Olga Kern, Jan 18, 2017

Robert Blocker, Dean

horowitz piano series

Olga Kern

Boris Berman, Artistic Director January 18, 2017 • Morse Recital Hall

Yale School of Music

Olga Kern January 18, 2017 • Morse Recital Hall

Domenico Scarlatti 1685–1757

Ludwig van Beethoven 1770–1827

Selected Sonatas Keyboard Sonata in A major, K. 24 Keyboard Sonata in D minor, K. 9 Piano Sonata in C major, K. 159 Piano Sonata No. 21 in C major, Op. 53, “Waldstein” I. Allegro con brio II. Introduzione. Adagio molto III. Rondo. Allegretto moderato – Prestissimo INTermission

Sergei Rachmaninoff 1873–1943

Selected Preludes Allegro vivace in C major, Op. 32, No. 1 Moderato in G major, Op. 32, No. 5 Vivo in A minor, Op. 32, No. 8 Prelude in C-sharp minor, Op. 3, No. 2 Allegro in C minor, Op. 23, No. 7 Lento in B minor, Op. 32, No. 10 Allegro in G-sharp minor, Op. 32, No. 12 Alla marcia in G minor, Op. 23, No. 5

Horowitz Piano Series

Alexander Scriabin 1872–1915

Etudes, Op. 42 Etude in F-sharp minor, No. 4 Etude in C-sharp minor, No. 5

Mily Balakirev 1837–1910

Islamey, Op. 18

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

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

Artist Profile

Olga Kern, piano Russian-American pianist Olga Kern is now recognized as one of her generation’s great pianists. She jumpstarted her U.S. career with her historic Gold Medal win at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Fort Worth, Texas, as the first woman to do so in more than thirty years.

A first prize winner of the Rachmaninoff International Piano Competition at seventeen, Ms. Kern is a laureate of many international competitions. In 2016 she will serve as jury chairman of both the Seventh Cliburn International Amateur Piano Competition and first Olga Kern International Piano Competition, where she also holds the title of artistic director.

In 2017 Ms. Kern will premiere her first American concerto, Barber’s Piano Concerto, with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Leonard Slatkin. Upcoming performances include orchestral appearances with Pacific Symphony, Colorado Symphony, Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, Stuttgarter Philharmoniker, and Copenhagen Philharmonic, as well as recitals at the Virginia Arts Festival and in Milan, Glasgow, New Haven, San Francisco, and Scottsdale.

Ms. Kern opened the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s 2015–2016 centennial season with Marin Alsop. Other season highlights included returns to the Royal Philharmonic with Pinchas Zukerman, Orchestre Philharmonique de Nice with Giancarlo Guerrero, Rochester Philharmonic, and San Antonio Symphony, a month-long tour of South Africa for concerts with the Cape and KwaZulu Natal philharmonics,

an Israeli tour with the Israel Symphony, solo recitals at Sarasota’s Van Wezel Hall, New York’s 92nd Street Y, and the University of Kansas’ Lied Center, and recitals with Renée Fleming at Carnegie Hall and in Berkeley.

In the 2013–2014 season, Kern appeared with the NHK Symphony, Orchestre National De Lyon, and the orchestras of Detroit, Nashville, Madison, New Mexico, and Austin and gave a recital at Seattle’s Meany Hall. Ms. Kern has performed in such famed concert halls as Carnegie Hall, the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, Symphony Hall in Osaka, Salzburger Festspielhaus, La Scala in Milan, Tonhalle in Zurich, and the Chatelet in Paris.

Ms. Kern’s discography includes her Grammy-nominated recording of Rachmaninoff ’s “Corelli” Variations and other transcriptions (2004), Brahms’ Variations (2007), and Chopin Piano Sonatas No. 2 and 3 (2010). She was featured in the award-winning documentary about the 2001 Cliburn Competition, Playing on the Edge.

Olga Kern is a Steinway Artist, and is managed by Columbia Artists Management.

Notes on the Program

Domenico Scarlatti Selected Sonatas Domenico Scarlatti followed in his father Alessandro’s footsteps as a musician of the highest quality. However, while the elder Scarlatti was instrumental in the development of Italian opera in the 18th century, the younger earned recognition from a young age as a keyboard virtuoso.

