N INET Y-F I FTH SEASON
Sunday, January 25, 2026, at 3:00
Piano Series KIRILL GERSTEIN LISZT Tre sonetti del Petrarca from Années de pèlerinage,
Deuxième année: Italie
Benedetto sia ’l giorno Pace non trovo, e non ho da far guerra I’ vidi in terra angelici costumi LISZT Après une lecture du Dante (Fantasia quasi sonata)
from Années de pèlerinage, Deuxième année: Italie
INTERMISSION
BRAHMS
Scherzo in E-flat Minor, Op. 4
BRAHMS
Sonata No. 3 in F Minor, Op. 5
Allegro maestoso Andante espressivo Scherzo: Allegro energico Intermezzo (Rückblick): Andante molto Finale: Allegro moderato ma rubato
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association acknowledges support from the Illinois Arts Council.
COMMENTS by Richard E. Rodda FRANZ LISZT Born October 22, 1811; Doborján, Hungary (now Raiding), Austria Died July 31, 1886; Bayreuth, Germany
Tre sonetti del Petrarca from Années de pèlerinage, Deuxième année: Italie COMPOSED
1838–39 and 1845
After a series of dazzling concerts in Paris in the spring of 1837, Liszt and his long-time romantic partner, Countess Marie d’Agoult, spent the summer with George Sand at her villa in Nohant before visiting their daughter Blandine in Switzerland and then descending upon Milan in September. As the birth of their second child approached, they retreated to Lake Como, where Cosima (later the wife of conductor-pianist Hans von Bülow before she left him to be with Richard Wagner) was born on Christmas Eve. They remained in Italy for the next year and a half, making extended visits for performances in Venice, Genoa, Milan, Florence, and Bologna before settling early in 1839 in Rome, where their third child, Daniel, was born on May 9. Liszt’s guide to the artistic riches of the Eternal City was the famed painter Jean-AugusteDominique Ingres, then director of the French Academy at the Villa Medici;
Liszt was particularly impressed with the works of Raphael and Michelangelo and the music of the Sistine Chapel. He took home as a souvenir of his Roman holiday the now-famous drawing that Ingres did of him and inscribed to Mme d’Agoult. Liszt’s Italian travels were the inspiration for the series of seven luminous piano pieces that he composed between 1837 and 1849 and gathered together for publication as book 2 of his Années de pèlerinage in 1858. The three Petrarch sonnets that occupy the heart of the second set of the Années de pèlerinage, Deuxième année: Italie (Years of Pilgrimage, Second Year: Italy) began as settings for high tenor voice of verses by that hallowed fourteenth-century poet Francis Petrarch. Liszt transcribed those songs for piano solo in 1845 and published them the following year. Ten years later, he created extended fantasias on the songs’ materials for inclusion in the Années. The Sonnet no. 47 (Benedetto sia ’l giorno) is, in the words of the noted English pianist and Liszt authority Louis Kentner, “a song of thanksgiving for the pleasures and sufferings of first
t h i s pa g e : Franz Liszt, in Hungarian costume, watercolor by Josef Kriehuber (1800–1876), 1838 | o p p o s i t e pa g e : Liszt, oil portrait by Miklós Barabás (1810–1898), 1847. Hungarian National Museum
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love.” It captures well the mood of Petrarch’s poem: Blessed be the day, the month, the year, the season, the hour, the place . . . where I was found and enslaved by two fair eyes. According to Kentner, the Sonnet no. 104 (Pace non trovo, e non ho da far guerra—I find no peace, and know not how to make war) speaks of “restlessness, tears, self-hate, vain
search for inner peace—all caused by the loved one. . . . It is understandable that pianists revel in its eloquence.” The dreamy mood of the Sonnet no. 123 (I’ vidi in terra angelici costumi) evokes perfectly Petrarch’s gracious words and images: I saw on earth figures of angelic grace . . . no leaf stirred on the bough, and all was celestial harmony.
