Jan Lisiecki in Recital House Programme

夜 之 頌

利 謝 茲 基 鋼 琴 獨 奏 會

Jan Lisiecki

in Recital

Night at His Fingertips

09 NOV

2 0 1 8 ｜ FR I ｜ 8PM

Grand Hall, Lee Shau Kee Lecture Centre The University of Hong Kong 香港大學李兆基會議中心大會堂

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Night at His Fingertips : Jan Lisiecki in Recital

PROGRAMME

CHOPIN

Nocturne in F minor, Op. 55, No.1 Nocturne in E-flat major, Op. 55, No.2

SCHUMANN

Nachtstücke , Op. 23 Mehr langsam, oft zurückhaltend Markiert und lebhaft Mit grosser Lebhaftigkeit Einfach

RAVEL

Gaspard de la Nuit Ondine Le Gibet Scarbo 15-minute Intermission

RACHMANINOV

Morceaux de fantaisie , Op. 3 No. 1 in E-flat minor: Élégie No. 2 in C-sharp minor: Prélude No. 3 in E major: Mélodie No. 4 in F-sharp minor: Polichinelle No. 5 in B-flat minor: Sérénade

CHOPIN

Nocturne in E minor, Op. 72, No. 1

CHOPIN

Scherzo No. 1 in B minor, Op. 20

© HOLGER HAGE / DEUTSCHE GRAMMOPHON

Jan Lisiecki

www.janlisiecki.com

Just 23, Canadian pianist Jan Lisiecki has won acclaim for his extraordinary interpretive maturity, distinctive sound, and poetic sensibility. Lisiecki’s insightful interpretations, refined technique, and natural affinity for art give him a musical voice that belies his age.

Jan Lisiecki was born to Polish parents in Canada in 1995. He began piano lessons at the age of five and made his concerto debut four years later, while always rebuffing the label of "child prodigy". His approach to music is a refreshing combination of dedication, skill, enthusiasm, and a realistic perspective on the career of a musician.

Lisiecki was brought to international attention in 2010, after the Fryderyk Chopin Institute issued a recording of Chopin’s piano concertos, performed live by Jan at age 13 and 14. BBC Music Magazine wrote of the "mature musicality" of his playing and commented the "sensitively distilled" insights of his Chopin interpretations; the release was awarded the Diapason Découverte. Confirming his status among the most imaginative and poetic pianists of his generation, Deutsche Grammophon signed an exclusive contract with Jan in 2011, when he was just 15 2

Night at His Fingertips : Jan Lisiecki in Recital

In March 2013, Lisiecki substituted at short notice for Martha Argerich, performing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 in Bologna with the Orchestra Mozart under Claudio Abbado. He crowned that season with a sensational account of Schumann’s Piano Concerto at the BBC Proms. The following year he performed three Mozart concertos in one week with the Philadelphia Orchestra, making his debuts as concerto soloist with the Orchestra Filarmonica della Scala in Milan, Tonhalle Orchestra Zürich, NHK Symphony Orchestra in Tokyo, and with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin. In the same season, Jan gave his debut recitals at Wigmore Hall, Rome’s Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, and in San Francisco.

The pianist’s development has taken place in company with many of the world’s leading orchestras, including the Orchestre de Paris, New York Philharmonic, and BBC Symphony, at venues such as Suntory Hall, the Kennedy, Lincoln, and Barbican Centres, and Royal Albert Hall. Jan has cultivated relationships with prominent conductors including Sir Antonio Pappano, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Daniel Harding, and Pinchas Zukerman.

Lisiecki made his debut in the main auditorium at New York’s Carnegie Hall in January 2016. Other significant performances included subscription series debuts with the Cleveland Orchestra and San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, and multiple tours, including with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Vladimir Jurowski, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, and the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra and Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Jan also performs concertos leading from the piano, with ensembles such as the Zurich Chamber Orchestra and Camerata Salzburg.

Foremost radio and television networks in Europe and North America have extensively broadcast Lisiecki’s performances, he was also the subject of the CBC National News documentary The Reluctant Prodigy . In 2013 he received the Leonard Bernstein Award at the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival and was also named as Gramophone Magazine ’s Young Artist of the Year.

Jan is involved in charity work, donating time and performances to such organizations as the David Foster Foundation, the Polish Humanitarian Organization and the Wish Upon a Star Foundation. In 2012 he was named UNICEF Ambassador to Canada having been a National Youth Representative since 2008. 夜 之 頌 ： 利 謝 茲 基 鋼 琴 獨 奏 會

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BIOGRAPHY

years old. Lisiecki’s first recording for DG, released in 2012, features Mozart’s Piano Concertos K. 466 and 467. It was followed in 2013 by Chopin’s Etudes Op. 10 and 25, praised by Gramophone Magazine for being "played as pure music, given as naturally as breathing". Jan’s recording of Schumann’s works for piano and orchestra was released in January 2016 and as ClassicFM wrote, "he may be young but Jan Lisiecki plays Schumann like a legend". His latest album, featuring Chopin’s rarelyperformed works for piano and orchestra, was released in March 2017, and has been awarded the prestigious ECHO Klassik.

