9 minute read
Piano Recital with Michelle Cann · February 28, 2022
20th-century piano masters Florence Price and Margaret Bonds (two Black women bonded as mentor and protégé who defied limitations and prejudice) headline this turbulent piano program, joined by Romantic legends Brahms and Chopin. A celebrated Price specialist, pianist Michelle Cann explores four masters of their craft, each reflecting American, German, and Polish cultural trademarks with unmatched compositions for piano. Michelle Cann, Piano
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Ballade No. 3 in A-flat major, Op. 47
Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849)
After the collapse of the Polish revolution against Russia in 1830, Frédéric Chopin went into exile to France, never to return. He settled in Paris where his innovative piano compositions significantly expanded the technical, formal, harmonic and emotive vocabulary of the instrument. He quickly achieved brilliant success as a composer teacher and pianist, becoming a favorite at the salons of the aristocracy; but he disliked and later avoided performing in public, having neither the emotional nor physical stamina for it.
Among Chopin’s innovations were two sub-genres for the solo piano repertory: the mazurka (which he had “invented” while still a teenager) and the ballade. His four Ballades are among the most important of his works. Composed mostly in Paris between 1831 and 1843, they were not written as a set, nor do they follow any common formal structure.
There is some disagreement about exactly what Chopin’s term “Ballade” relates to. Generally described as “narrative” in character, the ballades may be based on the German literary Ballade, or folk ballad; some scholars believe that they may have been inspired by the ballad poetry of the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz. Certainly, there is no overt literary reference in any of the four.
Chopin composed the A-flat major Ballade during 1840-41 while he was in the midst of his long-term romance with the novelist George Sand (pseudonym for Amantine Aurore Lucile Dupin). One of the few pieces that the composer ever played in public, it consists of three distinct sections each one building in emotional intensity. The first section with its own themes and tightly structured ABA form is separated from the rest of the piece and its motives are never repeated. The remainder of the work is designed around two themes, the first characterized by an almost limping rhythm, the second by florid arpeggios sweeping over the keyboard. In the middle section, these two themes are introduced and, in the final one, elaborately developed to an intense climax that concludes the work.
Piano Sonata in E minor
Florence Price (1887-1953)
Florence Price joined the already small field of African-American classical composers to become the first AfricanAmerican woman composer to have a work played by a major orchestra. Born into a middle-class family in Little Rock, Arkansas, she received support from her dentist father in addition to early training in piano from her mother. Given the impossibility of getting a proper musical education in Little Rock, she traveled to Boston, where she earned degrees in organ performance and piano pedagogy.
Rather than remain in a more comfortable northern environment, Price returned to Little Rock and established a teaching career between 1907 and 1927 in two African-American colleges. She eventually became head of the music department at Clark College in Atlanta. After her marriage, she moved with her husband to Chicago, where she continued her education in composition. In 1932, she achieved national recognition when she won first prize in the Wanamaker competition for her Symphony No. 1, which was premiered the following year by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Like so many Black composers of this period, Price supplemented her income by playing organ gigs for silent movies and writing choral or vocal arrangements for churches. And like so many women composers, she produced a significant body of art songs. Contralto Marian Anderson featured her arrangement of the spiritual “My soul’s been anchored in de Lord” and Price’s own Songs to Florence Price Sonata in E minor
Johannes Brahms Ballade in D major, Op. 10, No. 2
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Florence Price Fantasie Nègre No. 1 in E minor
Margaret Bonds Troubled Water
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David & Pamela Lane
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Michelle Cann appears by arrangement with the Curtis Institute of Music.
Most of her manuscripts were thought to have been lost, but in 2009 a trove of them were discovered in an abandoned house in St. Anne, Illinois. It turned out that the house had been the Price’s summer home. Unfortunately, much of her music remains unpublished; her scores and papers reside at the University of Arkansas.
Price composed the three-movement Sonata in 1932; it won her first prize in the 1932 Rodman Wanamaker Contest (“Rodman Wanamaker Contest in Musical Composition for Composers of the Negro Race”), the same year she also won the contest for her Symphony No. 1. As in many of her works, she – successfully – merged the Black musical tradition of spirituals and plantation dances with the Eurocentric Romantic forms.
Ballade No. 2, Op. 10/2
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
One of the hallmarks of the music of the Romantic era was the adaptation of literary “programs” or associations with purely instrumental music. Although hardly a new idea, the Romantics took the theory and practice in new directions. On the one hand, composers such as Hector Berlioz could hardly conceive of music without an associated story; on the other, Frédéric Chopin adopted the poetic title “ballade” for four of his greatest piano works without specifying any other literary association that we know of.
Like Chopin, Johannes Brahms took the name but changed the content. His four Ballades Op. 10, composed in 1854, evoke the mood – but not the strophic structure – of the folk ballad. Only No. 1, in D minor, has a reference to a text, the Scottish ballad “Edward”.
