Wei-Yi Yang, piano

wei-yi yang piano

horowitz piano series Boris Berman, Artistic Director February 4, 2015 • Morse Recital Hall

Robert Blocker, Dean

Horowitz Piano Series

wei-yi yang Wednesday, February 4, 2015 • 7:30 pm • Morse Recital Hall Boris Berman, Artistic Director

Please hold your applause until the end of each set.

Frédéric Chopin 1810–1849

Nocturne in F-sharp minor, Op. 48, No. 2

Franz Liszt 1811–1886

La lugubre gondola, S. 200 (1886 version)

Alexander Scriabin 1872–1915

Poème-nocturne, Op. 61

Liszt

Bagatelle sans tonalité, S. 216a

Scriabin

Poèmes, Op. 32 I. Andante cantabile II. Allegro — Con eleganza — Con fiducia

Chopin

Trois morceaux, Op. 52 I. Poème II. Enigma III. Poème languide

Scriabin

Vers la flamme: Poème, Op. 72 intermission

Horowitz Piano Series

Chopin

Trois nouvelles études, Op. posth.

Andantino in F minor Allegretto in A-flat major Allegretto in D-flat major

Scriabin

10 Études Piacevole, Op. 8, No. 4 Andante cantabile, Op. 8, No. 11 Presto, Op. 42, No. 1 Legatissimo, Op. 42, No. 2 Prestissimo, Op. 42, No. 3 Andante, Op. 42, No. 4 Agitato, Op. 42, No. 7 Allegro, Op. 42, No. 8 Allegretto – Molto volando, Op. 65, No. 2 Molto vivace — Impériux, Op. 65, No. 3

As a courtesy to the performers and audience, please silence all electronic devices.

Please do not leave the hall during selections. Photography or recording of any kind is prohibited.

Artist Profile · Notes on the Program

Wei-Yi Yang • piano Pianist Wei-Yi Yang has earned worldwide acclaim for his captivating performances and imaginative programming. Most recently, he was praised by the New York Times as the soloist in a “sensational” performance of Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie at Carnegie Hall. Gold Medal winner of the San Antonio International Piano Competition, Mr. Yang has also performed at the Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, and across Europe, Australia, and Asia. A dynamic chamber musician with a diverse repertoire, Mr. Yang has collaborated with the Pacifica, Cassatt, and Tokyo String Quartets, as well as Clive Greensmith, Frederica von Stade, and Richard Stoltzman, among numerous others.

Mr. Yang has curated inventive interdisciplinary projects, including a collaboration with actress Miriam Margolyes as part of the “Dickens’ Women” world tour; lecturerecitals on the confluence of Czech music and literature; and multi-media performances of Granados’ Goyescas with projections of Goya’s etchings. He has given world premieres of new works by contemporary composers, including Howard Boatwright, Jonathan Cole, Daniel Godfrey, and Ezra Laderman. Mr. Yang studied first in the United Kingdom and then with Arkady Aronov in New York. Under the guidance of Boris Berman, he received his D.M.A. from Yale in 2004.

Mr. Yang frequently presents masterclasses and performances in Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, Korea, and at Princeton University, Ithaca College, and the Hartt School. He has adjudicated the Isidor Bajic Piano Memorial and the San Antonio International Piano competitions, and the Concert Artists Guild

auditions. He regularly appears at festivals across the United States, from Napa Valley to Norfolk and abroad, including Germany, Serbia, Montenegro, Scotland, and Mexico.

In 2005 he joined the faculty of the Yale School of Music.

Note from the Performer Alexander Nikolayvich Scriabin (1872–1915) was one of Russia’s most unusual composers. During his short life of 43 years, Scriabin composed three symphonies, two symphonic poems, a romance for horn, a romance for voice, a piano concerto, and more than two hundred compositions for the piano.

Through stages of artistic search and metamorphosis, Scriabin evolved into a true individual with an original vision that incorporated both rhythmic complexity and harmonic boldness. In his ambitious attempt to combine color, philosophy, and music, Scriabin dared to go where none of his contemporaries had trod.

