29th Singapore International Piano Festival

S IN G A P OR E SY MP HON Y ORC HE S T R A

THE SINGAPORE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA 2023/24 SE ASON JULY 2023 – JUNE 2024

Featuring Chloe Chua, Julian Bliss, Mischa Maisky, Han-na Chang, Leonidas Kavakos, Rudolf Buchbinder, Paul Lewis, Chloë Hanslip, Andrew Arthur, Jukka-Pekka Saraste and more.

Photo: Sloth Creatives

SSO.ORG.SG

MESSAGE FROM THE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

L I M YA N

A very warm welcome to the 2023 Singapore International Piano Festival.

This year marks the centenary of the birth of Hungarian composer György Ligeti; and to celebrate this occasion, I am delighted to present Pierre-Laurent Aimard, arguably the world’s leading interpreter of the music of Ligeti (and Messiaen – but that will have to be for a future season!). Mr Aimard’s programme features an intriguing juxtaposition of Beethoven’s bagatelles and Ligeti’s Musica Ricercata, and finishes with a selection of Ligeti’s innovative and fiendish Etudes for piano – revered and feared in equal measure by pianists and piano students everywhere.

Before ascending the Devil’s Staircase, however, the festival kicks off with rather more familiar favourites by Chopin and Liszt performed by Nelson Goerner, originally slated to appear at the 2020 Festival. The second recital showcases the electrifying young talent of Tengku Irfan in a thoughtful and mature programme, which also – touchingly – includes a piece by his wife, Singaporean composer Koh Cheng Jin. The intelligent musicianship and musical scholarship of Jonathan Biss completes this year’s line-up. Mr Biss is perhaps bestknown for his deep study of the music of Beethoven and Schumann; and his series of video lectures on the complete Beethoven piano sonatas – accessible on Coursera – remains a most valuable and insightful commentary on this pillar of the repertory.

When informed of this year’s roster, one of my predecessors (as Artistic Director) was so excited he bounced a full foot clear of his seat! – I hope that you, too, will share our enthusiasm and have an exhilarating experience at SIPF 2023.

Lim Yan Artistic Director

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AT A G L A N C E

Digital Events on

Live Events

3 J U N , S AT

8 JUN, THU

Leon McCawley | 8pm

Nelson Goerner

Works by Haydn, Mozart and Schubert

7.30pm | Victoria Concert Hall Works by Chopin and Liszt

4 JUN, SUN 9 JUN, FRI

Shaun Choo | 8pm Works by Beethoven, Chopin, J.S. Bach, Busoni, Schubert, Strauss and Shaun Choo

Masterclass by Jonathan Biss

3.30pm | Victoria Concert Hall Dance Studio

Tengku Irfan S I P F F E S T I VA L P A S S : $ 8

• Access to both SIPF digital recitals • Unlimited access for 3 months • Bonus material from the Playback archives • Watch from anywhere in the world

7.30pm | Victoria Concert Hall Works by Beethoven, Fauré, Koh Cheng Jin, Schumann and Villa-Lobos

1 0 J U N , S AT

Masterclass by Tengku Irfan

1pm | Victoria Concert Hall Dance Studio

Talk by Pierre-Laurent Aimard 12 M A L L - AC C E S S PA S S: $ 3 0

5pm | Victoria Concert Hall Dance Studio

Jonathan Biss • Access to both SIPF digital recitals • 10+ new Singapore Symphony Orchestra releases every year • Full access to the Playback archives • Watch from anywhere in the world

7.30pm | Victoria Concert Hall Works by Schubert, Schumann, Mozart, Kurtág and Beethoven

11 J U N , S U N

Pierre-Laurent Aimard

7.30pm | Victoria Concert Hall Works by Ligeti, Beethoven, Debussy and Chopin Find out more

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8 JUN 2023, THU VICTORIA CONCERT HALL

NELSON GOERNER

CHOPIN

Ballade No. 1 in G minor, Op. 23 10’00 Ballade No. 2 in F major, Op. 38 7’00 Ballade No. 3 in A-flat major, Op. 47 8’00 Ballade No. 4 in F minor, Op. 52 12’00

Intermission 20'00 LISZT

Sonata in B minor, S.178 30’00

Concert Duration: approximately 1 hr 40 mins (with 20 mins intermission) • There will be a post-concert autograph session with Nelson Goerner.

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NELSON GOERNER

Nelson Goerner is one of the world’s greatest classical pianists, praised for his performances of the highest art and poetry.

In the 2022/23 season he performs at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Paris; Victoria Hall, Geneva; Hamarikyu Asahi Hall, Tokyo; Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon; Sociedad Filarmónica de Bilbao and deSingel, Antwerp as well as at the La Roque d’Anthéron, Enescu Festival, Pianos aux Jacobins and Singapore International Piano Festival.

Nelson Goerner has performed with many of the world’s major orchestras. In the 2022/23 season, he performs with the Hamburg, Malmö and Antwerp Symphony Orchestras, as well as the New Japan Philharmonic and Hallé Orchestras.

A keen chamber musician, Goerner regularly collaborates with Martha Argerich, Steven Isserlis and Gary Hoffman. The 2022/23 season will see Goerner perform recitals with Renaud Capuçon, Sol Gabetta and Tedi Papavrami.

Goerner has a strong relationship with the Mozarteum Argentino in Buenos Aires and enjoys a long association with the Chopin Institute in Warsaw, where he is a member of the artistic advisory committee. He has released several albums of unusual repertoire on the Institute’s own record label with several Diapason d’Or awards.

Goerner records predominantly for Alpha Classics. Accolades include: Gramophone Editor’s Choice for his Brahms, Diapason d’Or of the Year for his Debussy; BBC Music Magazine’s Recording of the Month for his Schumann album; Choc de Classica and Diapason d’Or for his Chopin Preludes album; plus resounding critical acclaim for his recording of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata. He has been awarded the “Gloria Artis” Award, the foremost cultural distinction in Poland, and has also received the Konex Platinum Prize by the Konex Foundation in Buenos Aires in 2019.

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FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN (1810 – 1849)

Ballade No. 1 in G minor, Op. 23 was written in Paris during 1835-1836 and dedicated to Monsieur le Baron de Stockhausen. All four ballades are written in some form of triple meter, except for the introduction and the coda of this Ballade. The largo introduction makes a declamatory beginning to the work in the Neapolitan key with parallel octaves, before morphing itself into the first theme, a wistful waltz. This theme centres the work, as it does not vary much the three times it recurs. This is unlike the second theme which is also presented three times, each iteration a vastly different character. It is first heard as a tender bel canto, then a victorious outcry backed up with a rich chordal texture, and finally a deeply passionate song that is swept along with an arpeggiated accompaniment. A thunderous passage of parallel sixths launches the turbulent coda with an untamable energy.

The seemingly innocent waltz of the first theme turns into a last desperate plea, whereupon the work collapses into a catastrophic conclusion.

There is speculation that this Ballade is linked to the romantic-heroic tale told by Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz in Konrad Wallenrod.

