Program - Alpin Hong (January 28, 2006)
Contents
About the Artist
During a whirlwind 2004-05 season encompassing ninety-five concerts and seventy outreach events across the United States, pianist Alpin Hong has earned the reputation as a modern day Pied Piper. Opening the ears, eyes and imaginations of over seventy thousand Americans, he introduced audiences young and old to the power of Stravinsky, the delicacy of Debussy, the clarity of Bach and the exuberance of Gershwin. Indeed, the Santa Barbara News Press described Mr. Hong's performance as "...a tour de force. Hong evoked a kind of Beatlemania when he came on stage. What a showman! What a musician!" In recognition of the pianist's immense gifts for communicating his passion for music to audiences of all ages, The McGraw-Hill Companies honored him in September 2005 with the $10,000 Robert Sherman Award for Music Education and Community Outreach.
In July 2005, Gramophone magazine declared Mr. Hong's solo CD (works of Scarlatti, Brahms, Debussy and Stravinsky on MSR Classics) "a debut that enhances this young pianist's reputation," in particular praising his "strong finger-work and keen ear for voice-leading." The New York Times lauded his "crystalline energy…clear and persuasive ideas…and remarkable breadth of coloration" in a review of his standing-room only New York recital debut at Carnegie Hall's Weill Recital Hall, the result of his winning First Prize in the 2001 Concert Artists Guild International Competition.
Highlights of Mr. Hong's 2005–06 season include his debut at the Gilmore International Keyboard Festival in Michigan performing Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 3 with the Battle Creek Symphony under the baton of music director Anne Harrigan, and residencies (comprised of educational outreach events and recitals) presented by the University of Iowa's Hancher Auditorium, the Gina Bachauer Foundation in Salt Lake City, and by the La Jolla Music Society as part of its well-known Discovery Series, as well as his Chicago recital debut on the Dame Myra Hess Series broadcast live on WFMT-FM.
Recent performance highlights include the 50th anniversary celebration of Merkin Concert Hall, recitals at Los Angeles' Wilshire Ebell Theatre and Royce Hall at UCLA, Purdue University Convocations in Lafayette, Indiana, the Frick Arts Centre in Pittsburgh, the Kansas City Friends of Chamber Music, Market Square Concerts in Pennsylvania and concertos with Orchestra X in Houston, the Greeley Philharmonic and the Indian River Symphony. International engagements include recitals at the Hoam Arts Center in Seoul, Korea, Panama's Asociacion Nacional de Conciertos and a concerto engagement with the Korean Broadcast Symphony (KBS).
Alpin Hong is a native of Michigan and made his orchestral debut with the Kalamazoo Symphony at the age of ten. He moved to Los Angeles soon after and garnered competition victories at a young age with wins at the 1989 Stravinsky Piano Competition, the 1993 SYMF Competition and the 1994 Los Angeles Spotlight Awards Competition. He completed his master's degree as a student of Jerome Lowenthal at The Juilliard School.
A resident of New York City, Mr. Hong further demonstrates his commitment to music education in fall 2005 as curator of "Kitchen Sink Music After School," an artist-in-the-schools program in Harlem. His non-musical interests include martial arts, skateboarding and snowboarding.
Tonight's Program
Tonight's program is a potpourri of works that range from the most delicate and sublime to the most dramatically powerful and sonorous expressions that the modern concert grand piano is capable of producing at the hands of a piano virtuoso.
Rondo Capriccioso, Op. 14, Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
As a child prodigy, Mendelssohn quickly gave rise to his early reputation as a "new Mozart." He had wide literary knowledge, wrote brilliantly and even could paint very well. He was a superb pianist and, like Mozart, an accomplished violist. He was an exceptional organist, and an inspiring conductor with an amazing musical memory. His genius as a composer led Hans von Bülow (1830-94) to describe him as the most complete master of form after Mozart.
