Program 1

The death of Beethoven in early 1827 deeply affected the 30-year-old Franz Schubert, who himself only had 18 months to live, and perhaps spurred him to even greater creative heights. That same year Schubert wrote the monumental song cycle Winterreise, the magnificent last three piano sonatas, the two piano trios and other extraordinary works including the Impromptus for piano. The C minor Impromptu is a work of haunting beauty. The melancholy opening theme is immediately captivating, its brooding minor restlessness giving way to a lyrical, more soothing version of the theme but now in A-flat major. The transition from minor to major keys is an important feature of Schubert’s music, both for harmonic colour and also for the implied change in emotional inflection. After a series of variations alternating between major and minor versions of the themes and culminating in a powerful climax, the opening melody returns, but now finally in C major, signalling a sense of acceptance and resolution.

public. Liszt, on the other hand, was a highly charismatic extrovert, a flamboyant showman who travelled extensively. Nonetheless, Liszt was strongly influenced by Schubert’s music. He transcribed dozens of Schubert’s songs for solo piano and arranged Schubert’s extended piano work Wanderer Fantasy as a concerto for piano and orchestra.

Liszt’s Sonata in B minor has some striking similarities with the Wanderer Fantasy. Both works are played straight through without a break yet are internally subdivided into four movements. Furthermore, in both works, the musical material is based on themes heard at the beginning which are transformed or varied as the piece unfolds, creating a sense of unity within the larger structure. In the Liszt sonata four musical ideas form the basis for the whole work. We hear the first three immediately – a descending scale, a leaping octave passage and a low-register gruff theme based on repeated notes. The fourth, a chorale-like theme, appears around three minutes in.

Franz Liszt and Franz Schubert could not have been more different in personality and in their engagement with society. Schubert was shy and introverted, kept a small circle of close friends and rarely ventured out in

Liszt’s transformations and variations of these ideas is masterly. One of the most striking occurs in the sonata’s slow movement where the opening low gruff theme becomes an elegant and dreamy melody, singing beautifully in the treble register. Immediately after this section, the leaping octave theme serves as the basis for a powerful and extended fugal passage.

The sonata was not universally well received at first. Its uncompromising sound world, musical and technical complexity, and perhaps even its lack of a Romantic title or programmatic references, set it apart from much of Liszt’s other piano music for which he was so celebrated. Nowadays, the sonata is universally acknowledged as a pinnacle of the repertoire and revered for its brilliant, at times exhilarating, piano writing and its captivating sense of musical journey.

Thomas Misson is a composer, pianist and music journalist from Hobart. He graduated from the University of Tasmania with Honours in Composition under the tutelage of Maria Grenfell, Russell Gilmour and Don Kay. Misson’s compositions are inspired by the extremes of the human condition and its omnipresent imperfections.

His music was highly commended in the national Jean Bogen Youth Prize, and has been heard on ABC Classic and Making Waves. He has been commissioned by artists including the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, MATTRA, and the ACO Collective, as featured on the album Hush 18: Collective Wisdom. During 2019 he was selected for the composition stream of the AYO National Music Camp, and Ensemble Offspring’s Hatched Academy. An experienced solo pianist and accompanist, he holds an LMusA (Distinction), the Nelle Ashdown Memorial Award, and has toured with Virtuosi Tasmania. When not composing, Misson maintains a busy schedule as an accompanist, composition teacher and music critic for The Mercury

The composer writes:

In 2021, I was approached by Paul Kildea from Musica Viva Australia to write a piece for Garrick Ohlsson for his 2023 Australian tour. He would be playing works by Liszt, Barber, Schubert, Scriabin, and Chopin (of whose music Garrick is a famous interpreter). While researching and reflecting on how my creative voice could complement the program, I stumbled on a description of Garrick’s playing that described him as possessing a ‘calmly commanding presence’.

I decided I would channel a piece by Liszt which evokes the same descriptors for me, Sposalizio from Années de pèlerinage (Years of Pilgrimage). In this work, Liszt describes Raphael’s high-Renaissance painting Sposalizio (The Marriage of the Virgin) in musical form. Though some of the motivic and structural scaffolding draws on the Liszt, conceptually and stylistically the piece has come to resemble something more pluralistic than a marriage. Convocations combines the unlikely and disparate elements of the Romantic piano giants, modernist styles, an Australian tour, a Tasmanian composer, and an American concert pianist in a congregation that aims to give life to a spiritual soundworld.