However, Chopin did not conceive his ballades to correspond to any specific narrative; he believed that each told their own story.

Chopin’s genius lay in subtle transitions and hidden connections. The Ballade No. 2 in F major, Op. 38, written in Nohant and Majorca and completed in 1839, is a testament to that.

From a simple opening of a repeated note in unison octaves, the first theme unravels. It is a sicilienne-like motif that embodies a peaceful lilt. A highly charged middle episode introduces

Ballade No. 3 in A-flat major, Op. 47 was composed in 1840-1841 and dedicated to Mademoiselle Pauline de Noailles. This Ballade is different from the rest due to its bright sonorities and optimism. The work is woven from two principal themes of contrasting character. The first, announced at the outset, is a lyrical melody in the right hand echoed by antiphonal responses in the left hand.

This pattern of two voices expanding out in opposite directions from a central point later intensifies into celebratory cadences and ecstatic arpeggios across the registers. The second theme signals a complete change in atmosphere with a dance-like character, outlined by a series of coquettish leaps. As the work develops, the second theme undergoes considerable development through intricate figuration that weaves above it and then resonantly rumbles below. In the climax, the first theme reappears triumphantly with flamboyant chords to back it. The waltz escalates in energy before a brilliant descending run, with four resolute chords to finish the work.

Many consider the last of Chopin’s ballades, Ballade No. 4 in F minor, Op. 52, composed in 1842 in Paris and Nohant and dedicated to Madame la Baronne C. de Rothschild, to be the pinnacle of his career. The innocent bell-like opening is a benign façade to what ensues. This unfolds into a melancholic waltz, the work’s first theme. The repeated bell tones first heard in the opening are still heard here, except with more urgency. The second theme, a gently rocking barcarolle brings consolation and even a touch of lightness to the story. As both themes develop throughout the work, the texture becomes increasingly rich and

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NELSON GOERNER

Chopin’s Ballades are the first known works written for piano bearing this title. They stand out from the rest of Chopin’s oeuvre as they effortlessly unite musical narrative and technical virtuosity, thus allowing the composer to manipulate form through unfolding drama. This compelling set of four paved the way for later composers such as Liszt and Brahms to further experiment on and to compose ballades of their own.

a dramatic second theme in the bass, with patterns in both hands surging like tumultuous currents in opposing directions. Both themes return with more development but are finally stamped out by an aggressive coda. We are hurled around by this macabre waltz but are forced to stop abruptly at the highest point of tension. The work ends hauntingly with one last echo of a single phrase of the main theme in a minor mode, leaving anticipation and apprehension lingering tangibly in the air.

NELSON GOERNER

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polyphonically intricate. Harmonic modulations and resonances foreshadow both Wagner and Debussy. The Coda erupts shockingly after five almost silent, heavenly chords. With hellbent fury, the work is driven to an apocalyptic conclusion. Like the Third Ballade, the Fourth Ballade also ends with four chords, except here they speak of an ending of inevitable tragedy.

FRANZ LISZT (1811 – 1886) Sonata in B minor, S.178 Liszt was a human being of astounding complexity and his music mirrored that individuality. Wearing his heart on his sleeves, one can hear in his output sounds that span the demonic, saintly, noble and passionate. The Sonata in B minor, S.178, reflects these qualities. It needs no analysis to be appreciated, but upon examination, is found to be one of monumental and intricate architecture.

To follow the narrative in this sonata, one needs to trace the shape-shifting that occurs across four major themes. The first theme opens the work desolately, with a pair of slow, descending scales, tonally ambiguous in the piano’s bass.

The second theme boldly befalls, hammered out in double octaves and ending with a diminished 7th sneer of an arpeggio. The third theme answers in the bass with a growling persistence, rife with repeated notes. These ideas vie with each other, resulting in a fascinating fabric of keyboard textures, all motivically interlinked, until the final theme appears. This is a grandiose major-key theme accompanied by chords that pulsate and emanate warm courage, a true apotheosis of the heroism behind Romanticism; whilst the other themes in this work undergo continuous motivic development, this theme remains relentlessly unchanged in its reappearances, other than in brief minor-key manifestations.

From this point on, the themes listed above undergo countless transformations. The listener traverses a vast emotional range, from manic rage to loving tenderness, from a diabolical

psyche to a humane struggle. The third theme, initially heard in the bass as a persistent growling transcends into a Liebestraum-like lyrical melody. The bold theme in double octaves is tamed into intellectual expression in an extended fugato. The grandiose theme abandons its dignity with rhetorical questions in the minor mode. Meanwhile, the slow descending scales that opened the work recur as boundary markers separating major sectional divisions.

Liszt had dedicated this work to his fellow composer Schumann, but when his wife Clara Schumann first heard it in 1854, she said the piece made her “feel utterly wretched”, called it “nothing but sheer racket” and lamented that “now I still have to thank him (Liszt)”. Over time, as performers and audiences decoded this indelible experiment on how far the piano sonata can be taken, this masterpiece has become a staple of piano repertoire.

Programme notes by Khoo Hui Ling

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9 JUN 2023, FRI VICTORIA CONCERT HALL

T EN G KU I RFA N

BEETHOVEN Sonata No. 22 in F major, Op. 54 10’00 FAURÉ Thème et variations, Op. 73 13’00 KOH CHENG JIN Tota pulchra es 5’00 ASIAN PREMIERE Intermission 20'00 SCHUMANN VILLA-LOBOS

Fantasie in C, Op. 17 35’00 Rudepoêma 19’00

Concert Duration: approximately 2 hrs (with 20 mins intermission) • There will be a post-concert autograph session with Tengku Irfan.

• Masterclass: 10 Jun, 1pm at the Victoria Concert Hall Dance Studio.

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T EN G KU I RFA N

Malaysian-born Tengku Irfan has appeared around the world as a pianist, conductor, and composer, and has been praised by The New York Times as “eminently cultured” and possessing “sheer incisiveness and power”. Irfan has performed with orchestras worldwide with conductors Claus Peter Flor, Neeme Järvi, Kristjan Järvi, David Robertson, Robert Spano, Osmo Vänskä, George Stelluto, Jeffrey Milarsky, among others.

Other performance highlights include the Juilliard Orchestra, AXIOM, Singapore Symphony Orchestra, Sao Paulo State Youth Orchestra, Estonian National Symphony Orchestra, Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra, Aspen Chamber Symphony, MDR Sinfonieorchester, Minnesota Orchestra, among others. Irfan won the Aspen Music Festival Prokofiev Piano Concerto No. 2 Competition in 2013, and was resident pianist of the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble for four consecutive years since 2014.

As a composer, Irfan has garnered three ASCAP Morton Gould Awards and a Charlotte Bergen Award with premieres by orchestras such as the New York Philharmonic, Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra, the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, Peoria Symphony Orchestra and the MDR Sinfonieorchester. Ever since his conducting debut with the MusicaNova Orchestra, he has conducted the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra for their 20th Anniversary Gala Concert, and was appointed the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra Youth Ambassador.