The Rondo Capriccioso in E Major, Op. 14 is one of Mendelssohn's most well-known and frequently performed solo piano works despite its extreme difficulty. Different listings provide conflicting information as to the dates of its origin, older ones giving it as 1824 when the composer was only 15. However, it apparently was derived from an E-minor étude noted on Mendelssohn's first autograph of the piece as January 4, 1828. In 1830 the composer reworked the étude into the work we now know as the Rondo Capriccioso in E Major. It was published in 1830 as Op. 14. The work opens with the brief lyrical Andante in E Major that Mendelssohn had added in his revision of the original étude. This glides seamlessly into the major rondo part (Presto leggiero) that scurries breathlessly through the section's thematic material. It breaks into irregular rhythmic patterns (couplets) that give one moments to be able to breathe before the music dashes off again. No wonder that the Rondo Capriccioso, a true bravura piece, full of sparkling brilliance, challenges student and virtuoso alike.
Suite bergamasque, Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
While a student at the Paris Conservatory in the 1870s, Debussy gained a reputation as an erratic pianist and being resistant to current matters of harmony and music theory. He finally won the Grand Prix de Rome in 1874 with his cantata L'Enfant Prodigue. This allowed him to travel and study in Europe and Russia before settling down in Paris to devote his career to composition.
Debussy reacted against the idolizing of Wagner's music by critics. While he recognized his greatness, he expressed the view that Wagner's approach represented a dead end for other composers. Thus he turned to the development of a distinctive French style of music. By using the range inherent in the whole-tone scale, as in Eastern music, he explored unusual harmonic relationships and dissonance to express the nuances of moods and evoke different sensations. The result was a number of sensuous and evocative orchestral works and piano pieces. The latter allow the performer to exploit the widest range of color that can be produced in the piano.
The Suite bergamasque consists of four parts and was published in 1905. A fascinating work, it is one of Debussy's famous piano suites. The Prélude, (Moderato [tempo rubato]) offers a display dynamic contrasts between spectacular opening and closing sections. The second part, titled Menuet (Andantino), intended to portray the typical Baroque form but with a sort of high stepping quality with colorfully subtle harmonies and playfulness in its pianissimo moments. The "trio" section is characterized by dramatic-sounding passages before the return to the more delicate menuetto. Next follows the Clair de Lune, the most famous part of the suite that Debussy composed in 1890. It is marked Andante très expressif and played very softly for the most part. However, the contrast given by the changes in intensity and the distances between them add to the beauty and expressiveness of the work, befitting its marking. The final Passepied (Allegretto ma non troppo) is bouncy, bold and rather frolicsome but ends quietly.
Piano Sonata No. 7 in B-flat Major, Op. 83, Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953)
Prokofiev, who studied with Rimsky-Korsakov at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, is probably best known for his ballet Romeo and Juliet and his touching Peter and the Wolf that serves as a young person's guide to the orchestra. As a youthful composer he was regarded as an enfant terrible because of the shock to audiences by his extremely dissonant early works, but this changed as his more mature works became colorful, beautifully crafted, and more in the romantic vein although still laced with wry humor and pungent drama. He had left Russia in 1918 with the onset of the Bolshevik Revolution to follow a career as a concert pianist/composer. By the time he returned to his homeland in 1935 he had already reconciled the avant-garde modernist and the lyrical traditionalist sides of his musical personality. Back in Russia he had problems with the Stalinistic-Soviet regime's attempts to control artistic endeavors but was more or less able to accommodate to these threats.
Prokofiev's piano sonatas date from the first group he composed at the end of the first decade of the 20th century up to his last ones (No. 9 and a fragment of a 10th) composed shortly before his death in 1953. They are considered crucial to the modern piano repertory. During the three-year period (1939-42) during which Prokofiev worked sporadically on his seventh piano sonata, he was faced with interpersonal problems and stresses caused by the onset of war. He was evacuated from Moscow by Soviet governmental decree to a safer region of the country along with other artists and musicians. Prokofiev took several compositions with him, including the sketches for the seventh and eighth piano sonatas, the Violin Sonata (Op. 80), two acts of the ballet Cinderella, and the almost completed libretto of War and Peace.
