hung-kuan chen piano
horowitz piano series Boris Berman, Artistic Director March 25, 2015 • Morse Recital Hall
Robert Blocker, Dean
Horowitz Piano Series
hung-kuan chen Wednesday, March 25, 2015 • 7:30 pm • Morse Recital Hall Boris Berman, Artistic Director
Johann Sebastian Bach 1685–1750 Ferruccio Busoni 1866–1924
Nun komm’ der Heiden Heiland, BWV 659 From Ten Chorale Preludes, BV B 27 Transcribed by Ferruccio Busoni (1893)
Franz Liszt 1811–1886
Piano Sonata in B minor, S. 178 intermission
Frédéric Chopin 1810–1849
Prélude in C-sharp minor, Op. 45 Mazurka in B minor, Op. 33, No. 4 Polonaise-Fantaisie in A-flat major, Op. 61
Alexander Scriabin 1872–1915
Piano Sonata No. 5, Op. 53
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
Hung-Kuan Chen is one of the great personalities of the music world: enigmatic, brilliant and versatile. He is a pianist of uncompromising individuality and a remarkably inspiring pedagogue. Born in Taipei and raised in Germany, Mr. Chen’s early studies fostered strong roots in Germanic Classicism, which he tempered with the sensibility of Chinese philosophy: the result is a dynamic and imaginative artistry. He is regarded as an extraordinary interpreter of Beethoven’s music. Mr. Chen’s career was launched when he won first prize in the Young Concert Artists’ Auditions, which presented him in his New York debut on the Young Concert Artists Series and followed it with a second major New York concert at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall. One of the most decorated pianists of his generation, Mr. Chen won top prizes in the Arthur Rubinstein, the Busoni, and the Geza Anda International Piano Competitions, along with prizes in the Queen Elisabeth, Montreal, Van Cliburn, and Chopin International Competition. He is a recipient of the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant. Hung-Kuan Chen has appeared in the music capitals of Asia, Europe and the Americas and collaborated with many major orchestras including Houston, Baltimore, Israel, Montréal, Pittsburgh, the Tonhalle, San Francisco, and Shanghai. He has performed with highly esteemed conductors; Hans Graf, Christoph Eschenbach, George Cleve, Josef Silverstein, Andrew Parrett, and Sui Lan; and colleagues including Yo-Yo Ma,
Cho-Liang Lin, Roman Totenberg, Denes Zsigmondy, Bion Tsang, Anthony Gigliotti, David Shifrin, and Laurence Lesser; and pianists Tema Blackstone and Pi-hsien Chen. Mr. Chen has served as Chair of the Piano Department of the Shanghai Conservatory, and is the Director of the International Piano Academy in Shanghai. In September 2009, he was appointed to the piano faculty of the New England Conservatory in Boston. In 1992 Hung-Kuan Chen suffered an injury to his hand which caused neurological damage and eventually resulted in focal dystonia. Through Qi Gong meditation and his own unique research he was able to heal and return to his life as a concert artist. His first post-accident solo recital in March of 1998 received rave reviews, and he was described as a transformed artist. Following his 2006 Jordan Hall concert, Richard Dyer wrote in The Boston Globe, “HungKuan Chen is back in prime technical form after years of struggle following an injury, but those years have made him a different pianist, and a better one. This man plays music with uncommon understanding and the instrument with uncommon imagination.”
Notes on the Program
bach/busoni Nun komm’ der Heiden Heiland In his last decade, while living in Leipzig, J.S. Bach compiled a set of eighteen organ chorale preludes, most of which he had written while court organist in Weimar, decades prior. In their breadth of styles, topics, and affects, they represent the diversity of Bach’s output, as well as his skill as a contrapuntalist. Nun komm’ der Heiden Heiland, one among these so-called Great Eighteen, interweaves a cantus firmus of Martin Luther between two voices, over a subdued walking bass. Bach’s setting, latent with suspensions and poignant leaps to dissonant pitches, is fraught with tension, which Busoni preserves in his thoughtful transcription. Busoni makes inventive use of the una corda pedal in the introductory and transitory material, saving the full sonority for the statements of the canto. The dramatic contrast in these textures enhances Bach’s counterpoint, creating a musical bas relief with the Lutheran hymn at the foreground, while octave doubling of the eighth-note walking bass line in the left hand evokes the sonorousness of an organ pedal. Simultaneously idiomatic to the piano and informed by the character of the organ, Busoni’s setting reveals the ability of Bach’s music to transcend both instrumental and historical bounds. franz liszt Piano Sonata in B minor, S. 178 For his B minor sonata, Franz Liszt radically reinvented the genre, fashioning a single, cohesive movement in a large-scale sonata form that simultaneously reflects a multimovement plan: a sonata within a sonata. The whole of Liszt’s form develops from a
few thematic seeds planted at the beginning of the work, and the composer achieves simultaneous unity and contrast through their manipulation. An ambiguous introduction presents a first theme in a vaguely Phrygian mode, leading to the Allegro energico that forms the body of sonata’s first pseudo-movement. From here, Liszt introduces his themes like a cast of characters: a marcato rising and falling figure in octaves framing a seventh; an ominous theme beginning with five repeated eighth notes heard first in the low range in the left hand; and a majestic, elegiac chorale over pulsating eighth notes. The intermingling of these characters forms the substance of most of the sonata: transfiguring each character throughout the movements harmonically and stylistically. The dramatic Allegro energico leads to a lush Andante sostenuto, through a fugal Scherzo, and at last to a Finale that recalls elements of each of the preceding pseudomovements. The work concludes with a climactic presto that apotheosizes the first theme in exaltation. Liszt conceives of the entire sonata as the gradual development of an initial thought, and as the work relaxes to a placid close, one feels a sense of longawaited resolution. All has come full circle. The form of this sonata replicates the very nature of creativity: a miniscule idea evolving into a great work of art. frédéric chopin Prélude in C-sharp minor, Op. 45 Accompaniments seldom draw much attention, and when they do it is for a specific purpose. Such is the case in this Prélude,