Scriabin wrote a variety of miniatures through the course of his career. Taking cues from Chopin, Liszt, and Wagner, Scriabin extended and expanded the idiom of Romantic piano music. The complexity and deep expressivity of Scriabin’s works can be largely attributed to the innovation and evolution of his aesthetics, fueled by his interests in synesthesia and theosophy. These diverse compositions achieve nuances of depth and intricacy, before mysticism takes possession of his later works.

In sum, Scriabin went far beyond secondary dominants and quartal harmonies to create lush sonorities and tonal ambiguities. The rhythmic agendas are often obscured by cross-rhythms and layered syncopations.

Notes on the Program

Ceaseless webs of polyphonies and melodic innuendos often dominate his musical texture. Much of Scriabin’s music vacillates between dark chasms haunted by brooding and fear, and ascension into blinding luminescence. Drifting through these musical events are senses of decadence, desire, and hallucinatory associations that suggest delirium, ecstasy, and possibly carnality.

Much like strong fine liquor, I feel that this music is best sampled in deliberate, measured little sips.

when he entirely abandoned himself to his inspiration.” Chopin admired Field’s nocturnes, and wrote 21 of his own, popularizing the genre.

To the extent which a nocturne is a reflection on the nature of the end of a day, Liszt’s La lugubre gondola (The Funeral Gondola, completed in 1882) is a reflection on the twilight of a lifetime: Richard Wagner, to whom he had paid visit in Venice briefly, died only two months after Liszt completed the elegy which is full of the aroma of Wagnerian leitmotif and chromatic ambiguity.

—Wei-Yi Yang Set 1 “...Some one frames upon the keys That exquisite nocturne, with which we explain The night and moonshine; music which we seize To body forth our vacuity.”

— T.S. Eliot From “Conversation Galante” (1920) The amorphous stretch of darkness between dinner and breakfast has long inspired the artist to portray the nightscape. A Baroque master of manipulating light and dark tones, Rembrandt captured the chiaroscuro of the Northern Dutch nightscape in nocturne prints such as “The Night Watch” of 1642.

John Fields, a bon vivant Irish-born pianist and composer who famously admitted on his deathbed in 1837, “I am not a Calvinist, but a Clavecin-iste,” manipulated tones into the first “Nocturne” musical miniatures.

Liszt attested to the novelty of Field’s work in 1859: “Nobody has even attempted this peculiar style, and especially none of those who heard Field play himself, or rather who heard him dream his music in moments

In search of parallels between music and visual art, American-British painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler appropriated musical terms like “arrangements,” “harmonies,” and “nocturnes” in his impressionistic works.

He wrote to Frederick Leyland, a patron and lover of Chopin’s work: “I say I can’t thank you too much for the name ‘Nocturne’ as a title for my moonlights [nightscapes]! You have no idea what an irritation it proves to the critics and consequent pleasure to me – besides it is really so charming and does so poetically say all that I want to say and no more than I wish!”

A synesthete to whom an F-sharp appeared as a bright blue cloud, Scriabin also believed in connecting the music and visual, albeit for more mystical reasons than simply provoking critics. The Poème-Nocturne has a similar dark haze to Whistler’s 1874 Nocturne in Black and Gold — perhaps colors which he might ascribe to the enigmatic E doubleflat which provides an axis for the miniature.

Notes on the Program

Set 2

Set 3

“...When you notice a cat in profound meditation, The reason, I tell you, is always the same: His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name: His ineffable effable Effanineffable Deep and inscrutable singular Name.”

—T.S. Eliot, from “The Naming of Cats” (1939)

“...What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it.... Whoever has approved this idea of order... will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.”

—T.S. Eliot, from “Tradition and Individual Talent” (1921)

Compared to Liszt’s avant-garde Bagatelle, Scriabin’s Opus 32 is almost Mozartian in its tonal F-sharp major trajectory. In dialogue with the sonatas of Mozart, the larger arc of Op. 32, No. 1 is the resolution of a lyrical second theme in the dominant (or other) key area towards the original home key. Where Mozart might have written dolce to indicate a delicate treatment of the new theme, in Op. 32, No. 1, Scriabin writes inaferando. This word, which appears Italian on the surface, is in fact a Scriabin-ism that translates roughly to “ineffability” or, perhaps, “unseizability.”