He was the runner-up and audience prize winner of the Los Angeles Conducting Competition in 2021.

Irfan was a double major in piano & composition at the Juilliard School, where he studied piano with Yoheved Kaplinsky, and composition with Ira Taxin and Robert Beaser. Currently, he is studying orchestral conducting with David Robertson at Juilliard. He is a proud recipient of the Juilliard School Kovner Fellowship Award.

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GABRIEL FAURÉ (1845 – 1924)

Sonata No. 22 in F major, Op. 54

Thème et variations, Op. 73

I. In tempo d'un menuetto II. Allegretto — Più allegro

Thème et variations, Op. 73 is one of Fauré’s most notable piano works. Described by pianist Alfred Cortot as the composer’s “most important composition both in actual dimensions and in character and beauty”, it is considered a classic by the French. In September 1895, Fauré wrote to a friend, “... I'm in the throes of writing the last variation… I don't know whether it's a good piece but I don’t imagine I'll surprise you if I say it's very difficult.” The result was one of the composer’s most celebrated and extended piano works.

Written in the height of Beethoven’s heroic period, this miniature sonata falls right between the composer’s monumental Waldstein and Appassionata sonatas, with the Eroica Symphony lurking nearby. Unlike its neighbouring sonatas, the Piano Sonata Op. 54, of modest aims and proportions, only has two movements.

Billed as a minuet, the first movement is a rondo form intended to have characteristics of a minuet. The outset of this sonata presents an amiable and ruminative theme lifting up from the bass but is later starkly contrasted and enlivened by sudden sforzandi that unsettle the normal metrical pattern. The climax occurs in the coda with a fusion of these two contrasting musical ideas, especially the surprising preeminence of the more dainty minuet.

The second movement is a perpetuum mobile that sounds more like an etude or toccata. It begins with dolce sixteenth-note arpeggios that constantly propel this movement forward. It finally ends with a fast Coda, annotated Più allegro.

The theme is a restrained, fateful and noble march, a close similarity to Schumann’s theme in his Études Symphoniques, Op. 13. Modally inflected, in a rhythmically repetitive pattern and configured with accents on weak beats of the bar. We hear Fauré’s fondness for bass lines.

Eleven variations follow, starting out with simple textural elaborations, but soon developing into further expressive lyricism and rhythmic complexities through techniques of counterpoint and fragmentation. Typical of Fauré, he avoids ending with a bombastic crowd-pleasing variation, but brilliantly exits softly, in a final meditative variation with enigmatic harmonic changes and lyrical tranquility in the major mode. As Robert Orledge writes in his biography of the composer, “It raises the whole work onto a higher, almost religious plane … the chorale rises from its serenity to a climax of transcendental intensity, making the flashy excitement of the penultimate variation seem trivial in comparison.”

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TENGKU IRFA N

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770 – 1827)

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KOH CHENG JIN (b. 1996)

TENGKU IRFA N

Tota pulchra es ASIAN PREMIERE This brief miniature is inspired by the 4th century Catholic Prayer of the same name, which speaks of the immaculate conception of The Virgin Mary. Religion aside, I wanted

to portray the contrasting notions of sin and salvation: The first section represents temptation and frivolity, while the second stands as a simple but sincere plea for redemption. The overall atmosphere of the slower section can be characterised by the serene prayer Tota pulchra es.

Tota pulchra es, Maria.

Et macula originalis non est in Te. Tota pulchra es, Maria.

Et macula originalis non est in Te. Tu gloria Ierusalem.

Tu laetitia Israel.

Tu honorificentia populi nostri.

Tu advocata peccatorum.

You are all beautiful, Mary, and the original stain of sin is not in you.

You are all beautiful, Mary, and the original stain of sin is not in you.

You are the glory of Jerusalem, you are the joy of Israel, you give honour to our people.

You are an advocate of sinners.

O Maria, O Maria.

Virgo prudentissima.

Mater clementissima.

Ora pro nobis.

Intercede pro nobis.

Ad Dominum Iesum Christum.

O Mary, O Mary, Virgin most intelligent, Mother most merciful.

Pray for us, Plead for us, To the Lord Jesus Christ.

HEITOR VILLA-LOBOS (1887 – 1959)

Fantasie in C, Op. 17

Rudepoêma

I.

Born in Rio in 1887, Villa-Lobos adapted Brazilian style and popular music to a classical Western Europe mold. He relished above all the motoric rhythms and melodic cells of his Latin American culture. He wrote Rudepoêma between 1921 and 1926, during his first residency in Paris. It became one of his paramount masterpieces for solo piano, and one of the most impressive and complicated compositions in the entire piano literature. He dedicated this complex work to Polish pianist Arthur Rubinstein, who also became a lifelong friend of the composer. The dedication of the score reads,

Durchaus fantastisch und leidenschaftlich vorzutragen; Im Legenden-Ton II. Mäßig. Durchaus energisch III. Langsam getragen. Durchweg leise zu halten.

Never one for disguising his emotions, Robert Schumann wore his heart on his sleeve, and in his music. Fantasie in C, composed in 1836, is a culmination of passion, virtuosity and delicacy, all in the name of love. It was intended as a tribute to Beethoven and eventually dedicated to Franz Liszt.

Schumann wrote to Clara in March 1838: “The first movement of the Fantasie is the most passionate I have ever composed; it is a profound lament on your account.”

Composed under the stimulus of such worldembracing emotions, it is rapturous and passionate in nature, featuring spontaneous flow of soaring melodies and swirling rhapsodic accompaniments.

The second movement is a riveting march of gargantuan technical demands. Cast in a classical rondo form, the forthright opening theme is contrasted with material in a pervasive dotted rhythm, alternating with contrasting episodes. The movement then reaches its zenith in the exhilarating coda, whose simultaneous leaps would give even the most practiced virtuoso some anxious moments.

The last movement is sublimely beautiful and intimate. A poetic reverie unfolds through melodic intimations, hymnal elements, and evocative harmonies – a dreamscape in suspended time. The coda is a euphoric declaration, gradually increasing in speed, before pulling back to Adagio in preparation for the peaceful and quiet finish.

“My sincere friend, I do not know if I have been able to put all of your spirit into the Rudepoêma, but I am honestly able to say that, as far as I can tell, I have caught your true temperament on paper as I might have done with an intimate snapshot. Hence, if I have succeeded, it will be you in fact who will have been the real composer of this work.”

The composer’s dedication suggests how extensively Rubinstein has influenced him as a composer, as well as the composition of this work. Rudepoêma is rhapsodic in style – a single movement with no clear repetition of thematic material. The composer incorporated multiple Brazilian sources, African polyrhythms, material displacement and even dances such as tango and samba. Filled with harmonic inventiveness, contrasted rhythms and dynamic tempo changes, it was as though the composer drew a musical portrait of his friend and great admirer. The piece is a reflection and portrayal of Rubinstein’s fascinating and colourful personality.