The Piano Sonata No. 7 in B-flat Major, Op. 83 was completed in the spring of 1942 after he finished the piano score for War and Peace. The seventh sonata is a powerful work showing a mixture of the youthful exhibitionism favored by the composer and his more serious reflection upon the nature of current events. The first movement (Allegro inquieto) more or less follows the sonata form without being constrained by traditional designs. It opens with a dramatic and sonorous march-like theme that may remind one of the music from the composer's Love for Three Oranges. This changes to a subdued, peaceful, pastoral-like passage and then again reverts back to the sonorous drama in a restatement of the opening themes before it subsides to the peaceful mode. The coda is an unexpected merry prankish statement that fades away. The second movement (Andante caloroso) starts with measured, easy-going calm steps in a theme that seems to have been borrowed from that of Friar Lawrence in the Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet. These slowly but steadily build up to such an intense climax that the music sounds anguished before it starts to calm down and slowly returns to the original pace as it peters out. The finale (Precipitato) is an excitingly paced and jazz-influenced piece with insistent "blues" between the rapid percussive beats, lending the whole a throbbing rhythm.
Danzas Argentinas, Op. 2, Alberto Ginastera (1916-1983)
The Argentinian composer Alberto Ginastera began his formal music training at the age of seven. At 12 he was enrolled in the Williams Conservatory in Buenos Aires. After graduating with a gold medal in 1935, he studied at the National Conservatory of Music from 1936-38 where as a student (1937) he had the opportunity to have the first performance of an orchestral suite from his ballet Panambi at the Teatro Colón. The brilliant composition received accolades hinting that here was a composer of significance. He received his Professor's Diploma a year later and embarked on a career as a composer.
Ginastera gained the reputation as one of the foremost composers of the Argentinian nationalist movement. He was granted a Guggenheim fellowship in 1942, but World War II forced him to postpone the visit to the U.S. until December 1945. Before he left he had already run afoul of the Peronist regime because of his support of civil liberties; but, he was permitted to leave. He lived in New York during his stay in the U.S. and had the opportunity to visit prominent music institutions, to hear his music performed and to renew acquaintance with Aaron Copland.
After his return to Argentina, Ginastera was active in developing music and arts programs. He composed works that combined elements of abstract folk music with traditional and contemporary techniques, and he held academic appointments and was invited abroad. Although he continued to face professional difficulties with the Perón government until 1956 when Perón was defeated, his creative productivity remained high. His music was essentially in the nationalistic idiom of Argentina until about 1958 when he started to incorporate advanced techniques such as serialism into his works.
Danzas Argentinas, Op. 2, completed in 1937, was Ginastera's first piano work. While influenced by the Argentine musical nationalism of the 1880s generation of composers like Alberto Williams and Julián Aquirre, the pieces show Ginastera's own personal style in mixing polytonality and dissonance with folk elements that enliven the rhythm of the dances. The very brief Dance No. 1, Danza del viejo boyero (Dance of the old cowherd) has repeated chord passages that are punctuated with a series of sharp blows. Dance No. 2, Danza de la moza donosa (Dance of the graceful maiden), in contrast is a calm and graceful but sinuous tango. The final Danza del gaucho matrero (Dance of the artful herdsman) opens with stealth-like motion and in the obsessive rhythmic pattern of the first dance then builds up to a brilliant climax.
Bénédiction de Dieu dans la Solitude, Franz Liszt (1811-1886)
Liszt, the greatest pianist of his time and a remarkable composer, is a legendary figure whose life has been written up in numerous scholarly biographical accounts and papers. He also has been portrayed on film and in the theater, and no wonder! The very nature of his complex and contradictory personality, his artistic temperament, creativity, his notorious philandering and liaisons with prominent married women in themselves would in the least serve as fuel for fictional representations. His strong catholic religious convictions seemed to be in conflict with his history of profligate behavior, raising some doubts about their sincerity. Be that is it may, from 1861 to 1869 he resided mainly in Rome, took minor orders of the Church (in 1865) and focused upon the writing of religious works. Much of the rest of his life was devoted to the composition of religious music while still teaching and performing as a concert pianist.
