Robert Blocker, Dean
doctor of musical arts degree recital
Ronaldo Rolim, piano Thursday, December 12, 2019 | 7:30 pm | Morse Recital Hall in Sprague Memorial Hall
Sergei Prokofiev 1891–1953
Visions Fugitives, Op. 22 1. Lentamente 2. Andante 3. Allegretto 4. Animato 5. Molto giocoso 6. Con eleganza 7. Arpa. Pittoresco 8. Commodo 9. Allegretto tranquillo 10. Ridicolosamente 11. Con vivacità 12. Assai moderato 13. Allegretto 14. Feroce 15. Inquieto 16. Dolente 17. Poetico, andantino 18. Con una dolce lentezza 19. Presto agitatissimo e molto accentuato 20. Lento irrealmente
Karol Szymanowski 1882–1937
Masques, Op. 34 I. Shéhérazade II. Tantris le Bouffon III. Sérénade de Don Juan
intermission
Program, cont. Ferruccio Busoni 1866–1924
Sonatina No. 4, BV 274, “in diem nativitatis Christi MCMXVII”
Maurice Ravel 1875–1937
Le tombeau de Couperin, M. 68 I. Prélude II. Fugue III. Forlane IV. Rigaudon V. Menuet VI. Toccata
This performance is in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Musical Arts degree. As a courtesy to others, please silence all devices. Photography and recording of any kind is strictly prohibited. Please do not leave the hall during musical selections. Thank you.
Artist Profile With “a special ability to present touching interpretations” (El Norte), Brazilian pianist Ronaldo Rolim is a prominent figure among the newest generation of outstanding musicians. Acclaimed for his “consummate elegance” (New York Concert Review) and “mastery of phrasing, agogic accents, and dynamics” (Oberbaselbieter Zeitung), he has performed extensively over four continents, in such venues such as Carnegie Hall, Zurich’s Tonhalle, London’s Wigmore Hall, the Great Hall of the Liszt Academy in Budapest, and Beijing’s National Centre for the Performing Arts. He is a winner of Astral’s 2017 National Auditions. He has also captured top prizes at numerous international competitions, including the James Mottram, Bösendorfer, San Marino, Lyon, and Teresa Carreño competition, as well as the prestigious Concours Géza Anda in Zurich. In 2019, Mr. Rolim releases his latest album on Odradek Records, Szymanowski - The Wartime Triptychs, devoted to the programmatic works the Polish composer wrote during World War I. In fact, this very topic is extensively discussed in Mr. Rolim’s doctoral thesis, completed in 2016 at Yale University. r. Rolim begins the 2019–2020 season as M soloist in Beethoven’s Concerto No. 5 with the Louisiana Philharmonic. He was featured in a celebration of the 150th anniversary of the birth of Enrique Granados, with performances of the composer’s complete Goyescas in venues in the U.S., Europe, and Brazil. Recent guest soloist performances include Brahms’ Concerto No. 1 with the Symphony Orchestra of the St. Petersburg State Academic Capella, Debussy’s Fantaisie with the Minas Gerais Philharmonic in
Brazil, and a German tour of Beethoven’s Concerto No. 5 with Ukraine’s Lviv Philharmonic Orchestra. Other recent performances include both the Grieg and Schumann concerti at the Septembre Musical Festival in Montreux, Switzerland, the Chausson Concerto with the São Paulo String Quartet, and an appearance in Bernstein’s Age of Anxiety in the Bernstein Centenary Festival hosted by the Minas Gerais Philharmonic. Mr. Rolim has performed with the Tonhalle Orchester Zürich, Musikkollegium Winterthur, Concerto Budapest, Phoenix Symphony, and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, as well as many of Brazil’s foremost ensembles. A frequent presence at international music festivals, he has been featured in solo recitals and chamber music performances at Ravinia, Folle Journée, Accademia Musicale Chigiana, Musikdorf Ernen, Académie Musicale de Villecroze, the Kingston Chamber Music Festival, and the Lake George Music Festival. His performances have been featured in radio broadcasts in Brazil (Radios MEC and Cultura), the U.S. (Spokane Public Radio and WBJC Baltimore), and Europe (Radios SWR 2, BBC 3, Rai 3, and France Musique). He has also been featured in several television programs in his home country, including Brasil Piano Solo, a series of recitals dedicated exclusively to Brazilian music, presented by the TV Cultura Channel. He has also participated in the documentary Magda Tagliaferro: A World Inside The Piano, in which he performed music of Scriabin. passionate advocate of chamber music, A Mr. Rolim is the founding member of Trio Appassionata, formed in 2007 with
Artist Profile, cont.
Program Notes by Ronaldo Rolim
violinist Lydia Chernicoff and cellist Andrea Casarrubios. Some of the ensemble’s recent projects include tours of Brazil and China, and the release of its debut album, gone into night are all the eyes, for Odradek Records. Featuring piano trios by American composers, Gramophone said the disc “deserves automatic respect”, presenting “musicmaking as impressive and dangerous as a granite cliff” (International Record Review). Mr. Rolim greatly enjoys working with diverse chamber musicians, and has performed with the Aizuri, Jasper, and São Paulo string quartets, and members of Ensemble Connect, the Baltimore Symphony, the Brazilian Symphony, and Bronx Arts Ensemble. Ronaldo Rolim began musical studies with his mother, Miriam Corrêa, and gave his first public performance at the age of four. He was admitted to the Magda Tagliaferro School in São Paulo as a student of Zilda Candida dos Santos and Armando Fava Filho. After winning the Nelson Freire and the Magda Tagliaferro national piano competitions at the age of 18, he moved to the U.S., where he studied with Flavio Varani at Oakland University (Michigan), Benjamin Pasternack at the Peabody Conservatory, and Boris Berman at the Yale School of Music.