Programme notes by Lin Tonglin, and Koh Cheng Jin (Tota pulchra es)

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TENGKU IRFA N

ROBERT SCHUMANN (1810 – 1856)

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1 0 J U N 2 0 2 3 , S AT VICTORIA CONCERT HALL

J O N AT H A N B I S S

SCHUBERT SCHUMANN

Four Impromptus, D.935, Op. 142 30’00 Theme and Variations in E-flat major, WoO 24 “Geistervariationen” (“Ghost Variations”) 15’00

Intermission 20'00 MOZART KURTÁG BEETHOVEN

Rondo in A minor, K. 511 10’00 Selections from Játékok “Games” 9’00 Sonata No. 31 in A-flat major, Op. 110 20’00

Concert Duration: approximately 2 hrs (with 20 mins intermission) • There will be a post-concert autograph session with Jonathan Biss.

• Masterclass: 9 Jun, 3.30pm at the Victoria Concert Hall Dance Studio.

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J O N AT H A N B I S S

Jonathan Biss is a world-renowned pianist who channels his deep musical curiosity into performances and projects in the concert hall and beyond. In addition to performing with today’s leading orchestras, he continues to expand his reputation as a teacher, musical thinker, and one of the great Beethoven interpreters of our time. He is Co-Artistic Director alongside Mitsuko Uchida at the Marlboro Music Festival. He also recently led a massive open online course (MOOC) via Coursera, reaching an international audience of over 150,000. Biss writes extensively on his repertoire and has authored four audio- and e-books, including UNQUIET: My Life with Beethoven (2020), the first Audible Original by a classical musician and one of Audible’s top audiobooks of 2020.

During the 2022/23 season, Biss gives solo recitals in cities including Cologne, New York, Sydney, and Philadelphia, performing works by Berg, Schumann, and Schubert; he performs Beethoven trios with Midori and cellist Antoine Lederlin in Cologne, Hamburg, London, and Tokyo; and appears as soloist with the Atlanta Symphony, Concerto Budapest, Melbourne Symphony and the Rochester Philharmonic, as well as with the New York String Orchestra at Carnegie Hall playing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 (“Emperor”).

Biss has been recognised with numerous honors, including the Leonard Bernstein Award presented at the 2005 Schleswig-Holstein Festival, Wolf Trap’s Shouse Debut Artist Award, the Andrew Wolf Memorial Chamber Music Award, Lincoln Center’s Martin E. Segal Award, an Avery Fisher Career Grant, the 2003 Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award, and a 2002 Gilmore Young Artist Award. His albums for EMI won the Diapason d’Or de l’Année and Edison awards.

Jonathanbiss.com Jonathanbiss

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FRANZ SCHUBERT (1797 – 1828)

J O N AT H A N B I S S

Four Impromptus, D.935, Op. 142 • • • •

No. 1 in F minor No. 2 in A-flat major No. 3 in B-flat major No. 4 in F minor

Schubert’s genius was equally well-suited to the epic scale and to the miniature. In piano sonatas and chamber music works of 40 minutes or longer, he takes existing forms and expands them, testing their natural limits and turning digression into a sublime art; in hundreds of lieder, each no more than a few minutes long, he pierces and, in some case, shatters your heart with a single change of harmony or turn of phrase.

The Four Impromptus, D.935 occupy a middle ground. Already deeply moving when heard individually, they become something greater when experienced in their entirety. Written exactly a year before Schubert’s death at the age of 31 (consider it: 935 pieces of music written by the age of 30), the successive tonalities, forms, and moods of these four freestanding pieces suggest a grand sonata in F minor.

However, freed from the strictures of the word “sonata” and the long shadow it — and Beethoven’s 32 towering examples of the form — casts, Schubert’s imagination becomes even more uninhibited, the results even more wondrous. The first Impromptu is not a sonata form; it has no development.

Instead, its expected two themes — the first tragic, the second consoling but still so full of sorrow — are supplemented by an unexpected third. Marked pianissimo appassionato, it is many seemingly contradictory things at once: fervent, mysterious, urgent, halting, haunting.

Its effect is transformative: when it is followed by the return of the Impromptu’s opening idea, it has moved away from defiance and towards resignation. Acceptance is still a long way off, but the fight has been revealed to be futile.

The second piece, an Allegretto, is quintessential Schubert: evocative of a Viennese dance, perhaps a ländler, in an A-flat major that is somehow more deeply sad than the F minor music that preceded it, and so simple on its surface that any attempt to explain how profoundly moving it is would be doomed to failure. If the first Impromptu is discursive, taking the listener down a wandering and unpredictable path, this one takes a very different route to the sublime, using an unadorned A-B-A form, the simplest in all of music. Not one of its motivic or harmonic events is jarring; few of them are unexpected. In spite or because of this sense of inevitability, the music finds the core of Schubert’s vulnerability, and ours.

The third Impromptu has another kind of deceptive simplicity, its lilting B-flat major theme falling and then rising in perfect symmetry: a child’s poem. But over the course of five wide-ranging variations, it develops into something different. Even the variations which merely embellish the theme somehow deepen it in the process; Schubert is constitutionally incapable of writing meaningless music, and every appoggiatura, every neighbor tone, shades and complicates the music’s narrative. That narrative is further complicated by the journey two of the variations take away from the B-flat major home, first to B-flat minor, then to G-flat major. The former is often dark and always suffused with sehnsucht — longing. (Sehnsucht is the central fact of Schubert’s existence. A line from Die Taubenpost, his final song — “Sie heißt die Sehnsucht” [“She is called longing”] — could be considered his motto.) The latter tries to be light-hearted, doesn’t quite manage, and in the process only grows more sehnsuchtsvoll: a Schubert signature. Almost every bar features a series of large upward leaps, a gesture that would be carefree in any other pair of hands.

But even when Schubert yodels, he does so mit Sehnsucht.

The end of the last variation is not the end of the Impromptu; there is a partial reprise of the theme, in a lower octave and at a slower tempo.

The final Impromptu returns to F minor and is another study in surface lightness that is not, in fact, light. Marked Allegro Scherzando, its predominant characteristic is not playfulness.

Eely in its misterioso middle section, featuring pianissimo scales slithering up and down the keyboard, it is otherwise steely, staring fate in the eye and showing no remorse. If the first Impromptu ended with resignation but not acceptance, the last exhibits neither: it ends with a fortississimo downward scale, spanning the entire piano and landing on a single, terrible, low F. Schubert’s extraordinary gift for lyricism and consolation is matched — balanced is not the word — by the intensity with which he confronted the pain of life and the horror of death. In these Impromptus, both qualities are given magnificent expression. But it is the horror that gets the last word.

ROBERT SCHUMANN (1810 – 1856) Theme and Variations in E-flat major, WoO 24 “Geistervariationen” (“Ghost Variations”) • • • • • •

Theme Variation I Variation II Variation III Variation IV Variation V

In the early hours of February 17th, 1854, Schumann composed a theme in E-flat major; by the 23rd, he had written five variations on it.

On the 27th, he made revisions and wrote out a clean copy of the work.

On the 26th, he threw himself into the Rhine.

