Jeremy Denk - 1.18.24

PROUDLY PRESENTS

Jeremy Denk CHRISTENSEN PERFORMANCE HALL on The Madeline Janis Courter Stage

JANUARY 18, 2024 7:30PM

BIG ARTS 2024 Classical Circle Leadership Supporters David Huggin & Ken Nees

JEREMY DENK Winner of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship and the Avery Fisher Prize, Jeremy Denk is one of America’s foremost pianists. He was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Returning frequently to Carnegie Hall, Denk has appeared with the Chicago Symphony, New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony and Cleveland Orchestra and toured with The Academy of St Martin in the Fields and at the Royal Albert Hall as part of the BBC Proms.

“

. . . an unerring sense of the music’s dramatic structure and a great actor’s intuition for timing.

-BOSTON GLOBE

”

PROGRAM NOTES DR. RICHARD E. RODDA

Partita No. 5 in G major, BWV 829 Johann Sebastian Bach Born March 21, 1685 in Eisenach, Germany Died July 28, 1750 in Leipzig Composed around 1730 Much of Bach’s early activity after arriving in Leipzig in 1723 as director of music for the city’s churches was carried out under the shadow of the memory of his predecessor, Johann Kuhnau, a respected musician and scholar who had published masterly translations of Greek and Hebrew, practiced as a lawyer in the city, and won wide fame for his keyboard music.

In 1726, probably the earliest date allowed by the enormous demands of his official position for new sacred vocal music, Bach began a series of keyboard suites that were apparently intended to compete with those of Kuhnau. In addition to helping establish his reputation in Leipzig, these pieces would also provide useful teaching material for the private students he was beginning to draw from among the University’s scholars, who were less hampered by bureaucratic exigencies than their superiors in recognizing Bach’s genius. (Several of his secular cantatas were written for commissions from the University students.) The Partita No. 1 in B-flat major (BWV 825) issued in 1726 was the first of his compositions to be published, with the exception of two cantatas issued during his short tenure in Mühlhausen many years before (1707-1708). Bach funded the venture himself, and he even engraved the plates (to save money) with the help of his teenage son Carl Philip Emanuel, who was then learning that exacting craft. (Copies could be had directly from the composer, cash in advance.)

Bach published an additional Partita every year or so until 1731, when he gathered together the six works and issued them collectively in a volume entitled Clavier-Übung (“Keyboard Practice”), a term he borrowed from the name of Kuhnau’s keyboard suites published in 1689 and 1692.

The Partitas of what became Part I of the Clavier-Übung were well received; Johann Nikolaus Forkel, in the first full biography of Bach (1802), reported that “the works made in their time a great noise in the musical world.

Such excellent compositions for harpsichord had not been seen or heard before, so brilliant, agreeable, expressive and original are they. Anyone who could play them well could make his fortune in the world thereby, and even in our times, a young artist could gain acknowledgment by doing so.” Bach continued his series of Clavier-Übung with three further volumes of vastly different nature: Part II (1735) contains the Italian Concerto, the ultimate keyboard realization of that quintessential Baroque orchestral form, and an Overture (Suite) in the French Manner; Part III (1739), for organ, the Catechism Chorale Preludes, several short canonic pieces and the “St. Anne” Prelude and Fugue; and Part IV (1742), the incomparable Goldberg Variations.

The term “partita” was originally applied to pieces in variations form in Italy during the 16th century, and the word survived in that context into Bach’s time. The keyboard Partitas of the Clavier-Übung, however, are not variations but suites of dances, a form that in France occasionally bore the title of Partie, meaning either a movement in a larger work or a musical piece for entertainment. The French term was taken over into German practice in the late 17th century as Parthie to indicate an instrumental suite, and Bach’s “Partita” seems to have been a corruption of that usage. The Partita No. 5 begins with a scintillating Praeambulum of whirling scales and arpeggios. A gracious Allemande and a brilliant Courante precede the sweet duet strains of the Sarabande. The delicate Tempo di Minuetto is paired with a Passepied, a quick variant of the minuet that was especially popular in French theatrical music. The closing Gigue is a full-fledged fugue in two-part dance form.