PROGRAMME NOTES

Nocturnes, Op. 55, Nos. 1 & 2 Nocturne, Op. 72, No. 1 FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN (1810-1849) Romanticism’s belief in the authenticity of the solitary "I" gave rise to the advent of a paradoxically "private" art. In the case of music, this paradox lies implicitly in the art of performance — a public display of privacy. Nocturne was a newly revamped musical genre reflecting neatly this romantic aesthetic.

The word nocturne — a French adaptation of the Italian notturno , "night piece" — did not belong exclusively to the nineteenth-century musical life: Haydn, Mozart, and their contemporaries wrote many notturni , such as the famous Eine kleine Nachtmusic [A Little Night Music]. But in the eighteenth century, notturno was a social genre, music for soirées , and was mostly frothy and light-hearted in character. Championed by the Irish pianist John Field (1782-1837), the nineteenth-century nocturne adopted a serious, inwardlooking dimension to project artistic solitude as an expression of freedom and transcendence. To quote Franz Liszt reporting on Field’s performance of his nocturnes: "from their very first sounds we are immediately transported to those hours when the soul, released from the day’s burdens, retreats into itself and soars aloft to secret regions of star and sky." The purpose of those nocturnes, as Liszt wrote, were "to infuse the keyboard with feelings and dreams and to free music from the constraints imposed until then by regular and official form."

The nocturne thus thrived as a popular genre played at the European salons.

Chopin further developed the nocturne into a major genre of his own. In 1826, he became a student at the Warsaw Conservatory, a relatively new institution, committing himself to a continuation of his studies in harmony and counterpoint. Soon afterwards, he began going his own way, experimenting with new genres and forms. His second year at the Conservatory saw a variety of compositions: waltzes, a polonaise, a mazurka, and the first of his nocturnes, the Nocturne in E minor, published only posthumously in 1855 as Op. 72, No. 1.

It was a work of relative maturity, marked by its translucent homophonic texture mediating between the new sonic possibilities enabled by the innovative mechanism of the Pleyel piano and the fashionable bel canto style found in the operatic music of Bellini and Donizetti. This was to become a hallmark of Chopin’s pianism, and his contemporaries frequently compared the sound of his playing to that of the Aeolian harp.

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Night at His Fingertips : Jan Lisiecki in Recital

The two Nocturnes, Op. 55, were published in 1844. Chopin dedicated them to his Scottish pupil Jane Stirling, who had just invited her teacher to Britain for a seven-month visit. The first of the two, the Nocturne in F minor, is in ternary form, which allows the opening theme, peaceful and unperturbed, to return after an impetuous middle section. Differing in form, the following Nocturne in E flat has no contrasting middle section such that the piece flows from the beginning to the end in a through-composed manner. Frederick Niecks, a German biographer of Chopin, gave a less-than-flattering review of the first nocturne of the set, suggesting that in it one "will note only the flebile dolcezza [tender sweetness] of the first and the last section, and the inferiority of the more impassioned middle section." The problematics of Chopin’s nocturnes in their immediate reception history deepened as public attitudes towards the salon culture became increasingly critical. By 1841, a certain Ferdinand Hand had indicted the nocturne for a twofold misconception consisting, on the one hand, of dawdling, and on the other hand, of falling into the effeminate and languishing, which weakens the soul and tires the listener. It was during the heyday of musical romanticism, ironically, that the stigma of effeminacy began to attach itself to music through emerging critiques of the salon culture. In 1844, the author of an essay in Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung complained of the soft, rapturous, tender, lyrical, almost womanly character of the Fieldian cantilena. One can’t help but wonder if Chopin, situated at the centre of the shifting cultural climate, did indeed frequently include dramatically turbulent middle sections in his nocturnes — like the one that so disturbed Niecks — to counter expressly the genre’s association with the feminine .