THOMAS MISSON © 2023

Alexander Scriabin was originally hailed as the Russian Chopin. In his collections of preludes, études, mazurkas and nocturnes for piano, he paid homage to Chopin’s legacy both in genre and in his richly Romantic, voluptuous musical style. The three études (studies) we will hear in this performance certainly owe a debt to Chopin’s groundbreaking studies as well as those of Liszt. The simplicity of the beguiling melody in the first C-sharp minor study gives way to some fiendishly difficult piano writing in the following two works.

In his Two Poems, Scriabin moves away from the Romantic gestures of the studies, creating a more forward-looking exploration of melody, texture and harmony which would evolve into his mature style. Also around this time, we see the development of his aesthetic to embrace a mystical, transcendental conception of music. While the first Poem is languid, rhythmically fluid and melodically focused, the second is an explosive, rhythmically driven piece full of extrovert energy.

The Piano Sonata No. 5, written four years later, takes these extreme moods even further. This is an intensely volatile piece, languid and dreamy one moment, then suddenly frenzied and excited. Scriabin often juxtaposes these states without preparation, resulting in a form that feels episodic rather than organic but never ceases to surprise and excite.

ANNOTATIONS BY MARK COUGHLAN © 2023

Program 2

In the late 1880s Claude Debussy returned to Paris having spent a couple of unfulfilling years at the Villa Medici in Rome, a residency that resulted from his winning the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1884. He was disappointed with the company, the food and the accommodation in Rome but this was an important time for the composer in gaining confidence with his emerging unique musical voice. He had also recently discovered the music of Wagner and heard for the first time Javanese Gamelan, and both experiences were to influence his compositional development.

Debussy began writing the Suite bergamasque around 1890 although it was not until 1905 that it was revised and published. The work pays homage in part to the Baroque keyboard music that Debussy greatly admired, especially that of Couperin. The opening Prélude has an improvisatory quality alternating between bold and elegant. The following Menuet has a slightly wistful character, playful and delicate, its vigorous dance rhythms somewhat restrained. Clair de lune is a work of ethereal beauty and one of the most celebrated of all piano pieces with its ravishing textures and seductive harmonies. The final Passepied bubbles along to the gently driving left-hand rhythm, drawing this charming set to a close.

Samuel Barber is regarded as one of America’s finest composers. Born in 1910 into a musical family, he studied composition, voice and piano and for a number of years was a student at the celebrated Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. He decided early on that music would be his chosen career, writing to his mother at the age of nine to declare his intention to become a composer and asking her not to force him to play football. By the age of seven he had written his first piano piece, at ten his first operetta and he was appointed church organist when he was 12. Much of Barber’s music conveys a sense of postRomantic lyricism, his gift for singing informing an often expressive melodic style.

From the moment he arrived in Paris in 1831 Frédéric Chopin became a regular at the opera. He was particularly drawn to the operas of Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti, and much of his melodic writing reflects their ornamented lyricism. In May 1833 Chopin attended a performance of Ferdinand Hérold’s opera Ludovic. As was common practice in the Parisian salons, he subsequently wrote a set of Variations brillantes on one of the arias. After an introduction and simple statement of the lilting theme, there is a series of variations: the first elegantly flowing, then a jaunty dance, a lyrical variation in the style of a nocturne and a bravura scherzo that brings the piece to an exciting conclusion.

Barber’s Piano Sonata has an extraordinary pedigree, being commissioned by two of the great American song writers, Irving Berlin and Richard Rodgers, and premiered by the legendary pianist Vladimir Horowitz. This monumental work shows the more modern dimension of Barber’s writing, employing techniques such as 12-tone rows – arranging all of the notes within an octave (both the black and the white notes, on a piano keyboard) into a fixed order – and bitonality. In the first movement the writing is often gritty and angular with passages of thunderous virtuosity contrasted with moments of wistful lyricism. The delightful second movement creates a sense of lighthearted playfulness with its sparkling textures, alternating beat patterns and unexpected turns. By contrast, the slow third movement is a concentrated, somewhat mournful piece of sustained intensity. Barber’s interest in Bach’s keyboard music seems to be an influence in this movement, as well as in the finale which begins in a highly-charged, fugal style with virtuosic toccata-like writing throughout.

Chopin’s first piano sonata was written while he was still a student in Warsaw, and was not published during the composer’s lifetime. The serene Larghetto movement foreshadows his enormous success writing nocturnes. The piece is written with five beats per bar, creating for the listener a subtle disorientation around the phrasing, but this was not an experiment Chopin ever repeated.

For Thomas Misson’s Convocations, see page 07.

In contrast to these rarely heard works, the Scherzo No. 2 is one of Chopin’s most popular compositions. It is full of drama and pianistic flair with striking contrasts between explosive virtuosity, long lyrical melodies and a quietly elegiac middle section. The excitement builds with gripping intensity throughout the coda, propelling the music towards a thrilling conclusion.