He survived, obviously. But within days he was moved to an asylum where he spent the last two terrible years of his life. The relationship between Schumann’s creativity and his mental illness is a difficult subject: necessarily and

maddeningly speculative at best, voyeuristic and demeaning at worst. The only thing that is clear is that the Variations in E-flat major — often called Geistervariationen, or Ghost Variations — are an astonishingly moving product of a life’s waning edge. Schumann’s inspiration — genius, if you prefer, and in this case, I do — is intact; it is the vitality that has been drained from him. With certain of Schumann’s qualities no longer present, some of his greatest and most distinctive ones — his inwardness, his poetry, his ability to access and express his most private self — are heightened.

If you give yourself over to the piece, without judgment for what it is not — brilliant, certainly, or even much interested in its listener — the experience is profound and profoundly unsettling. We do not normally visit these places.

In the period in which Schumann wrote these variations, he believed that angels and demons were playing music for him. This particular theme, he said, came from Schubert — the most angelic of the angels. Schumann must have loved it very much — a reimagined version became the main theme of the equally moving slow movement of his violin concerto.

It is Schubert through the lens of Schumann: more fragile, less sure-footed. Often, it lingers, finding a particular note or suspension difficult to let go of; even when it does not, not much happens. It is less an expression of simplicity (of which Schubert was perhaps the supreme master), more an expression of intimacy. Its many upward intervals reach for something that remains unreachable.

The variations, too, have journeys but not destinations, desires but not fulfillments. Often, they are little more than the theme itself — presented in cannon, one voice trailing after another, or encircled by moving notes that try to give the theme a liveliness that is not in its nature. But this paucity of events has the effect of heightening the meaning of everything that does happen. Each altered interval, each suspension makes us hold our breath: we feel that the effort is costing Schumann lifeblood.

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It now bears the weight of its history — a history it did not have when we first heard it, only ten minutes earlier. It has lost its innocence and grown even more beautiful.

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Schubert and Schumann are our two greatest poets of solitude; to hear their music is to know what it means to be alone. But the aloneness of Schubert and of Schumann are different things.

Schubert’s is the aloneness of a person who never truly shared his life with another person.

Schumann, by contrast, did share his life with another person — and what a person! But in spite of this, in spite of his extraordinary bond with Clara Wieck, in spite of her willingness to marry and share her life with him, and in doing so, to make her talent and creativity and ambition subservient to his needs — the needs of his fragile mental state and compositional genius and male ego — he remained alone.

Schumann’s aloneness is the aloneness that will not be assuaged. The aloneness of a person who wants to be known, but is terribly frightened of it.

Clara, too, was frightened at the prospect of Schumann being known. Frightened for herself, surely, but also frightened for him. After he dedicated the Geistervariationen to her, she suppressed its publication: she was so afraid that it would reveal his weakness, she could not hear how it revealed his essence. Finally published in 1939, we need not make the same mistake. A window this deep into the soul of a great artist is a rare gift; we should accept it with gratitude, and go with him into the darkness and the light.

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756 – 1791) Rondo in A minor, K. 511 Mozart is the most objective of the great composers. Neither an optimist nor a pessimist, Mozart is simply a realist — a stenographer of emotion. If this sounds cold, the results are anything but. Mozart’s mind is so omniscient, his understanding of psychology is so sophisticated — and, of course, his mastery of his craft is so staggering — he can convey, in sound, the changeability and illogic of human feeling and the frequent stupidity of human behaviour in a way that is both unnervingly

precise and deeply moving. With a single harmonic shift, he can move from exhilaration to melancholy; with another, he can leave the melancholy behind, laughing or shrugging it off.

His music, like our inner lives, is in a constant state of flux.

What, then, accounts for the Rondo in A minor, K. 511? For the entirety of its ten devastating minutes, it drops any hint of third-person remove, and for the great majority of them, it conveys a profound, inescapable grief.

Written early in 1787, when Mozart was 31, no biographical detail helps explain its genesis.

The E minor Violin Sonata, K. 304 and the A minor Piano Sonata, K. 310, are similarly uninterrupted expressions of anguish — but they come in the immediate aftermath of the unexpected and likely preventable death of Mozart’s mother, whom he adored. By contrast, the beginning of 1787 was a relatively happy and stable time in Mozart’s complicated life.

The motivation for the A minor Rondo is as inexplicable as is the devastating impact it has on the listener.

The A minor Rondo is extraordinary among Mozart’s works not only for its singlemindedness, but for its extreme compression.

This is a function not primarily of the density of its events, but of the notes themselves: this is surely the most chromatic work Mozart ever composed. This produces countless points of tension — the intervals that open the first and second measures of the piece are so uncomfortable, they produce a physical sensation in the body. But equally, this chromaticism conveys a difficulty in moving, the sense of being stuck, trapped. The notes are too close together; the effort in rising a mere fifth, as happens over two full measures in the first phrase, is so exhausting, the only possible response is to fall back down to where we started. It is a declaration of hopelessness, just moments into the piece.

For all the ways in which the a minor Rondo is atypical, it is vintage Mozart in that it owes so much to the world of opera. This is less a question of the vocal quality in it — achingly

Bleaker still is the coda. As is so often the case with Mozart’s codas, it draws its power in part from its superfluousness; Mozart has already said everything that needs saying. But he is not finished. Incorporating suggestions of the two major-key episodes, and transforming them into music as desolate and oppressive as the rest of the piece, he then brings the opening idea back one last time. It is chromatic as ever, but shortened to a mere fragment, as if the effort required to play the phrase in its entirety is by now simply impossible. This fragment was once a beginning, an invitation to more music; it has now become an answer, a devastating confirmation that the grief will not assuaged. All that can follow it is a two-note pianissimo cadence, the ultimate expression of resignation, bringing this singular masterwork to a whispered, shattering close.

GYÖRGY KURTÁG (b. 1926) Selections from Játékok “Games” Go to YouTube and you will find, alongside the makeup tutorials and the woodworking demonstrations and the professionally enraged people screaming about all sorts of things, a curious treasure: two rather small octogenarians sit at an upright piano in Budapest, playing the music of Bach. Arms intermingled, minds and souls seemingly inextricable from one another, their concentration is absolute but serene. As they play, the last three centuries and all of life’s practical concerns fall away. Bach is there.

These are Márta and György Kurtág. Each is a profound example of what a life lived through music can be; that they found one another is a miracle. Márta, sadly, is no longer living, but György, now in his 98th year, remains one of the essential musicians of our time, and one of the great composers.

Kurtág’s ability to realise his singular musical vision should be credited in large part to two women. The first, of course, is Márta, who for the 62 years that they were married provided both infinite support and an intellectual and creative mirror. The other is the dedicatee of his String Quartet, Op. 1, the psychologist Marianne Stein. The downside of an attunement to the greatest music of the past as deep as Kurtág’s is that it can be paralysing: by the age of 30, Kurtág was in a depression and unable to compose. Stein not only lifted him from the depression, she provided him with an aesthetic path forward. As Kurtág himself encapsulated her message to him: “Simplicity allows for direct, personal expression.” The scope was no longer the point; the absolute truth of the idea and the precision with which it was expressed was what mattered. In the many decades since Stein helped Kurtág towards this revelation, he has produced thousands of works, most of them only minutes or even seconds long, each of them revelatory in their honesty and in their intellectual and emotional depth.