夜 之 頌 ： 利 謝 茲 基 鋼 琴 獨 奏 會

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Nachtstücke, Op. 23 ROBERT SCHUMANN (1810-1856) Unlike the other high-spirited work, Faschingsschwank aus Wien , Schumann’s Nachtstücke , Op. 23, written concurrently during his 1839 visit to Vienna, exhibits a sombre, subdued, and darker mood. It was partly because of the devastating events taking place in the composer’s life. "Over the last few days I have been putting all my energy into completing two large compositions," wrote Schumann from Vienna to Clara Wieck in Paris on March 30, 1839, "but I am not sure I will be able to finish them because I am needed in Zwickau — my brother Eduard is very ill." A week later, Eduard Schumann, Robert’s oldest brother, who was at the time the sole owner of their father’s publishing house in Zwickau, died. In another letter dated on Easter Monday that year, Schumann recounted his receiving the news: "I cannot begin to describe the state my heart was in. [...] Therese [Eduard’s wife] sent me an ominous letter; I know these letters, which are promptly followed by a notification of death; I also had a premonition, a peculiar premonition the previous Monday and Tuesday." The premonition was described in detail in another letter to Clara dated April 7, 1839, before Schumann had received confirmation of his brother’s death. Writing from Prague on his way from Vienna to Leipzig, Robert noted: "I wrote to you about a premonition; it came to me in the days between March 24 and 27, when I was writing my new composition; there is a recurring passage to which I kept returning; it is as though someone was sighing with a heavy-hearted 'Oh God'— when writing the piece, I kept seeing funeral processions, coffins, unhappy despairing people, and when I had finished it and had long sought a title, I kept coming back to 'funeral fantasy' — Is that not curious? While composing, I was often so overcome that tears came forth and I really did not know why and had no reason for them — then Therese’s letter arrived, and it became plain to me. [...] He [Mechetti, Schumann’s publisher] certainly will get the funeral fantasy, but I will call it 'Nachtstücke '."

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Night at His Fingertips : Jan Lisiecki in Recital

Originally, the four movements of Nachtstücke bore the following programmatic titles: 1. Trauerzug (Funeral Procession) 2. Kuriose Gesellschaft (Strange Assembly) 3. Nächtliches Gelage (Nocturnal Revelry) 4. Rundgesang mit Solostimmen (Roundelay with Solo Voices) When asked about her opinion of the titles, Clara replied to Robert: "You have really beautifully and ingeniously conceived your Nachtstücke , wonderful for those of us who fully understand you! But for the public: even experts will not know what you mean, and it will bother them. I think you should settle for using only the general title Nachtstücke , which is very revealing in itself. Indeed, the music says far more than can be described; connoisseurs will realize this."

Schumann followed the advice and had the publisher erase the titles from the engraver’s copy before the set got published.

夜 之 頌 ： 利 謝 茲 基 鋼 琴 獨 奏 會

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Gaspard de la nuit MAURICE RAVEL (1875-1937) In July 1908, Ravel wrote to Madame Ida Godebska, a famed hostess of Parisian salons: "Gaspard de la nuit will finally see the light of day after many a long month of gestation. [...] It has been a devil in coming, but that is only logical since it was he who is the author of the poems." The inspiration behind these three piano pieces demanding keyboard virtuosity at the highest level was Aloysius Bertrand’s 1842 collection of poems bearing the same name. Subtitled Fantaisies à la manière de Rembrandt et de Callot , Bertrand’s poems and the phantasmagoric imagery they invoke lie at the core of Ravel’s sonic imagination. The overall pensive atmosphere and the frequent usage of darker harmonic hues prompt one to wonder if the composer’s creative genesis was not unrelated to witnessing his father’s suffering from dementia, a malady that ultimately claimed his life merely months after Gaspard was completed.

Gaspard de la nuit perfectly exemplifies Ravel’s prodigious craft, taste for emotional depth, and strive for expressive multiplicity. The three pieces of the set display three disparate styles of writing: suave, concentrated, and obsessive. Ondine takes its name from the mythical creature of siren, whose lethal allure embodies the slippery boundary between desire and death. Enmeshed with a thrumming tremolo, Ravel’s siren song, gentle and enticing, ebbs and flows mysteriously in and out of a luminescent sonorous tapestry. Le Gibet conjures up a macabre scene inspired by the final lines of the poem: "C’est la cloche qui tinte aux murs d’une ville, sous l’horizon, et la carcasse d’un pendu que rougit le soleil couchant. [It is the bell that tolls from the walls of a city, under the horizon, and the corpse of the hanged one that is reddened by the setting sun.]" The indefinitely repeating B-flat, a sonic marker of the death toll, punctuates clusters of uncanny-sounding dissonant chords, evoking a chilling atmosphere. Scarbo depicts the gothic folly of demonic possession, recounting a nightmare of diabolical goblins making horrifying assaults. The theatre of terror reaches its climax when an unprecedented crescendo and accelerando lead to the last and most relentless appearance of the demonic figure before the curtain suddenly goes down. A master of availing himself of the piano’s articulatory and tonal capacities, Ravel, through his piano writing, was able to produce uniquely and meticulously sculpted sound objects, whose gestural idiosyncrasies unmask a kind of mechanical playfulness. But beyond these sonic facades, if one ventures further, there is always a sense of melancholy, stupor, and vulgarity even, however fugitive it may be, awaiting.