Earlier, in 1848, Liszt abandoned his concert career to devote more time to composing. He held the post as court conductor to the Duke of Weimar. It was in Weimar that Liszt assembled a collection of ten religiously inspired pieces he titled Harmonies poètiques et religieuses. The works varied greatly in scope and were mostly composed between 1845 and 1851. One of them, written in 1834, already had that same title, named after a collection of poems by Alphonse de Lamartine (1790-1869). For a number of years Liszt had been thinking about compiling a collection of works inspired by Lamartine under the title, Harmonies poètiques et religieuses. Thus he revised this earlier piece as Pensé des morts, which then served as the fourth piece in the later collection which was published in 1853.
The Bénédiction de Dieu dans la Solitude , the third piece in the collection Harmonies poètiques et religieuses, is considered one of Liszt's most important masterpieces, prefaced by lines from Lamartine: "Whence comes, O God, this peace which overwhelms me? / Whence comes its faith with which my heart overflows?" The work, in three parts, unfolds with rather mystical yet sentimental and profound passages full of vivid detail and color. It demands virtuosity in the shaping of its phrases and the control of its difficult textures. The added coda moves from a simple sublime phrase to a powerful climax. The act of listening to the Bénédiction de Dieu dans la Solitude has been described as transporting one into a mystical experience where time is suspended.
Suite from Firebird, Igor Stravinsky (arr. G. Agosti) (1881-1971)
Despite his father's wish for him to study law, Igor Stravinsky sought to develop a career as a composer. He had taken private lessons in harmony, and he intended to enter the Russian Conservatory. When Stravinsky brought his works before Rimsky-Korsakov, head of the Conservatory, the old composer, sensing the talent in the young man, proposed that he, himself, give him private lessons. Stravinsky was delighted by the offer and readily accepted. Rimsky-Korsakov had arranged for his students to perform their works, and Stravinsky chose his orchestral piece Fireworks (1908). His music sparked the interest of Sergei Diaghilev who saw that Stravinsky would be the ideal composer of works for his Russian Ballet. Despite his misgivings about writing descriptive music at the time, the composer could not turn down the opportunity provided him by Diaghilev to write the score for the ballet, The Firebird, for the 1910 Paris production by the Ballet Russe.
The libretto, already written by M. Fokine, is based on the Russian national fairy story about the Firebird (Zhar-Ptitsa). According to the legend the Firebird gives the heroic Ivan Tsarevich a magic flaming feather as a reward for freeing it from the evil magician, King Kashchei. In the course of his wandering in Kashchei's magic garden after he freed the Firebird, Ivan meets 13 maiden princesses held prisoner by the magician and falls in love with one of them. He is captured when he attempts to free them and is about to be put to death when he remembers the magic feather. With it he summons the Firebird who gives him the secret of Kashchei's immortality which enables him to overcome the enchantments, destroy the magician and his cohorts, free the captives, and marry the princess.
Stravinsky spent six months in St. Petersburg working on The Firebird. The ballet had its sensationally successful premiere on June 25, 1910, at the Paris Opera House conducted by Gabriel Pierné. However, the rather excessive expressiveness and flamboyant features of his score for The Firebird bothered Stravinsky from the start. In 1911 he immediately set about to make adjustments by writing a shorter concert suite, which extended the popularity of The Firebird throughout Europe. A second concert suite for a smaller orchestra was arranged by the composer in 1919. A third Firebird Suite was written in 1945 for the same size orchestra, but with revised instrumentation.
The Suite from Firebird on today's program is a piano arrangement of three dance sequences from Stravinsky's 1911 orchestral suite made in 1928 by Guido Agosti, a pupil of Ferrucio Busoni. The first is the Infernal Dance of King Katstchei from part III of the orchestral suite. Here the evil magician is depicted by the relentlessly furious sounds of the music. This followed by the Lullaby, in the form of a languorous Russian Romanza, adapted from part IV of the orchestral suite. The Finale, arranged from part V of the orchestral suite, contains the festive and joyous music that accompanies the final wedding procession.
About the Program Notes
Program notes by professor emeritus Arthur Canter, a retired clinical psychologist on the faculty of the UI Department of Psychiatry. An amateur music historian, he has been a long-time contributor of program notes for Hancher concerts and participant in the musical life of Iowa City.
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