn wind eddying round him. The final intermezzo opens with the ominous tread of the quiet main theme in C-sharp minor octaves. It has been compared to a funeral march, and the more animated middle section lightens the mood only briefly before the return of opening theme, now skillfully set as a middle voice within a complex harmony. PIOTR ANDERSZEWSKI FRANCESCO PIEMONTESI Works by BEETHOVEN and BACH Works by BACH, DEBUSSY and RACHMANINOFF Sat Apr 13 7:30pm Tue May 21 7:30pm Piano Piano sfperformances.org 3