FRANZ LISZT
Après une lecture du Dante (Fantasia quasi sonata) from Années de pèlerinage, Deuxième année: Italie COMPOSED
1839
Liszt and Marie were avid readers of Dante Alighieri, the patriarch of Italian literature, and while in Rome in 1839, Liszt was moved by the Inferno in the poet’s Divine Comedy to compose his Après une lecture du Dante (After a Reading of Dante). The work was thoroughly revised ten years later and included in book 2 of the Années de pèlerinage. (The Divine Comedy inspired a full symphony from Liszt in 1855–56.) Après une lecture
du Dante is largely constructed from two contrasting subjects, perhaps depicting heaven and hell. The first consists of transformations of two motifs: an ominous augmented fourth (a harmonically unsettling leap known since the Middle Ages as the “devil’s interval”) and anxious chromatic octaves evoking the descent into the abyss; the contrasting second subject is serene, idyllic, and heavenly. Only a few moments of calm recalling the second subject slow the furious pace of this unforgivingly virtuosic evocation of Dante’s weird and horrible visions as it drives toward a dramatic and ferocious close.
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JOHANNES BRAHMS Born May 7, 1833; Hamburg, Germany Died April 3, 1897; Vienna, Austria
Scherzo in E-flat Minor, Op. 4 COMPOSED
1851
It was Brahms’s ability as a pianist that brought him his earliest fame. His father, Jakob, a double bass player of meager success in Hamburg, early recognized the boy’s musical talents and started him with piano lessons when he was seven. Just three years later, Johannes was playing well enough to be offered a tour of America as a child prodigy, but the family instead chose that he receive further training (at no cost) from Eduard Marxsen, a musician whose excellent taste and thorough discipline helped form his student’s elevated view of the art. Marxsen guided Brahms’s earliest attempts at composition and prepared him for his first public recital, given in Hamburg in September 1848, when he was fifteen. Significantly, the program included a fugue by Bach. A year later, Brahms presented a second concert that featured another selection by Bach as well as Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata. The first evidence of Brahms’s creative talents presented itself soon after he began studying with Marxsen
in the form of piano improvisations, potpourris of popular melodies, and variations on folk songs. He was making attempts at large, formal pieces by 1849, and within two years, he had composed the Scherzo in E-flat minor, op. 4, the earliest piece that he allowed to reach publication. There also seem to have been at least two piano sonatas and some chamber pieces from his teenage years, but those have disappeared— Brahms was almost pathologically secretive throughout his life about his sketches and unpublished works. The Sonata in F-sharp minor, op. 2, followed in 1852, and the Sonata in C major, op. 1, a year later. It was these three early piano works that helped set the course of Brahms’s life. In April 1853, the twenty-yearold Brahms set out from his native Hamburg for a concert tour of Germany with the Hungarian violinist Eduard Reményi. The following month in Hanover, they met the violinist Joseph Joachim, himself just twenty-two, whom Brahms had heard give an inspiring performance of Beethoven’s concerto five years earlier in Hamburg. Brahms was at first somewhat shy in the presence of the celebrated virtuoso, but the two men warmed to each other when the
a b o v e : Brahms, ca. 1855 portrait, Robert-Schumann-Haus Zwickau, Saxony, Germany
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young composer began to play some of his recent music at the piano. That summer, Brahms and Joachim spent eight weeks together at Göttingen, discussing music, studying scores, playing chamber works, and setting the foundation for a creative friendship that would last for almost half a century. Joachim learned of Brahms’s desire to take a walking tour through the Rhine Valley, and he arranged a joint recital to raise enough money to finance the trip. Along with the proceeds of the gate, Joachim gave Brahms as a parting gift several letters of introduction, including one to Robert and Clara Schumann in Düsseldorf. On the last day of September 1853, Brahms met the Schumanns for the first time. “Here is one who comes as if sent straight from God,” Clara recorded in her diary. Brahms spent a delightful month in Düsseldorf, seeing the Schumanns almost every day, sharing meals, talking, joining their family walks, and playing music with them. Robert was simply overwhelmed by Brahms’s talent, a conviction he shared with the musical world in his article “New Paths,” which appeared in the October 23 edition of his journal, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (New Journal for Music): It seemed to me that there would and indeed must suddenly appear one man who would be singled out to articulate and give the ideal expression to the tendencies of our time, one man who would show us his mastery, not through a gradual process but, like Athene,