Domenico’s talents rivaled those of Handel and J.S. Bach, both of whom share his birth year of 1685, but his compositional approach shies away from the forms and affects of the Baroque period in favor of whimsical virtuosity that foreshadows a later style. As a composer, Domenico’s most enduring legacy is his large collection of harpsichord sonatas. Totaling more than 500, these sonatas, typically, are relatively brief in duration and divided into two musical sections, each of which is commonly repeated. The sonatas on today’s program are representative of the larger collection with regard not only to these structural stipulations but also to the virtuosity they require of a performer.

As with many of Domenico’s sonatas, quick leaps, flashy trills, suspensions, and other ornaments abound. Still, the sonatas retain their individual character and musical ideas; K. 159, for example, includes the harmonic progression known as the “horn fifth,” common in music associated with the hunt.

Ludwig van Beethoven Piano Sonata No. 21 in C major, Op. 53, “Waldstein” Ludwig van Beethoven’s “Waldstein” Sonata, Op. 53, stands alongside the “Appassionata” Sonata, Op. 57, and the “Eroica” Symphony, Op. 55, as a monumental work of the composer’s middle period. Named for its dedicatee, Count Ferdinand von Waldstein of Vienna, the sonata pushed at the structural and expressive boundaries of Beethoven’s piano sonatas written prior to the early years of the 19th century, ushering in a lengthy span of time in which the composer seemed to focus on works with heroic characters and musical materials. However, the “Waldstein” may have been something of a side project for Beethoven, as the early 1800s were a period in which the troubled composer longed for fame in the world of opera in Vienna. Beethoven saw opera as holding the key to unlocking the success he had yet to attain with his instrumental works.

Ultimately, Beethoven’s work on the planned opera Vestas Feuer, taken on at the same time as the “Waldstein,” arrived at an insurmountable barrier. Today, Beethoven’s contributions to the opera genre are seen to be minimal, while his over-whelming influence on many categories of instrumental music is without comparison. The “Waldstein” Sonata, arranged in three movements, is extraordinarily wide-ranging in character and marked throughout by difficult technical challenges.

Notes on the Program

Sergei Rachmaninoff Selected Preludes

Alexander Scriabin Etudes, Op. 42

Though Sergei Rachmaninoff is perhaps best known among modern audiences for his virtuosic piano concertos, the composer’s output is impressively broad, including large-scale orchestral works, operas, a cappella choral pieces in the Russian Orthodox tradition, and piano works of a much smaller scale. Of the latter, Rachmaninoff ’s piano preludes are perennial favorites for their powerful emotional character. Today’s selection of preludes explores three different musical moments in the composer’s life. The earliest, the Prelude in C-sharp minor of Op. 3, was critical to Rachmaninoff ’s rising success as a composer and pianist.

One of the first pieces Rachmaninoff completed upon graduating from the Moscow Conservatory in 1892, the work remained close at hand in performances throughout his career. The preludes of Op. 23, by contrast, were written between 1901 and 1902, following a period of overwhelming self-doubt that prompted Rachmaninoff to consider abandoning his writing. The final set of preludes, Op. 32, dates from about a decade later than those, when Rachmaninoff was at a high point in his career. All told, the 24 preludes from Op. 3, Op. 23, and Op. 32 represent all major and minor keys, following in the tradition of the Well-Tempered Clavier of J.S. Bach and the Op. 28 preludes of Frédéric Chopin.

Like his contemporary Rachmaninoff, Alexander Scriabin was a piano student at the Moscow Conservatory with aspirations to complete his studies as quickly as possible and move into the professional world.

Similarly, both composers held themselves to impossibly high standards and suffered a variety of repercussions as a result. While their early lives shared commonalities, their music developed in starkly contrasting directions. Scriabin’s Eight Etudes of Op. 42, two of which are heard today, begin to show signs of the unique musical colors and sound world that Scriabin occupied with increasing frequency as his life progressed. These works were completed in 1903, an uncommonly prolific year for Scriabin and one that saw him return his focus to piano music after having written two symphonies just prior. In the case of No. 4 and No. 5 of this set of preludes, the tonal language has yet to embody Scriabin’s full expressiveness and mystical approach in works from the last years of his life, and yet the musical language nonetheless pushes at the boundaries of Romantic harmony and expressivity.

Both are characterized throughout by passionate melodies and creative accompanimental patterns.

Notes on the Program

Mily Balakirev Islamey, Op. 18 Between his important position as a musical tutor for prominent Russian composers of the so-called “Mighty Handful,” including Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Borodin, and his proto-ethnomusicological work collecting and arranging folk songs from throughout Russia, Mily Balakirev is often overlooked for his contributions as a composer. Of these, some of the most striking remain Balakirev’s piano works. As a trained pianist himself and a devoted follower of Chopin, Balakirev explored a variety of genres and styles in the piano idiom.