Scriabin, the profound mystic, imbues the Poèmes with a sense of ineffability. The title Vers la Flamme (Towards the flame) is described by Vladimir Horowitz as the world’s constantly accelerating movement towards fiery destruction. According to scholar Anna Gawboy, Scriabin believed that “the joining of sound plus light could work together and create sympathetic resonance in material objects and the human body, and this would be the agent of material dissolution…” This was the catalyst he hoped would bring about the end of the world and the transcendence up into the next spiritual level.

Nocturnist John Fields studied with Muzio Clementi, whose enduring technical etudes are familiar to today’s piano students. Chopin then blazed the trail for his and Scriabin’s didactic pieces to join the recital repertoire.

Despite the 2013 closing of the French factory which made Chopin’s favorite Pleyel pianos, as well as the material evolution/devolution of the piano since (a movement from leather hammers to felt, cross-stringing, and so on) the multifarious challenges of the taming the instrument remain. Each etude tonight focuses on a specific trial of musicianship and technique. In the Chopin, imagine the synchronization of tiny gnashing polyrhythmic gears of four melodic notes against six in the bass; and in the Scriabin, observe the domestication and equilibrium of three or more Cerberean voices with only two bare hands.

—Samuel Suggs

HOROWITZ PIANO SERIES 2014–2015 BORIS BERMAN ARTISTIC DIRECTOR WEDNESDAYS AT 7 : 30 PM MORSE RECITAL HALL OCT 1

RICHARD GOODE

OCT 22

PETER SERKIN

NOV 12

BORIS BERMAN

DEC 10

MELVIN CHEN

JAN 14

PETER FRANKL

FEB 4

WEI-YI YANG

MAR 4

ROBERT BLOCKER

MAR 25 HUNG-KUAN CHEN For tickets, call us at 203 432-4158, visit music.yale.edu, or visit the box office in Sprague Hall.

PIANO MASTER CLASSES THURSDAYS AT 10 : 30 AM Feb 5 Peter Frankl Feb 19 Boris Berman Mar 5 Melvin Chen Mar 26 Wei-Yi Yang Apr 9 Hung-Kuan Chen RSVP Requested Please contact us in advance at concerts@yale.edu 203 432-4158 Full Schedule music.yale.edu/master-classes/piano

Upcoming Events

Ettore Causa, viola Boris Berman, piano

Beethoven: Complete Cello Sonatas february 8 Morse Recital Hall | Sunday | 2 pm Faculty Artist Series Ole Akahoshi, cello, and Peter Frankl, piano, perform the complete Beethoven sonatas for cello and piano Free Admission

february 16 Morse Recital Hall | Wednesday | 7:30 pm Faculty Artist Series Music for viola and piano by Beethoven and Brahms, including arrangements by Causa Free Admission

Yale Brass Trio

Aulos Ensemble

february 9 Morse Recital Hall | Monday | 7:30 pm Faculty Artist Series William Purvis, horn; Allan Dean, trumpet; Scott Hartman, trombone.

With Mihae Lee, piano Free Admission

february 22 15 Hillhouse Ave. | Sunday | 3 pm Collection of Musical Instruments Gold and Glitter: Music from Venice and Versailles Tickets $25 • Seniors $20 • Students $10

Czech Chamber Music Danish String Quartet february 17 Morse Recital Hall | Tuesday | 7:30 pm Oneppo Chamber Music Series Haydn: String Quartet in F minor, Op. 20, No. 5; Thomas Adès: Arcadiana; Schubert: Quartet No. 15 in G major, D. 887 Tickets start at $26 • Students $13

february 22 Morse Recital Hall | Sunday | 4 pm Faculty Artist Series Kyung Yu, violin; Ole Akahoshi, cello; Wei-Yi Yang, piano. Smetana: Trio; Dvořák: Four Romantic Pieces; and more Free Admission

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Robert Blocker, Dean