spring fully armed from the head of Zeus. And he has come, a young man over whose cradle Graces and Heroes stood guard. His name is Johannes Brahms. Brahms was inspired by Schumann’s unstinting advocacy, and he threw himself into the composition of a new F minor piano sonata, his third work in the form in two years, which he played for Robert and Clara “from his head” on November 2, the eve of his departure from Düsseldorf. Brahms then made his way to Leipzig, the center of European music publishing, where, with Schumann’s blessing and the instant renown imparted by the Neue Zeitschrift article, his first two piano sonatas, a set of six songs and the Scherzo in E-flat minor were accepted by the prestigious firm of Breitkopf and Härtel; they were issued in December as, respectively, opp. 1–4. By the end of the year, Brahms had completed his third piano sonata, and the score was published as his op. 5 by the Leipzig firm of Senff in February 1854 with an appreciative dedication to Countess Ida von Hohenthal. The countess had acted as his hostess in Leipzig and also hired the composer’s younger brother, Fritz (a piano teacher in Germany and Caracas, known in his later years as “the wrong Brahms”), as music tutor for her children. The F minor sonata, the largest of his keyboard works, was Brahms’s last piano sonata, though the following year he did attempt a sonata for two pianos that was eventually transformed into the Piano Concerto no. 1. CS O.O RG
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Brahms’s pianism was noted for its rich emotional expression, fluency, individuality, nearly orchestral sonority, and remarkable immediacy, qualities supplemented in the op. 4 scherzo.
The dynamic scherzo proper occurs three times, its recurrences separated by episodes of contrasting nature (A–B–A–C–A).
JOHANNES BRAHMS
Sonata No. 3 in F Minor, Op. 5 COMPOSED
1853
The F minor piano sonata was among the creations upon which Brahms’s fame was founded—Clara Schumann, one of the era’s most esteemed piano virtuosos, immediately took it into her repertory and performed it with great success across northern Europe; Eduard Hanslick, the leading music critic of the time, said that “it belongs to the most inward experiences that recent piano music has to offer”; Richard Specht believed that the work and its immediate companions “are the most wonderful beginning ever made by any master”; and Brahms’s modern biographer Malcolm MacDonald said that “it stands with Liszt’s B minor sonata and the Grande Sonate of Alkan as one of the three greatest piano sonatas of the mid-nineteenth century.”
Even the redoubtable Richard Wagner, after hearing Brahms play the sonata in recital in Vienna in January 1863, is said to have “overwhelmed him with praise,” and pronounced that the sonata “shows what may still be done with the old forms, provided that one knows how to treat them.” The Sonata no. 3 in F minor, op. 5, is remarkable for the way in which Brahms harnessed the surging romantic language of his youthful style into the logical constructions of classical form. (This was precisely the quality that so excited Schumann’s admiration.) It is this masterly balance of ardent emotional expression and intellectual formal necessity—of heart and head—that imparts such power to this music. Also evident here is Brahms’s ability to blend rigorous counterpoint with singing lyricism, a technique that generates the thematic material of the sonata-form opening movement: a dramatic, leaping motif as principal subject; and a chordal
a b o v e : Johannes Brahms, lithograph portrait, ca. 1865, by Georg Engelbach (1817–1894). Hamburg State and University Library Carl von Ossietzky
