Wei-Yi Yang, piano

wei-yi yang

horowitz piano series Boris Berman, Artistic Director November 11, 2015 • Morse Recital Hall

Robert Blocker, Dean

Horowitz Piano Series

wei-yi yang Wednesday, November 11, 2015 • 7:30 pm • Morse Recital Hall Boris Berman, Artistic Director

Frédéric Chopin 1810–1849

Nocturne in B-flat minor, Op. 9, No. 1

Sergei Prokofiev 1891–1953

Sonata No. 8 in B-flat major, Op. 84 I. Andante dolce II. Andante sognando III. Vivace intermission

Franz Schubert 1797–1828

Sonata No. 21 in B-flat major, D. 960 I. Molto moderato II. Andante sostenuto III. Scherzo — Allegro vivace con delicatezza IV. Allegro ma non troppo

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

Pianist Wei-Yi Yang has performed worldwide as soloist, recording artist, and chamber musician to critical acclaim.

Winner of the gold medal in the San Antonio International Piano Competition, he has appeared on the stages of Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, and major venues across America, Asia, Europe and Australia. Most recently, he was praised by the New York Times in a “sensational” performance of Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie at Carnegie Hall.

actress Miriam Margolyes as part of the “Dickens’ Women” world tour, lecturerecitals on the confluence of music and literature in Czech culture as seen through works by Janácek and Kundera, and multi-media performances of Granados’ monumental piano suite Goyescas with projections of Goya’s etchings from the collection Caprichos supplied by the Yale Art Gallery.

Wei-Yi Yang’s performances have been featured on NPR, PBS, ARTE (Association Relative à la Télévision Européenne), and ABC (Australian Broadcasting Company), and on recordings by Ovation, Albany Records, Renegade Classics, and the Holland-America Music Society. Mr. Yang is a frequent guest artist at the festivals of Novi Sad, Serbia; Monterrey, Mexico; Konstanz, Germany; Kotor, Montenegro; La Jolla and Napa, California; and Norfolk, Connecticut.

Born in Taiwan of Chinese and Japanese heritage, Mr. Yang studied first in the United Kingdom, and then in America with renowned Russian pianists Arkady Aronov at the Manhattan School of Music and Boris Berman at Yale. Mr. Yang has also worked with eminent pianists Claude Frank, Peter Frankl, Vera Gornostaeva, Hans Graf, Byron Janis, Lilian Kallir, and Murray Perahia. He is a founding member of the Soyulla Ensemble, which received the prestigious McKnight Fellowship, and recently made its debut at Alice Tully Hall and toured Korea.

A dedicated chamber musician, Wei-Yi Yang has collaborated with many distinguished musicians, including the Alexander, Brentano, Cassatt, Pacifica, and Tokyo String Quartets; mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade; soprano Dawn Upshaw; clarinetists Richard Stoltzman and David Shifrin; violists Ettore Causa, Roberto Díaz, and Roger Tapping; and violinist Axel Strauss, among numerous others. With cellist Clive Greensmith, he performed Mendelssohn’s complete duos for cello and piano on the 1884 Erard Grand piano at the Yale Collection of Musical Instruments.

In demand as a committed teacher, Wei-Yi Yang has presented master classes and performances in Scotland, Ireland, Germany, Spain, Thailand, Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, Mexico, Serbia, and Montenegro.

He has adjudicated at the Isidor Bajic Piano Memorial Competition, the San Antonio International Piano Competition, and the Concert Artists Guild auditions.

In 2004, he received his doctorate from Yale, where he joined the faculty in 2005, and serves as Associate Professor of Piano, Chair of DMA committee, and a Jonathan Edwards Fellow.

His interest in interdisciplinary projects has led to a collaboration with English

Notes on the Program

frédéric chopin Nocturne in B-flat minor, Op. 9, No. 1 The Nocturne in B-flat minor begins with a solemn tumbling downward that grows increasingly anxious with chromatic embellishments. The falling quality of this initial melody permeates the rest of the piece: small sweeps upwards are answered by an inevitable sinking in nearly each phrase.

While night is a time of longing, it is also a time of dreaming, and here a tender reverie emerges from the sunken minor-key theme. Yet even this modally major and lighter material sighs and leans downward.

Chopin’s reverie dissolves into an echo, suspended for a moment in the hazy space between wakefulness and sleep. A final plummet downwards gives way to a Picardy third, but this major-key ending should not supplant the intense expression of yearning. Chopin seems to remind his listener of this with a final chromatic sigh. sergei prokofiev Sonata No. 8 in B-flat major, Op. 84 Prokofiev completed his eighth piano sonata in 1944; he had begun this last of the three “War Sonatas” in 1939. This year marked not only the beginning of Soviet and German occupation of Poland, but also Prokofiev’s affair with Mira Mendelssohn.

By 1941, Prokofiev had openly left his wife and two sons to live with Mira, the dedicatee of the Sonata No. 8.

Though conceived in a B-flat centered key area like the other pieces on tonight’s program, Prokofiev’s use of tonality is even more liberal than Chopin’s and Schubert’s. In the first movement, Andante dolce, a wandering theme twists and winds chromatically, but

somehow each initial phrase cadences in B-flat major. This weakly established tonal center soon drifts to distant harmonic regions, and the spiraling material patiently accumulates into an impassioned Allegro moderato.

The second movement, Andante sognando (dreamily), juxtaposes the density of the first movement with a lightness and clarity that dances in triple meter and floats upwards, not withstanding lilting chromatic quirks. Beginning in D-flat major, it is reminiscent of the D- flat major reverie in Chopin’s Nocturne.

The finale, Vivace, turns the wandering themes of the first movement into vigorous arpeggios. While the B-flat tonality is asserted in the first opening sweeps upwards, as in the first movement, any sense of tonal stability is quickly usurped by more chromatic ventures. The finale also recalls the Andante sognando waltz in D-flat major, now harsh and ominous. franz schubert Sonata No. 21 in B-flat major, D. 960 Schubert’s Sonata in B-flat major was written in 1828 just months before his death, part of a prolific outpouring of music in the midst of extreme illness. The catalogue of Schubert’s last year includes many works that have come to be considered his most masterful and sublime: the Cello Quintet in C major, three expansive and interconnected piano sonatas (the last of which is the B-flat Sonata), the Mass in E-flat major, the posthumously published Schwanengesang song anthology, and the list goes on.

Notes on the Program

The affectual spectrum traversed throughout the approximately forty-minute Sonata in B-flat major overflows the constraints of language. For example, what is the character of the simple, tender opening theme of the sonata? It seems to occupy some intermediary space between the words we use to describe feelings. Not quite happy nor sad, tranquil nor heavy, it transcends the dualities we often use to categorize emotions.

Similarly, in the first movement, Molto moderato, the key of G-flat major appears as an intermediate thematic area between the conventional harmonic journey from tonic (B-flat major) to dominant (F major).

But this G-flat, as both a pitch and a harmonic area, is too important to function only as transition, occupying instead a structural area of its own. There is extraordinary value in this ambiguity: as Socrates declared in the Symposium, it is this in-between space in which Eros (beauty) resides.

Schubert’s Sonata in B-flat major taps into these niches of sentiments with sound. — Notes by Katherine Balch

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