The Játékok (“Games”) exemplify this. They are a compendium of characteristically tiny pieces, begun in 1973 and by now comprising ten volumes. As the name would suggest, they were conceived, at least in part, as a holistic and joyous instructional manual for young pianists.

A surprising number of the great composers have written works that are explicitly for children (though, like the best children’s books and films, also richly rewarding for adults): Bach, Schumann, Bartók, just for starters. But Kurtág’s contribution to this genre is unique, both for the breadth of its imagination, and for the profundity he finds in simplicity. These works exhaust (and then expand) the encyclopedia of sonorities the piano can produce, but the

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beautiful though it is — and more a function of how deeply attuned Mozart is to how the piece works as a narrative. As the name “Rondo” would imply, its principal material is twice interrupted by a contrasting episode. Both episodes are in the major mode, bringing, if not actual hope, then the possibility of hope; both lead back to the A minor music of the opening by way of a transitional passage even more claustrophobically chromatic than the main theme itself. These brief windows into a less bleak world make the one we come back to ever bleaker.

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sonorities themselves are never the point: they are the building blocks of poetry that is emotionally pure and wryly witty.

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Kurtág dedicates many of these pieces to the memory of people no longer living – some of them friends, but more often, composers of the past. His music is in constant conversation with theirs. To listen to the Játékok is to deepen your connection not only to their author, but to the hundreds of years of a musical tradition that lives on with him.

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770 – 1827) Sonata No. 31 in A-flat major, Op. 110 I. Moderato cantabile molto espressivo II. Allegro molto III. Adagio ma non troppo – Allegro ma non troppo In 1821, Beethoven was 50 years old. Not yet an old man, he was the most revered composer in Europe; he was also a tragic figure, and a pathetic one. Functionally deaf, suffering from rheumatic fever, jaundice and gastrointestinal distress, and mired in a thoroughly ugly dispute with his brother’s family, he ended up spending a night in jail that summer through a set of circumstances both extraordinary and entirely in character: having gotten lost while on a walk and carrying no identification, he grew so hungry he started looking through the windows of private houses and was apprehended by the police, who would not believe that this hapless, unkempt man could be The Great Beethoven.

It is indeed beyond comprehension that this person, at this point in his life, could compose the Sonata in A-flat major, Op. 110. That this person who, on account of both a miserable run of luck and the core of his character, had absolutely no mastery of any aspect of his life, could produce a work of surpassing rigor and transcendent vision. That Beethoven, whose life was an encyclopedia of disappointments, could conceive of a piece of music that, in spite of moments of utter despair, retains its idealism

and ends in absolute euphoria. To say that what he achieved with this work in the face of overwhelming obstacles is inspiring would be totally insufficient. Op. 110 is life-giving and life-changing.

Like so many of Beethoven’s late works, the scope of Op. 110 expands as it progresses: the sonata begins with great beauty but no hint of the grandeur to come. The opening theme is marked “sanft” — like all the best German words, it is untranslatable, but somewhere near its core is “gentleness.” This gentleness, this softness of texture immediately opens the heart but conceals the enormous ambition of the journey we have just embarked on.

Beginning a work that aims for the infinite with such modesty feels fitting, for Op. 110 is altogether a sonata of paradoxes. While it conveys great generosity and contains some of the most sheerly beautiful music Beethoven ever wrote, it is a remarkably tight construction — less than 20 minutes long, with not a note wasted. That “sanft” opening theme — a very deliberate climb, each upward step followed by a smaller downward one — is not just the first movement’s main motive: pared down, it will become the subject of the fugal finale.

The notes remain practically the same, but the emotional transformation will be enormous: from amabile, to philosophical, to utterly ecstatic.

If the first movement is somewhat compact, the second is dramatically so: barely two minutes from start to finish, this scherzo (in the “wrong” meter of 2/4) has a concentrated intensity that is equal parts controlled fury and slapstick — another paradox. The source material for this music is a pair of folk songs that Beethoven might well have heard in the beer halls he frequented: “Our cat has had kittens,” and — no joke — “I am slovenly; you are slovenly.”

Beethoven’s lack of refinement or social graces is imprinted on this music. The elbows-out brusqueness is a reminder that Beethoven’s music is as much about the physical as it is about the metaphysical — that while he often

seems superhuman, he remains awkwardly, painfully human.

This movement offers yet another paradox: In one sense, the music is backward-looking.

Throughout, there are hidden and not-so-hidden connections to the (equally wondrous) Sonata Op. 109, written the previous year; in this sonata’s most desperately dark moment, it quotes its predecessor literally. But Beethoven doesn’t just refer to his own previous work: the forms he uses in the finale of Op. 110 — recitative, arioso, fugue — are all borrowed from Bach.

Perhaps “borrowed” is the wrong word. As Stravinsky said, “Bad composers borrow; great composers steal.” Beethoven’s forms might belong to Bach, but the content is sublimely, startlingly his own. Bach would not, in a recitative, have repeated the same note 27 (!) times in a row — a manic, pleading cry into the void. Bach wrote a great many tragic ariosos, but they do not contain massive crescendos, building and building to a climax that never comes, followed instead by a sudden retreat to piano — a musical representation of hope, snuffed out. And Bach is likely the greatest master of the fugue of his or any time, but his fugues are ends unto themselves. They do not expand, and seek, and strive, until they evolve into something else entirely — into outpourings of pure melody (pure spirit, really) at the extreme upper end of the piano, the accompanying left hand at the extreme lower end (because the piano was never, ever enough for Beethoven; the whole world was not enough for Beethoven). Bach is the template here, but

Programme notes by Jonathan Biss

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In spite of the many wonders to be found in these first two movements, they are mere prelude to the finale, one of Beethoven’s most complex and most profound achievements.

Nearly double the length of the first two movements combined, it is comprised of five sections with a wide range of musical forms, and conveying an even wider range of feeling: from total desolation to the euphoria that can come only in its wake.

the music is nothing but Beethoven. Beethoven, looking not to the past, but to the future — a future that, the last 50 years be damned, might yet be beautiful.