Three Romances, Op. 21 Clara Schumann Born September 13, 1819 in Leipzig Died May 20, 1896 in Frankfurt Composed in 1853 and 1855 Goethe called her “a noble phenomenon”; Franz Grillparzer, Austria’s greatest poet and a sensitive musician, was inspired to write a poem titled When She Played Beethoven’s F minor Sonata; the prestigious journal Neue Zeitschrift für Musik ranked her as the third greatest pianist of the day, behind only Franz Liszt and Sigismond Thalberg. The object of these encomia was a teenage girl from Leipzig, a dazzling Wunderkind who possessed not only flawless keyboard technique but also extraordinary

artistic sensitivity and unswerving dedication to the most elevated principles of the musical art — Clara Wieck. Clara’s father, Friedrich, a noted teacher of piano and voice, operator of a music-lending library and a piano store, and a former preacher, vowed even before the girl was born that he would develop her into a consummate artist, and he showed considerable restraint by not beginning her lessons until she was five. His instruction fell upon a fertile talent — Clara made her public debut at the Leipzig Gewandhaus on October 20, 1828 (she was nine-and-quarter years old), gave her first complete recital two years later, and made her debut international tour the following season. By 1835, she was acclaimed throughout Europe as a child prodigy.

In 1829, the nineteen-year-old Robert Schumann met Friedrich Wieck, and he was accepted by the pedagogue as a student; the following year, Robert moved into the Wieck household. He was at first amused by his teacher’s gifted daughter, but over the course of the following years, the couple’s relationship developed into true love (“Clara grows more charming, inwardly, outwardly, every day, every hour,” Robert wrote in 1835) and became one of the great romances of the 19th century. That story — Papa Wieck’s nearly irrational resistance to the union, the lovers’ court battle to receive legal permission to marry, their passionate devotion to each other during their sixteen years of wedded life, Robert’s mental collapse and untimely death in 1856 — is well-known and carefully chronicled in a half-dozen books. Clara put her domestic duties before her professional ambitions during those years (she gave birth to eight children between 1841 and 1854), concertizing only occasionally and composing just a piano trio and a handful of songs and solo piano pieces, including her Variations on a Theme of Robert Schumann in 1853. Following her husband’s death in 1856, she resumed touring and teaching, but never composed again.

The first of the Op. 21 Romances (A minor) is bittersweet, a sentiment somewhat moderated by a more animated central episode. Clara composed the piece after visiting her husband at the Endenich asylum on April 2, 1855 and then recorded in her diary, “It is really sad in mood, just as I was when writing it.” The Allegretto (F major), brief, lighthearted and colorfully harmonized, provides an intermezzo between the more serious movements surrounding it. The grace, subtlety and liquescent figurations of the closing Agitato (G minor) recall the waltzes of Frédéric Chopin, whose music Clara performed from age fourteen, when she began including his solo works in almost all of her recitals and first played his Concerto No. 1 in E minor, until her last appearance with orchestra, in his Concerto No. 2 in F minor when she was 71.

Ballade No. 3 in A-flat major, Op. 47 Frédéric Chopin Born February 22, 1810 in Zelazowa-Wola, Poland Died October 17, 1849 in Paris Composed 1831, 1838, 1840-1841 and 1842 The Ballade No. 3 in A-flat major, one of Chopin’s best-loved creations, was composed during the quiet and happy period he spent with George Sand in Paris in 1840-1841. Upon its publication in 1841, it was dedicated to Mlle. de Noailles, whom Antoine-François Marmontel, in listing Chopin’s pupils, referred to as one of the composer’s “disciples afféctionnées.” The work was said to have been derived from Mickiewicz’s poem Ondine, which Laurent Cellier paraphrased: “On the shores of a lake, a young man pledges fidelity to a young girl. Doubting the faithfulness of men, despite the protestations of her lover, she disappears and returns in the bewitching form of a water sprite. As soon as she tempts the young man, he succumbs to her charms. To expiate his sin, he is dragged to the bottom of the water and condemned to a breathless pursuit of the sprite, whom he can never catch.” American critic Irving Kolodin wrote of the A-flat major Ballade that “a certain underlying strength may be overlooked in the seductive appeal of its soft-contoured surface. Feminine it may be said to be also, but only if the female in question is possessed (as more than a few have been known to be) of a whim of iron.”