Notes on the Program
in which Chopin generates palpable tension between a melody atop an assertive accompaniment against which the melody occasionally floats, yet often strains. A fourbar introduction of descending eighth notes fades seamlessly into the lute-like left hand accompaniment, which then rises in arpeggios like a cloud of smoke. A melancholic theme in the right hand emerges, but scarcely escapes the gravity of the eighth notes churning beneath, which frequently close in on its range. Chopin blurs the lines between melody and accompaniment throughout the Prélude. The whole work lies in an ambiguous haze, made more disorienting by his frequent, surprising hints of new key areas. Though disorienting, these shifts in key are never abrupt or jarring, but subtle, as though the key of C-sharp minor gets lost in Chopin’s cloud of smoke. Near the end of the prelude, following a fermata, the accompaniment absorbs the melody and a sinuous cadenza, free of any true melodic voice, meanders chromatically before finding C-sharp minor once again. chopin Mazurka in B minor, Op. 33, No. 4 Robert Schumann described Chopin’s works as “guns buried in flowers.” The elements the composer’s music bound in nationalism are perhaps his most important contribution. As Schumann put it, “because this nationalism is in deep mourning, it attracts us all the more firmly to this thoughtful artist.” Poland was a vanquished territory when Chopin came to Paris at the age of twenty-one, among exiles of the Great Emigration after the Russian imperial army crushed the November Uprising of 1830.
Though he never returned to his birthplace, Chopin preserved strains of his heritage in his piano music. His mazurkas are refined pianistic versions of a triple-meter folk dance, usually sprightly in traditional character. Parisian salon culture loved them not for any assumed political meaning but for their exoticism. Chopin cools some of this Mazurka’s traditional fire in the melancholic first theme. Embellishments enhance the exotic character: turns, trills, and grace notes add an element of improvisatory folk-like ease to the music, which at times in its sotto voce timbre suggests the delicacy of a hammered cimbalom. A contrasting section in a forte dynamic with a strongly accented bass line provides the dance’s sense of joviality. Yet the Mazurka ends as wistfully as it began. An open fifth rocks back and forth in the left hand, and for a moment we feel as though we have wandered away, before Chopin returns to B minor like a plunge into icy waters. chopin Polonaise-Fantaisie in A-flat major, Op. 61 In describing his laborious sketching of this piece, Chopin wrote: “I’d like to finish something that I don’t yet know what to call.” The Polonaise-Fantaisie is difficult to categorize: a synthesis of the pomp and vigor inherent to the Polonaise dance form with the mercurial, pensive, and rhapsodic qualities of the Fantasy. It begins with a series of arpeggios that, in their wandering tonality, perfectly encapsulate the improvisatory quality of the fantasy. The Polonaise rhythm announces itself dramatically, but then fades to the background. The theme subtly, after a time,
Notes on the Program
disintegrates into a cascade of sixteenth notes. After a time, Chopin leads us to B major for a contrasting theme. At the return of the first polonaise theme, the composer generates a flurry of rhythmic activity, pitting triplets against sixteenth notes and the dotted martial rhythms of the polonaise. The energy is exhausted until a single, final outburst. Chopin’s work is a fantasy on the subject of the polonaise: a transformation, occasionally a distortion, and a reinvention. Affectively, Chopin’s music often falls into two categories: the introverted and the extroverted. In the Polonaise-Fantaisie, the composer combines both of these elements in a unified work. alexander scriabin Piano Sonata No. 5, Op. 53 Scriabin’s fifth piano sonata is a pivotal work, “pivotal” referring both to its essentiality and to its role as a turning point in the composer’s style and technique. Of his ten sonatas, this is the first to be constructed as a single movement, a form which Scriabin followed in the remainder of his piano sonatas. Hearing the work in progress, his wife wrote in her diary, “you cannot even tell it is a sonata.” Tatyana’s statement is revealing and somewhat misleading: in fact, Scriabin follows a single-movement sonataform plan in many respects. Scriabin’s chromatic language cloaks this structure in clouds of color and mysticism. Hardly a single chord in this work does not draw an added seventh, ninth, or tritone into its spectrum. To call Scriabin’s musical language “dissonant” implies a tension that must find resolution. With Scriabin’s harmonic vocabulary, after a time one loses
the expectation for dissonant leading tones to resolve to triadic harmonies, and they are liberated — not from tension entirely, but from the shackles of expectation. — Notes by Patrick Campbell Jankowski
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