Paul Lewis Piano Recital House Programme

李

奏

維

鳴

斯

與

鋼

變

琴

奏

獨 奏 © Kaupo Kikkas

會 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

Welcome to the Grand Hall.

Thank you for coming to this HKU MUSE event. To ensure that everyone enjoys the music, please switch off your mobile phones and any other sound and light emitting devices before the performance. Unauthorised photography and audio/video recordings in the Hall are prohibited. Enjoy the concert and come again.

Sonata and Variations: Paul Lewis Piano Recital

SCHUBERT

BEETHOVEN

Presented by

Supported by

hkumuse museinfo@hku.hkď˝œ+852 3917 8165ď˝œwww.muse.hku.hk D

Piano Sonata No.18 in G major, D. 894 Molto moderato e cantabile Andante Menuetto. Allegro moderato Allegretto

15-minute Intermission

33 Variations on a Waltz by Diabelli in C major, Op. 120

Alla Marcia maestoso Var. II. Poco allegro Var. III. L'istesso tempo Var. IV. Un poco più vivace Var. V. Allegro vivace Var. VI. Allegro ma non troppo e serioso Var. VII. Un poco più allegro Var. VIII. Poco vivace Var. IX. Allegro pesante e risoluto Var. X. Presto Var. XI. Allegretto Var. XII. Un poco più moto Var. XIII. Vivace Var. XIV. Grave e maestoso Var. XV. Presto scherzando Var. XVI. Allegro Var. I.

Var. XVIII. Var. XIX. Var. XX. Var. XXI. Var. XXII. Var. XXIII. Var. XXIV. Var. XXV.

Poco moderato Presto Andante Allegro con brio – Meno allegro Allegro molto Allegro assai Fughetta. Andante Allegro

Var. XXVI.

Vivace Allegro Var. XXIX. Adagio ma non troppo Var. XXX. Andante, sempre cantabile Var. XXXI. Largo, molto espressivo Var. XXXII. Fuga. Allegro – Poco adagio Var. XXXIII. Tempo di Menuetto moderato Var. XXVII. Var. XXVIII.

Var. XVII.

1

Paul Lewis Paul Lewis is internationally regarded as one of the leading musicians of his generation. His cycles of core piano works

by Beethoven and Schubert have received unanimous critical and public acclaim worldwide, and consolidated his reputation as one of the world's foremost interpreters of the central European classical repertoire. His numerous awards have included the Royal Philharmonic Society's Instrumentalist of the Year, two Edison awards, three Gramophone awards, the Diapason D'or de l'Annee, the Preis Der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik, the Premio Internazionale Accademia Musicale Chigiana, and the South Bank Show Classical Music award. He holds honorary degrees from Liverpool, Edge Hill, and Southampton Universities, and was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2016 Queen's Birthday Honours.

2

BIOGRAPHY

He appears regularly as a soloist with the world's great orchestras, including the Berlin Philharmonic, Boston Symphony, Chicago Symphony, London Symphony, London Philharmonic, Bavarian Radio Symphony, NHK Symphony, New York Philharmonic, LA Philharmonic, and the Royal Concertgebouw, Cleveland, Tonhalle Zurich, Leipzig Gewandhaus, Philharmonia, and Mahler Chamber Orchestras.

Paul Lewis' recital career takes him to venues such as London's Royal Festival Hall, Alice Tully and Carnegie Hall in New York, the Musikverein and Konzerthaus in Vienna, the Theatre des Champs Elysees in Paris, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, and the Berlin Philharmonie and Konzerthaus. He is also a frequent guest at some of the world's most prestigious festivals, including Tanglewood, Ravinia, Schubertiade, Edinburgh, Salzburg, Lucerne, and the BBC Proms where in 2010 he became the first person to play a complete Beethoven piano concerto cycle in a single season.

His multi-award winning discography for Harmonia Mundi includes the complete Beethoven piano sonatas, concertos, and the Diabelli Variations , Liszt's B minor sonata and other late works, all of Schubert's major piano works from the last six years of his life including the 3 song cycles with tenor Mark Padmore, solo works

by Schumann and Mussorgsky, and the Brahms D minor piano concerto with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Daniel Harding. Future recording plans include a multi-CD series of Haydn sonatas, Beethoven's bagatelles, and works by Bach.

Š Kaupo Kikkas

Paul Lewis studied with Joan Havill at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London before going on to study privately with Alfred Brendel. He is the Co-Artistic Director of Midsummer Music, an annual chamber music festival held in Buckinghamshire, UK.

3

Sonata and Variations: Paul Lewis Piano Recital

Piano Sonata No.18 in G major, D. 894 Franz Schubert (1797-1828)

4

A great piano composer, Schubert himself was no great virtuoso pianist. He was once stuck mid-way of the finale when he was playing his Fantasia in C major, D. 760, for his friends. Giving up on finishing the performance, he rose from his seat and said, "Let the devil himself play the stuff". Although his mastery of the piano, as noted by his brother Ferdinand, was peculiar, he must at times have been frustrated to find that his capacity as a pianist did not meet his aspiration as a composer. Unlike Franz Liszt (1811-1886), who composed technically demanding pieces to showcase his skills as a professional concert pianist, Schubert was a composer who, writing music largely as an amateur, did not allow his technical boundaries to limit the scope of his compositions, even if this means that he had to write a simplified version of the piano accompaniment of Der ErlkĂśnig for his own performance.