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Night at His Fingertips : Jan Lisiecki in Recital

Morceaux de fantaisie, Op. 3 SERGEI RACHMANINOV (1873-1943) Known for their gracious lyricism and delicacy, most of John Field’s piano nocturnes were composed, published, and for a long time chiefly performed in Russia, where he settled in 1803. Having spent the last three decades of his life in both St Petersburg and Moscow, Field, through his numerous pupils and disciples including Mikhail Glinka, became a major catalyst in the process of Russia’s joining the Western Europe nations as a major producer of music in the so-called "art music" tradition.

Among Field’s students was a good amateur pianist, Arkady Alexandrovich, who later became the grandfather of Sergei Rachmaninov. The five piano pieces collectively known as Morceaux de fantaisie , Op. 3, were written by Rachmaninov in the autumn of 1892, when he was nineteen and had just completed his studies in composition (and in piano studies in the previous year) at the Moscow Conservatory.

Rachmaninov dedicated the five-piece set to Anton Arensky, his harmony teacher at the Conservatory. He gave the first performance of the set at a concert in Kharkov towards the end of the same year. Two of the pieces, including the famous Prelude (No. 2), formed part of his solo programme during his tour to London in 1903.

The set opens with a beautiful Élégie , inspired by the nocturnal idiom and infused with both Fieldian grace and Chopinesque melancholy. The second piece, a Prélude in C-sharp minor, a piece that haunted Rachmaninov for the rest of his career with its excessive popularity, brings the composer’s dramatic impulse at the piano to the fore. Following the delicate Mélodie and the technically demanding Polichinelle , the set winds up with a Sérénade , in which the usage of modal melodies arouses some kind of mysterious exoticism, wilily disrupting the pieces otherwise romantic atmosphere with a sense of otherness. Rachmaninov revised both the Mélodie and the Sérénade later in his career, sharply increasing the complexity of musical texture and harmonic vocabulary, and re-published the set in 1940.

夜 之 頌 ： 利 謝 茲 基 鋼 琴 獨 奏 會

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Scherzo No. 1 in B minor, Op. 20 FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN (1810-1849) The scherzo emerged initially as a vocal-instrumental genre during the Italian Baroque with the appearance of "musical joke" pieces such as Monteverdi’s Scherzi musicali . The decisive admission of the term into the canon of instrumental movements in regular Classical usage dates from Haydn’s String Quartets, Op. 33 composed in 1781. Beethoven later established scherzo as a regular substitute for the minuet and as a classic inner movement within the multi-movement symphonic or instrumental sonata cycle, providing with its light and humorous tone a comic relief. In the hand of Chopin, the scherzo not only became an expansive onemovement work, but it also took on a serious, dramatic, and virtuosic perspective.

His unprecedented treatment of the genre triggered Robert Schumann to respond with bewilderment on hearing this Scherzo in B minor: "How will gravity array itself, if wit is already cloaked so darkly?"

Written in 1831 and published later in 1835, the Scherzo was the first of the four Chopin composed throughout his life. Around the time of its composition, the November Uprising against Russia broke out in Poland while Chopin was on an artistic tour in Vienna, where Thomas Albrecht, a friend and the dedicatee of the piece, convinced him to stay and build a career there. Despite Chopin’s genteel surroundings far away from the turmoil at home, the Scherzo’s dark, chaotic, and unsettling opening nonetheless seems to disclose the composer’s deep concern about the recent development in his native country. As a stand-alone piece, Chopin’s Scherzo has a tripartite structure with a coda attached at the end, alluding to the sonata-allegro form and making use of its formal logic to hang a great variety of musical materials together. Between the dramatic outburst of the opening section in B minor and its return before the coda, one hears a serene più lento middle section in the parallel major. Here Chopin quotes from an old Polish Christmas song Lulajże, Jezuniu , creating a sweet, lyrical reverie walled off from the turbulent terror of the piece’s outer sections. It is perhaps also here that Chopin, in a language entirely of his own, attempts to recapture the spirit of his homeland in the face of its lamentable defeat by Russia.

Programme notes by Morton Wan MPhil in Musicology, HKU 2016 PhD student in Musicology, Cornell University 10

Night at His Fingertips : Jan Lisiecki in Recital

夜 之 頌 ： 利 謝 茲 基 鋼 琴 獨 奏 會

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Night at His Fingertips : Jan Lisiecki in Recital

夜 之 頌 ： 利 謝 茲 基 鋼 琴 獨 奏 會

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