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11 J U N 2 0 2 3 , S U N VICTORIA CONCERT HALL

PIERRE- L AURENT AIMARD

LIGETI BEETHOVEN LIGETI BEETHOVEN LIGETI BEETHOVEN LIGETI BEETHOVEN LIGETI BEETHOVEN LIGETI BEETHOVEN LIGETI BEETHOVEN LIGETI BEETHOVEN LIGETI BEETHOVEN LIGETI BEETHOVEN LIGETI Intermission 20'00

Musica ricercata, No. 1 3’00 Bagatelles, Op. 119, No. 9 in A minor 1’00 Musica ricercata, No. 2 4’00 Bagatelles, Op. 33, No. 2 in C major 3’00 Musica ricercata, No. 3 1’00 Bagatelles, Op. 119, No. 2 in C major 1’00 Musica ricercata, No. 4 2’45 Bagatelles, Op. 119, No. 3 in D major 2’00 Musica ricercata, No. 5 3’00 Bagatelles, Op. 119, No. 10 in A major 0’30 Musica ricercata, No. 6 1’00 Bagatelles, Op. 119, No. 11 in B-flat major 2’30 Musica ricercata, No. 7 3’30 Bagatelles, Op. 119, No. 6 in G major 1’30 Musica ricercata, No. 8 1’00 Bagatelles, Op. 119, No. 5 in C minor 1’00 Musica ricercata, No. 9 2’00 Bagatelles, Op. 33, No. 7 in A-flat major 2’00 Musica ricercata, No. 10 1’30 Bagatelles, Op. 119, No. 8 in C major 2’00 Musica ricercata, No. 11 4’30

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11 J U N 2 0 2 3 , S U N VICTORIA CONCERT HALL

PIERRE- L AURENT AIMARD

DEBUSSY

CHOPIN

LIGETI

Études, L 136 • No. 3 – Pour les quartes 5’00 • No. 7 – Pour les degrés chromatiques 2’30 • No. 11 – Pour les arpèges composés 4’30 Études, Op. 25 • No. 2 in F minor “The Bees” 2’00 • No. 8 in D-flat major “Double Sixths” 1’30 • No. 11 in A minor “Winter Wind” 4’00 Études for Piano, Book 1 & 2 • No. 7 – Galam Borong 3’00 • No. 8 – Fém 2’30 • No. 6 – Automne à Varsovie 4’00 • No. 2 – Cordes à vide 3’30 • No. 4 – Fanfares 4’00 • No. 13 – L'escalier du diable 5’30

Concert Duration: approximately 2 hrs (with 20 mins intermission) • There will be a post-concert autograph session with Pierre-Laurent Aimard.

• Talk: 10 Jun, 5pm at the Victoria Concert Hall Dance Studio.

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PIERRE- L AURENT AIMARD

Widely acclaimed as a key figure in the music of our time, Pierre-Laurent Aimard has had close collaborations with many leading composers including György Ligeti, Karlheinz Stockhausen, George Benjamin, Pierre Boulez and Oliver Messiaen.

Aimard begins the 2022/23 season by receiving Denmark’s most prominent music award, the Leonie Sonning Music Prize 2022 which will be celebrated in a series of concerts with Royal Danish Orchestra/Cambreling and recitals in Copenhagen and Aarhus. Elsewhere he continues to work closely with leading orchestras and conductors across Europe including Antwerp Symphony/Herreweghe, Radio Filharmonisch Orkest/Deneve, Deutsche Symphony Orchester Berlin/Chan, Orchestre National de Lille/Bloc and Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France. He continues his collaboration with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra and Esa-Pekka Salonen, recording Bartók’s complete piano concertos due for release in Autumn 2023, and returns to Los Angeles Philharmonic for Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4.

In celebration of György Ligeti’s 100th Anniversary in 2023, Aimard will perform works by the composer in collaborations throughout the season, including, Seoul Philharmonic/ Robertson for his Concerto for Piano; acclaimed German Jazz pianist, Michael Wollny on an improvisatory project around the Etudes and continuing to celebrate the composer through his unique recital programming.

His critically acclaimed recordings include Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata and Eroica Variations for Pentatone and a new recording of Visions de l’Amen with Tamara Stefanovich.

With Messiaen’s opus magnum Catalogue d’oiseaux, he was honoured with multiple awards including the prestigious ‘Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik’.

Through his professorship at the Hochschule Köln as well as numerous lectures and workshops worldwide, Aimard sheds an inspiring light on music of all periods.

pierrelaurentaimard.com pierrelaurentaimard pierrelaurentaimard pierre-laurentaimard8131

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770 – 1827) Bagatelles, Op. 119 Bagatelles, Op. 33

Musica ricercata Beethoven’s Op. 119 bagatelles are tiny pieces each lasting only a minute or two. They are easy pieces, too, which makes them seem somewhat like shavings off a master’s workbench: perhaps they resembled teaching pieces too much? His publisher certainly thought so, and complained to Beethoven that they were insignificant trifles — a criticism that the composer presumably did not take very well! He was working on the Missa Solemnis and the Ninth Symphony simultaneously as well, and spare moments of genius went into these pieces (and the later Op. 126, not performed tonight).

Considering some of these bagatelles are as short as ten seconds (Op. 119, No. 10), Beethoven’s compositional approach with these short pieces show him responding to the challenge of extremely compressed time scales.

His later music had become formally sprawling and more symphonic in scale, so these “trifles” show him compressing these tendencies into extremely short timescales.

The odd one out here is a time-skip back to an earlier set (Op. 33, No. 7), which is a Haydn-like scherzo. Beethoven’s harmony here is almost barebones, with long stretches of repeated material and an obsessively repeated tonic-dominant sequence.

By interspersing these bits of tonal music in between the much more bare textures of Ligeti’s Musica ricercata, the first section of this programme juxtaposes two kinds of compositional restriction. Ligeti chose to write 11 short movements, starting with only two “notes” in the first one (A and D) and allowing himself one more each time. Octave changes were also allowed, so the first movement famously starts with the pianist playing As up and down the whole keyboard, the second only has E#, F#, and G, and so on.

CLAUDE DEBUSSY (1862 – 1918) Études, L 136 • No. 3 – Pour les quartes • No. 7 – Pour les degrés chromatiques • No. 11 – Pour les arpèges composés

FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN (1810 – 1849) Études, Op. 25 • No. 2 in F minor “The Bees” • No. 8 in D-flat major “Double Sixths” • No. 11 in A minor “Winter Wind”

GYÖRGY LIGETI Études for Piano, Book 1 & 2 • • • • • •

No. 7 – Galam Borong No. 8 – Fém No. 6 – Automne à Varsovie No. 2 – Cordes à vide No. 4 – Fanfares No. 13 – L'escalier du diable

Debussy’s piano music underwent huge shifts: from his early Fantaisie (really a piano concerto) on a symphonic scale, to the orientalist and painterly “impressionism” he was famous for in his two sets of Préludes, to the late masterpieces that form his set of twelve Études. Throughout this journey he always strove for new sounds and sonorities, a process that could not have been unaffected by the onset of the Great War the year before his set of studies were completed.

In keeping with the earlier theme of restricted composition, No. 3 “Pour les quartes” is a compositional study as well as a pianistic one.

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GYÖRGY LIGETI (1923 – 2006)

As more notes are added, folk-like tunes begin to appear, and the last few movements are so rich in texture they are indistinguishable from “regular” music. It is as if Ligeti and Beethoven are slowly converging to a point: the wild dance of the 10th movement of Musica ricercata gives way to Beethoven’s elegant minuet (Op. 119, No. 8), before Ligeti wraps up with a sinuously winding chromatic fugue (No. 11).