Heartbreaker Missy Mazzoli Born October 27, 1980 in Abington, Pennsylvania Composed in 2013 Premiered on April 15, 2013 at the American Pianists Association Competition in Indianapolis by Sarah Daneshpour Missy Mazzoli was born in 1980 in the Philadelphia suburb of Abington and studied at Boston University, Yale University School of Music and Royal Conservatory of the Hague. Mazzoli taught composition at Yale in 2006 before serving for the next three years as Executive Director of the MATA Festival in New York, an organization dedicated to promoting the work of

young composers. She is currently on faculty as Composer-in-Residence with the Bard College Conservatory of Music and previously taught at the Mannes College of Music. At New York’s Kaufman Music Center in 2016, Mazzoli and composer Ellen Reid Mazzoli established the Luna Composition Lab, a mentorship program and support network for female-identifying, non-binary and gender-nonconforming composers ages 13-19. Mazzoli was a Composer-Educator Partner with the Albany Symphony in 2011-2012, Mead Composer-in-Residence at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra from 2018 to 2021, and in 2018 was commissioned to write a new work for the Metropolitan Opera, the first woman with that distinction. Missy Mazzolli’s awards include a Grammy nomination for Best New Classical Composition, citation as 2022 “Composer of the Year” by the influential trade journal Musical America, Music Critics Association of North America Award for Best New Opera of 2016 for Breaking the Waves, and many other honors and grants, including both the Godard Lieberson Fellowship and the 2023 Marc Blitzstein Award for Musical Theater and Opera from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Mazzoli wrote of Heartbreaker, commissioned for the 2013 American Pianists Association Competition in Indianapolis, “As a composer who started her musical life as a pianist, it was unexpectedly difficult to write a short piece for the American Pianists Association’s Competition. I wanted to write something virtuosic but something that stood out from traditionally showy ‘competitive’ pieces. My work, Heartbreaker, is virtuosic in subtle, unusual ways. It starts out deceptively simple, and quickly spirals into something that is just within the limits of the pianist’s control. It requires a virtuosity that is not about playing faster than everyone else, or even about playing more accurately than everyone else, but more about striking a balance between rhythmic precision and the free-wheeling abandon the piece requires.”

Sonata in A major, D. 959 Franz Schubert (1797-1828) Composed in 1828 In the hall of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna on March 26, 1828, immediately after completing his magnificent C major Symphony (justifiably dubbed “The Great” by later generations), Franz Schubert gave the only public concert entirely of his works held during his lifetime. The event, prompted and sponsored by his circle of devoted friends, was a

significant artistic and financial success, and he used the proceeds to celebrate the occasion at a local tavern, pay off some old debts, acquire a new piano, and buy tickets for Nicolò Paganini’s sensational debut in Vienna three days later. Despite the renewed enthusiasm that concert inspired in him for his creative work, and encouraging signs that his music was beginning to receive recognition outside of Vienna, Schubert was much troubled during the following months by his health. His constitution, never robust, had been undermined by syphilis, and by the summer of 1828, he was suffering from headaches, exhaustion and frequent digestive distress.

Despite his discomforts, he continued to compose, completing the Mass in E-flat, a setting in Hebrew of Psalm 92 for the City Synagogue of Vienna, and the Schwanengesang, doing extensive work on what proved to be his last three piano sonatas (D. 958-960), and beginning his C major String Quintet.

At the end of August, Schubert felt unwell, complaining of dizziness and loss of appetite, and his physician advised that he move for a time to a new house outside the city recently acquired by the composer’s brother Ferdinand. Though Ferdinand’s dwelling was damp and uncomfortable and hardly conducive to his recovery, Franz felt better during the following days, and he was able to participate in an active social life and attend the premiere of a comedy by his friend Eduard von Bauernfeld on September 5th. Schubert also continued to compose incessantly, completing the three piano sonatas on August 26th and performing them at the house of Dr. Ignaz Menz the following day. The C major Quintet was finished at that same time; it and the sonatas were the last instrumental works he completed. On October 31, 1828, Schubert fell seriously ill, his syphilitic condition perhaps exacerbated by the typhus then epidemic in Vienna, and he died on November 19, 1828; he was 31.

The A major Sonata (D. 959) begins with a heroic gesture immediately balanced by airy falling arpeggios — the opposed states of vigor and languor are juxtaposed throughout much of the movement. The Andantino is the most dramatic movement in the last three sonatas. Its outer sections exude barren bleakness, an uncommon emotion in Schubert’s music but one he had distilled perfectly the year before in his stunningly desolate setting of Wilhelm Müller’s Der Leiermann (“The Hurdy-Gurdy Man”), the closing song of the cycle Die Winterreise (“The Winter’s Journey”); the movement’s central portion rises to peaks of true passion. The Sonata is rounded out by a gentle Scherzo and a supple Rondo.

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