Islamey, Op. 18, combines Balakirev’s devotion to the piano and its expressive possibilities with his fascination with the folk tunes of the Caucasus. Islamey, first completed in 1869 and revised in the final years of Balakirev’s life, cultivates a musical landscape comprised of contrasts between blazing staccato passages and deeply contemplative melodies and harmonic progressions. While Balakirev often labored over an individual piece of music for years, Islamey was finished in its initial version in the span of one month and in a wave of inspiration following a trip to the Caucasus. The piece is set in a general A-B-A form, with an agitated theme in the outer sections of the work and a contrasting slower theme that Balakirev attributed to Armenian Tatar folk traditions.

– Nathan Reiff

HOROWITZ PIANO SERIES Boris Berman Artistic Director Wednesdays at 7:30 pm Morse Recital Hall

MASTER CLASSES Most master classes take place Thursdays at 10:30 am in Morse Recital Hall JAN 19

Olga Kern

FEB 2

Asaf Zohar, Tel-Aviv Academy of Music

FEB 16

Wei-Yi Yang

MAR 2

Boris Berman

APR 13

Murray McLachlan, Chetham’s School of Music

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CONCERT POSTPONED We regret to announce that the Peter Frankl concert scheduled for February 8 has been postponed.

We hope to announce the new date in the near future.

HOROWITZ PIANO SERIES

SEP 21

BORIS BERMAN Debussy: 24 Preludes

OCT 05

WEI-YI YANG

NOV 16

HUNG-KUAN CHEN

DEC 07

2016–2017

Ravel’s Miroirs and more OLGA KERN

Schumann, Scriabin, and more

YEFIM BRONFMAN

Stravinsky’s Petrushka and more

DEC *PROKOFIEV AT 125 students perform the composer’s 14 YSM ballet music; Boris Berman, host JAN 18 MAR 08 APR 05

OLGA KERN

“Sheer talent does not come more transparently.” –Gramophone

ROBERT BLOCKER Beethoven, Mozart, and more

MELVIN CHEN

All-French program including Chausson Concerto, Op. 21

YEFIM BRONFMAN

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Upcoming Events Arthur Haas & Friends january 20

Faculty Artist Series Faculty harpsichordist Arthur Haas performs with his ensemble Gold and Glitter, featuring Caroline Giassi, baroque oboe; Daniel Lee, baroque violin; and Martha McGaughey, viola da gamba Morse Recital Hall | Friday | 7:30 pm free admission

Wendy Sharp & Friends january 22

Faculty Artist Series Faculty violinist Wendy Sharp performs with YSM faculty pianist Melvin Chen, violinist Julie Kim, violist Marka Gustavsson, and cellist Mimi Hwang Morse Recital Hall | Sunday | 3 pm free admission

Brentano String Quartet january 24

Oneppo Chamber Music Series Pianist Jonathan Biss and violist Hsin-Yun Huang join the Brentano String Quartet for a program that includes selections from Bach’s The Art of the Fugue; Elgar’s Piano Quintet, Op. 84; a selection of Gesualdo’s madrigals; and Mozart’s String Quintet No. 6, K. 614 Morse Recital Hall | Tuesday | 7:30 pm Tickets start at $26 • Students $13

Giancarlo Guerrero, guest conductor january 27

Yale Philharmonia Guest conductor Giancarlo Guerrero leads the Yale Philharmonia in performances of Wagner’s Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10 Woolsey Hall | Friday | 7:30 pm Tickets from $10 • Yale Faculty/Staff $8 Students $5 $3 surcharge for purchases at the door

Ettore Causa, Frank Morelli & Boris Berman january 29 Faculty Artist Series Violist Ettore Causa, bassoonist Frank Morelli, and pianist Boris Berman — all members of YSM’s faculty — perform a program that features a duo for bassoon and piano, a duo for viola and bassoon, and a trio Morse Recital Hall | Sunday | 3 pm free admission

Yale Brass Trio january 31

Faculty Artist Series Pianist Mihae Lee joins the Yale Brass Trio for a program that honors Robert E. Nagel Jr. with performances of Nagel’s Brass Trio, Paul Lansky’s Pieces of Advice, Pierre Gabaye’s Récréation, and more Morse Recital Hall | Tuesday | 7:30 pm free admission

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