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strain (to which the leaping motif in the bass acts as accompaniment) as complementary theme. These two expressive states—drama and lyricism—contend in the development section before a recapitulation of the themes, somewhat abbreviated, closes the movement. The eloquent Andante is headed with lines by the German poet Sternau: The evening falls, the moonlight shines / Two hearts, joined in love / Embrace each other blissfully. This poignant nocturne (which may have been sketched as early as 1852 in Hamburg) extends across a sonata form modified so that the second theme of the exposition, a quiet melody in sweet intervals divided equally between the two hands, is replaced in the recapitulation by a hauntingly beautiful strain of folkish simplicity in full chords. The scherzo is Brahms’s tribute to the Florestanesque character pieces of impetuous nature that loom so large in Schumann’s output. Ominous, sometimes demonic, it is one of the most vehemently expressive pieces Brahms ever wrote, and his sense of classical formal propriety required him to balance it with a sedate central trio that glides smoothly along in an almost hymnlike manner. Instead of proceeding directly to the finale, Brahms next inserted a
movement titled Intermezzo, which “looks back” (Rückblick) to the Andante by transmuting its theme into a tragic threnody accompanied by the cadence of distant funeral drums. Though he did not ascribe a literary reference to this sullen music, it may perhaps be related to an entry in a notebook wherein he collected poems that struck him as suitable for songs, in which the earlier lines from Sternau were followed by the next stanza of the poem: If ye knew how soon / How soon the trees are withered / And the wood is bare / How soon comes the dreary day / When the heart’s beat is dumb. The finale, blended from elements of rondo and sonata forms, is built upon the contrast between the tensely rhythmic opening theme and two lyrical melodies revealed in later episodes of the movement. The sonata ends with a brilliant, major-key coda whose flamboyant virtuosity documents the technical panache that marked Brahms’s pianism as a young man.
Richard E. Rodda, a former faculty member at Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Institute of Music, provides program notes for many American orchestras, concert series, and festivals.
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PROFILES Kirill Gerstein Piano A fascination with musical discovery combined with boundless curiosity, imagination, and virtuosity has established Kirill Gerstein as one of today’s most prolific and compelling performers. Gerstein is a searching artist. As a pianist, curator, educator, musical leader, and artistic collaborator, he has explored resonant themes across a vast spectrum of repertoire—from baroque suites and classical concertos to contemporary creations, jazz, and cabaret—nourishing relationships with many of the world’s leading orchestras, conductors, instrumentalists, singers, composers, festivals, recording labels, and media platforms. Highlights of Gerstein’s past season include a Carnegie Hall solo recital debut, performance with the Berliner Philharmoniker to mark Ferruccio Busoni’s centennial, appearances with the Orchestre National de France, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, and the orchestras of San Francisco, Pittsburgh, and Atlanta, among many others. Gerstein was artist-in-residence with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, spotlight artist with the London Symphony Orchestra, and curator of Busoni and His World concert series at London’s Wigmore Hall.
P H OTO BY M A R C O B O R G G R E V E
In 2025 Gerstein released The Visitors in collaboration with Chick Corea and legendary vibraphonist Gary Burton and Thomas Adès’s The Tempest Suite with violinist Christian Tetzlaff. His Music in Time of War earned him a 2025 special Opus Klassik Award for exceptional curation. Gerstein’s world premiere recording of Adès’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra with the Boston Symphony, conducted by the composer, was nominated for three Grammy awards and received the 2020 Gramophone Award. Born in 1979 in Voronezh, Russia, Kirill Gerstein attended one of the country’s special music schools for gifted children and taught himself to play jazz at home by listening to his parents’ record collection. Following a chance encounter with Gary Burton in Saint Petersburg when he was fourteen, he was invited to study at the Berklee College of Music in Boston as the youngest student. At sixteen, Gerstein completed his undergraduate and graduate degrees at the Manhattan School of Music and continued his studies with Dmitri Bashkirov in Madrid and Ferenc Rados in Budapest. First prize winner at the Tenth Arthur Rubinstein Competition in 2010, Gerstein received the prestigious Gilmore Artist Award and an Avery Fisher Career Grant. He was awarded an honorary doctor of musical arts from the Manhattan School of Music in 2021.