PIERRE-L AURENT AIMARD

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All the harmonic material in this piece is built from the interval of the 4th, a technical demand made mostly of the right hand. Debussy makes light work of this limitation, drawing richly coloured sonorities from the piano and even inventing a virtuoso climax in the middle of the piece, arising organically from the sparse, open sounds of the beginning and fading back therein.

No. 7 “Pour les degrés chromatiques” is a whirlwind romp, almost Lisztian in its speed and technical challenge, certainly much closer to the impressionist sound paintings of Debussy’s Préludes, as is No. 11 “Pour les arpèges composés” with its much more watery feel. None of these pieces sacrifice real musical inspiration on the altar of technique, however, even if Debussy described them as “a warning to pianists not to take up the musical profession unless they have remarkable hands”; they are beautiful in their own right, and show the mature Debussy as a true artist.

A programme of études is never complete without mentioning Chopin, the composer who first used them as a serious musical genre that aspired to transcend its technical origins. His two sets of studies, Op. 10 and Op. 25, have always been prized for both their musical and didactic qualities, and tonight’s programme includes three exercises from the latter set.

In this selection, the D-flat major étude is the shortest of the three and, like Debussy’s above “Pour les quartes”, is a compositional exercise where the right hand plays only 6ths throughout. Despite this, Chopin’s harmony is chromatic and the writing is lyrical, just as it is in the needly F minor with its arabesques and in the famous “Winter Wind” with its cascades of right-hand figuration.

Ligeti’s études, unlike the previous two sets, were written by a composer who absolutely could not play his own music. Ligeti’s own statement, that he could write what he wanted because he did not need to think about managing the difficulties, is reminiscent of Ravel’s approach to piano writing: technically

playable, and maybe even pianistic, music that also simply happens to be incredibly challenging to learn and perform.

Ligeti’s studies are concerned with polyrhythms, and his harmonic language makes strong tonal and modal references. Galamb Borong is faux-Indonesian, inspired by gamelan; Fém is Hungarian for “metal”, depicted by the bright, hammered sound of the open 5ths; Automne à Varsovie (“Autumn in Warsaw”) is a succession of falling scale fragments at different speeds culminating in a massive crash.

“Open Strings”, Cordes à vide, is a study in stacked perfect 5ths, while Fanfares is a carnival romp on an octatonic ostinato. To wrap up, “Devil’s Staircase”, L'escalier du diable is a threateningly rising infinite sequence, looping over itself, with a shocking “chorale” at its climax.

Programme notes by Thomas Ang

A S TA N D I N G O V AT I O N T O O U R D O N O R P AT R O N S We would like to express our deepest appreciation to the following individuals and organisations who support our mission to create memorable shared experiences with music in the past year.

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You can support us by donating at www.sso.org.sg/donate or www.giving.sg/sso.

BOARD OF DIRECTORS & C OMMIT TEES CHAIR Goh Yew Lin BOARD OF DIRECTORS Yong Ying-I (Deputy Chair) Chang Chee Pey Chng Kai Fong Prof Arnoud De Meyer Warren Fernandez Kenneth Kwok Liew Wei Li Sanjiv Misra Lynette Pang Prof Qin Li-Wei Geoffrey Wong Yasmin Zahid Yee Chen Fah Andrew Yeo Khirn Hin NOMINATING AND EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE Goh Yew Lin (Chair) Prof Arnoud De Meyer (Treasurer) Geoffrey Wong Yong Ying-I

SSO MUSICIANS’ COMMITTEE Mario Choo Guo Hao David Smith Wang Xu Christoph Wichert Elaine Yeo Zhao Tian

HUMAN RESOURCES COMMITTEE Yong Ying-I (Chair) Chng Kai Fong Prof Arnoud De Meyer Heinrich Grafe Doris Sohmen-Pao INVESTMENT COMMITTEE Geoffrey Wong (Chair) Sanjiv Misra David Goh Alex Lee AUDIT COMMITTEE Yee Chen Fah (Chair) Warren Fernandez Lim Mei Jovi Seet SNYO COMMITTEE Liew Wei Li (Chair) Prof Qin Li-Wei Benjamin Goh Vivien Goh Dr Kee Kirk Chin Clara Lim-Tan

SSO COUNCIL Alan Chan (Chair) Odile Benjamin Prof Chan Heng Chee Dr Geh Min Heinrich Grafe Khoo Boon Hui Lim Mei Dr Stephen Riady Priscylla Shaw Prof Gralf Sieghold Andreas Sohmen-Pao Prof Bernard Tan Dr Tan Chin Nam Tan Soo Nan Wee Ee Cheong

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S I N G A P O R E S Y M P H O N Y G R O U P A D M I N I S T R AT I O N CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER Kenneth Kwok CEO OFFICE Shirin Foo Musriah Bte Md Salleh ARTISTIC PLANNING Hans Sørensen (Head) Artistic Administration Teo Chew Yen Jodie Chiang Jocelyn Cheng Michelle Yeo Lynnette Chng OPERATIONS Ernest Khoo (Head) Library Lim Lip Hua Avik Chari Wong Yi Wen Orchestra Management Chia Jit Min (Head) Peck Xin Hui Production Management Noraihan Bte Nordin Leong Shan Yi Asyiq Iqmal Ramayah Elango Khairi Edzhairee Khairul Nizam Digital Production Jan Soh

COMMUNITY IMPACT Kok Tse Wei (Head) Community Engagement Kua Li Leng (Head) Erin Tan Whitney Tan Samantha Lim Terrence Wong Choral Programmes Kua Li Leng (Head) Regina Lee Chang Hai Wen Singapore National Youth Orchestra Pang Siu Yuin (Head) Tang Ya Yun Tan Sing Yee Ridha Ridza ABRSM Patricia Yee Lai Li-Yng Joong Siow Chong Freddie Loh May Looi William Teo

PATRONS Development Chelsea Zhao (Head) Anderlin Yeo Nikki Chuang Elliot Lim Sharmilah Banu Marketing and Communications Cindy Lim (Head) Chia Han-Leon Calista Lee Sean Tan Myrtle Lee Hong Shu Hui Jana Loh Sherilyn Lim Elizabeth Low Customer Experience Randy Teo Dacia Cheang Joy Tagore CORPORATE SERVICES Finance, IT & Facilities Rick Ong (Head) Alan Ong Goh Hoey Fen Loh Chin Huat Md Zailani Bin Md Said Human Resources & Administration Valeria Tan (Head) Janice Yeo Fionn Tan Evelyn Siew Organisation Development Lillian Yin

Presented by

Organised by Singapore Symphony Group

Supported by

Patron Sponsor

Official Hotel

The mission of the Singapore Symphony Group is to create memorable shared experiences with music.

Through the SSO and its affiliated performing groups, we spread the love for music, nurture talent and enrich our diverse communities.

The Singapore Symphony Orchestra is a charity and not-for-profit organisation. You can support us by donating at www.sso.org.sg/donate.

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