The Piano Sonata in G major was more within Schubert's technical comfort zone comparing to the Fantasia in C major. It was written in October 1826, when the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (the Philharmonic Society of Vienna) granted 100 florins to him after he had sent them a manuscript of his Symphony No. 9 in C major, D. 944 (Beethoven sold his Ninth Symphony to the publisher Scott's Sons for 600 florins). Although Schubert clearly indicated on his autograph that the piano piece was a sonata, Tobias Haslinger published it in 1827 with the title 'Fantaisie, Andante, Menuetto, and Allegretto', which led the piece to be known as the 'Fantasie'. The title, which individualised the four movements of the lengthy piece, might have been chosen to promote the piece to the vibrant community of amateur pianists in Austria. In any case, it should not be taken as a misnomer; in the 19th century, the boundary between the fantasy and the sonata—the former embodies freedom and the latter strict norms—could be hard to delineate, as many composers, including Beethoven and Schubert himself, started to integrate elements of the two genres into each other.

奏 鳴 與 變 奏 ： 李 維 斯 鋼 琴 獨 奏 會

The stormy events in this sonata are not adversities meant to be overcome; they are not challenged with any confrontational force. One could interpret them as the harsh realities from which Schubert wants to escape, and the sonata is his imaginary musical haven where he has beautiful dreams about life. When his dreams are interrupted by thoughts of reality—his suffering from syphilis, the poor receptions of his operas—he merely supresses them and allows the music to return to complete quietude at the end.

PROGRAMME NOTES

While the first movement of the piece exhibits a well-balanced sonata-allegro form in key distribution, the frequent harmonic discursions and subtle changes in mood throughout the movement do support the case for Haslinger's title. As early as in bar 10, the tranquil opening theme takes on a tragic colour with a modulation to B minor, like dark clouds gathering in a clear sky. Three bars later, as the mode shifts to B major, the thick clouds disappear quickly as if they were an illusion. It takes three more bars for the music to return to the tonic before it proceeds to the second theme. The dramatic tension between the first and second themes one expects to find in the expositions of Beethoven's sonatas does not build up until the end of the exposition, where the peaceful ebb and flow develops into successive high waves, leading to a dramatic development juxtaposing intense circumstances with serene episodes.

5

Sonata and Variations: Paul Lewis Piano Recital

33 Variations on a Waltz by Diabelli in C major, Op. 120 Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 -1827)

6

Described by Alfred Brendel (b. 1931) as "the greatest of all piano works", the Diabelli Variations is a musical journey from the banal to the sublime. The journey starts with a waltz written by Anton Diabelli (1781-1858), a Viennese publisher and composer. In 1819, Diabelli invited 50 Austrian composers, including Carl Czerny (1791-1857) and Schubert, to write a variation of the dance tune. Beethoven was also invited, but rather than contributing a single variation to the collection, he came up with his own set of 33 variations, completed four years later in April 1823. Diabelli published the work so quickly (in June) that a copy of the edition was sent to London before Ferdinand Ries (1784 -1838), Beethoven's pupil and secretary, had any chance to sell the variations to a London publisher. Together with the 50 variations written by other composers, the work was published in a volume entitled Väterlandischer Kßnstlerverein (Fatherland's Society of Artists), a nationalistic title suggesting Diabelli's intention with this project is to showcase the musical talents of his fellow Austrians.

Repetitive in nature, Diabelli's theme is anything but ingenious. It has two sections with exactly the same structure: a four-bar phrase with an anacrusis and repeated chords, its transposed repetition, a four-bar sequential passage in which a threenote figure is repeated in stepwise progression, and a four-bar cadential figure.

According to Anton Schindler (1795 -1864), Beethoven's biographer, the great composer dismissed the theme as a 'cobbler's patch' (Schusterfleck), a derogatory term referring to the repetition of a short phrase on different scale degrees, as exemplified by the two sequential passages in Diabelli's waltz. Yet, using this technique is not necessarily a musical sin. In the Universal-Lexicon der Tonkunst (The Universal Dictionary of Music, 1840), the author warned that adopting the 'cobbler’s patch' excessively would show 'a tremendous poverty of creativity', but he also suggested that when occasionally used, it can intensify or sustain an excited feeling and is especially apt for comic effects.

奏 鳴 與 變 奏 ： 李 維 斯 鋼 琴 獨 奏 會

The variation set is not all about humour; it constitutes a progressive transcendence of the theme through rhythmic intensification, textural sophistication and sentimental elevation. After two parodies of the theme, imitative counterpoint can be heard in Variation 3. The tempo then accelerates and culminate locally with Variation 7, in which the melodic wheel spins madly. A moment of repose and lyricism immediately follows. After another 'spinning wheel' passage in Variation 27, the music begins its final stage of transcendence. Humour retreats and melancholy reigns, leading to a coloratura lament that presents a profound statement of emotional depth (Variation 31). The contrapuntal complexity of the piece reaches its peak in the penultimate variation. With a double fugue that treats the repeated crotchets of Diabelli's waltz as one of the subjects, Beethoven's music transcends the earthly theme and rises to sublimity, then achieves ascension and closes with a celestial coda.

PROGRAMME NOTES

The comic potential of the 'cobbler's patch' is fully realized in Beethoven's variations. As Diabelli's theme is similar to Mozart's 'Notte e giorno faticar' in Don Giovanni in the descending fourth of the opening bass line and the ascending melodic contour of the ensuing 'cobbler's patch', Beethoven borrows the aria in Variation 22, which recalls Leporello's sardonic complaint about his work and his difficult master. In Variation 9, the opening turn of Diabelli's theme is repeated throughout the entire variation with a humorous tone highlighted by the first occurrence of C minor. Such exaggeration of the repetitiveness of the theme can also be found in other variations, such as Variations 1, 2, 5, 19, 21 and 25, which parody either the repeated chords of the theme or its sequential passages.

Programme notes by

Sheryl Chow MPhil in Musicology, HKU PhD candidate in Musicology, Princeton University

7

www.muse.hku.hk