The second, in D major, is reminiscent of a Schubert Lied. It opens with a serene Andante, like a lullaby, followed by a percussive middle section with some odd harmonic writing and finally a return to a varied version of the opening.
From Six Klavierstücke, Op. 118, No. 2 in A major, Intermezzo
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Late in life Brahms composed a number of short piano pieces, 20 of which he published. But friends and colleagues attest that he destroyed others in his characteristic perfectionist manner. He gave the works, such vague titles as “Intermezzo,” “Fantasie,” “Ballade,” “Romance” or “Rhapsody,” which did not demand adherence to any particular formal design – often not deciding on the title until the last minute before publication. He compiled and published them in four sets, Op. 116 through 119.
The six Klavierstücke, Op. 118 were published in 1893, together with the four of Op. 119. Brahms’s friend and biographer, Max Kalbeck suspected that some of their material had originated years earlier. But Brahms, of course, had destroyed any notes and documents that would have helped us trace the development of his musical ideas. Only the final autograph survived his fireplace. The first public performance of the two sets was given in London in January 1894 by the beautiful and talented Ilona Eibenschütz, a student of Clara Schumann, who may have been the inspiration for some of the works.
The dominant character of the pieces in Op. 118 is reflective and introspective, with little of the bravura or assertiveness of Brahms’s earlier piano music. No. 2 is a dreamy lullaby, with subtle shifts in mood and expression achieved via tempo rubato and the underlying harmonies of the basic motive. Its middle section contains new thematic material but retains the original mood and continues to develop fragments of the main theme.
Fantasie Nègre No. 1 in E minor
Florence Price (1887-1953)
Price composed the Fantasie nègre in 1929, dedicating it to her student and compatriot Margaret Bonds. It is based on the old Spiritual “Sinner, Please Don’t Let This Harvest Pass.” In 2013, upon the 100th anniversary of Margaret Bonds’s birth, UNC-Chapel Hill professor Louise Toppin organized a two-day symposium honoring this African-American composer, arranger and pianist. The occasion elicited an NPR interview with Toppin, during which she reintroduced to the general public the first African-American musician to play as a soloist with the Chicago Symphony, a friend and collaborator of poet Langston Hughes, and arranger and composer of songs for Leontyne Price. Yet most of Bonds’s compositions have remained unpublished.
Born in Chicago to a middle-class family, Bonds devoted her life to performing and teaching. She graduated from Northwestern University with bachelors and masters degrees. She was a student and friend of Florence Price, and even lived with her for a while. She passed the early part of her career during the Depression and World War II, when there were few opportunities for black classical composers, much less black women composers. Her works consist primarily of art songs, choral and piano compositions.
Stylistically, she belongs to a group of composers who incorporated elements of spirituals, jazz, blues and European classical idioms. A set of free variations on the spiritual “Wade in the River” over a jazzy ostinato in the left hand, “Troubled Waters” exemplifies the mélange, including complex tonal harmony and cross rhythms.
“Wade in the River” was one of the songs associated with the Underground Railroad.
Program Notes by Joseph & Elizabeth Kahn www.wordprosmusic.com
Michelle Cann, Piano
A compelling, sparkling virtuoso” (Boston Music Intelligencer), pianist Michelle Cann made her orchestral debut at age fourteen and has since performed as a soloist with numerous orchestras including The Philadelphia Orchestra, The Cleveland Orchestra, the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, and the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra.
A champion of the music of Florence Price, Ms. Cann performed the New York City premiere of the composer’s Piano Concerto in One Movement with The Dream Unfinished Orchestra in July 2016 and the Philadelphia premiere with The Philadelphia Orchestra in February 2021, which the Philadelphia Inquirer called “exquisite.”
Highlights of her 2021–22 season include debut performances with the Atlanta, Detroit, and St. Louis symphony orchestras, as well as her Canadian concert debut with the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa. She also receives the 2022 Sphinx Medal of Excellence, the highest honor bestowed by the Sphinx Organization, and the 2022 Andrew Wolf Chamber Music Award. Embracing a dual role as both performer and pedagogue, her season includes teaching residencies at the Gilmore International Keyboard Festival and the National Conference of the Music Teachers National Association.
Ms. Cann regularly appears in solo and chamber recitals throughout the U.S., China, and South Korea. Notable venues include the National Centre for the Performing Arts (Beijing), the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (Washington, D.C.), Walt Disney Concert Hall (Los Angeles), and the Barbican (London). She has also appeared as cohost and collaborative pianist with NPR’s From The Top.
An award winner at top international competitions, in 2019 she served as the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra’s MAC Music Innovator in recognition of her role as an African-American classical musician who embodies artistry, innovation, and a commitment to education and community engagement.
Ms. Cann studied at the Cleveland Institute of Music and the Curtis Institute of Music, where she holds the inaugural Eleanor Sokoloff Chair in Piano Studies.
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