Once called “the war to end all wars,” World War I (1914–1918) shattered what Stefan Zweig deemed “the world of security,” in a dramatic reshuffling of European society and geopolitics. The event had a profound impact on early-twentieth-century composers, and indirectly fostered the inception of several masterpieces. Tonight’s program feature four of these works, all conceived under extraordinary circumstances. Russia’s disastrous campaign in World War I was marked by millions of casualties, shortage of food, severe inflation, and growing political instability, proving deeply unpopular among its citizens. The inevitable 1917 Revolution brought down czarism and spread the chaos in the streets of St. Petersburg (then Petrograd). Prokofiev, however, remained oblivious to that for as much as he could. To avoid being recruited to the army he returned to the Conservatoire as an organ student, and whenever possible he fled Petrograd to find peace to work. Despite such disengagement from political affairs at the time, his musical language involuntarily became more lyrical and his characteristic sarcasm somewhat tamed. Amid scores such as the Scythian Suite and the opera The Gambler gave way to works such as the First Violin Concerto, the Third and Fourth Piano Sonatas, and the “Classical” Symphony. Visions Fugitives, a fascinating kaleidoscope of moods presented in twenty vignettes, also falls into this vein. They are some of the most personal works Prokofiev ever wrote, and perhaps represent the most spontaneous manifestation of his musical instincts. The title was extracted from the
poetry of Konstantin Balmont, a Russian Symbolist whom Prokofiev met during the war years. The Visions were not written in chronological order, and Prokofiev himself did not conceive them as an inseparable whole. However, the set as it is features a compelling architecture. From the simple naïveté of No. 1 to the hectic bitonal battle of No. 5 there is a gradual buildup in tempo and volume, which starts to dissipate with the charming wit of No. 6, and continues in the contemplative mood of Nos. 7-9. Another buildup begins in pairs: the tongue-in-cheek sarcasm of Nos. 10-11, the plain weirdness of Nos. 12-13 and finally the pair of relentless toccatas, Nos. 14-15, the cycle’s climax. After such energy, the bittersweet nostalgia of Nos. 16-18 brings us to a more vulnerable psychological state. The breathlessness of No.1 9 is a disturbing break: Prokofiev once mentioned it is a representation of the street crowds during the February Revolution; the result may remind one of Picasso’s Guernica. After such cataclysm, No. 20 falls into the realm of the imaginary and delivers one of the most poetic, yet pessimistic endings in the piano literature. In April 1915, after going to Italy to discuss details of a possible collaboration with the impresario Sergei Diaghilev, Prokofiev returned to Petrograd via Kiev, and there he watched a performance of Szymanowski’s “La fontaine d’Aréthuse” (from Mythes) performed by the Polish composer himself and violinist Paweł Kochański. Prokofiev was so enthralled by the work that his own Violin Concerto, composed recently after that, contains many of the techniques
Szymanowski and Kochański had introduced in Mythes. Like Prokofiev, Szymanowski was also going through a transformation of his musical language, in fact a much more fundamental one. His music, once heavily influenced by Strauss and Reger, found a distinct compositional voice through works like Mythes, which combine the yearning, passionate expression of German post-Romanticism with the colorful sound world of Franco-Russian music, all with ancient mythology as programmatic backdrop. Having settled at his family’s estate in Ukraine during the war, he had the opportunity to assimilate all his influences and reach full maturity as a composer. In Masques, Szymanowski puts this newly inaugurated idiom to great use in a psychological depiction of famed types from different cultures. “Shéhérazade” recalls the storyteller from One Thousand and One Nights, who voluntarily marries King Shahryar despite knowing that every day he marries one virgin after murdering the one he married the day before, thus avoiding adultery. The king, however, becomes obsessed with her captivating stories, and after 1001 nights confesses himself in love, making her the new queen. Throughout, a five-note “threat” leitmotiv highlights the dramatic element of the piece. In scope, it resembles a ballade in the manner of Chopin, and its atmosphere of mystery and sensuality evokes Scriabin. “Tantris le Bouffon,” contrastingly, displays an oxymoronic combination of grotesquerie and passionate lyricism. “Tantris” is an anagram of “Tristan,” from the legend of Tristan und Isolde, immortalized in Wagner’s
Program Notes, cont. opera. Szymanowski, however, based his portrayal on Ernst Hardt’s Tantris der Narr, a satiric play loosely based on the legend. Hardt creates an entirely different plot using one single event of the original tale: Tristan’s appearance to Isolde disguised as Tantris. In the play, Tristan breaks an oath made before his uncle, King Mark, and returns to Cornwall, from where he was banned after rumors of having an adulterous life with Isolde, Mark’s wife. Disguised as a jester, he desperately attempts to reconnect with his beloved, but she fails to recognize him. Szymanowski’s Tristan features three distinct characters: introspective, sarcastic and passionate, each one linked to a different facet of his personality: the guilty nephew, the jester, and the lover. It is the most adventurous of the Masques, with chords that are almost cluster-like, and rare moments of harmonic stability. “Sérénade de Don Juan” refers to the Spanish tale of the libertine who seduced many women, immortalized in different literary sources, notably Da Ponte’s libretto to Mozart’s Don Giovanni. It is decisively the most operatic of the Masques, maintaining the parodistic vein of “Tantris” while adding a stereotypically flamboyant rhetoric. Song and improvisation are the core aspects of the piece, both linked to his personality: the former associated with seduction, the latter hinting at his dubious character. Their fanciful presentation in the music only emphasizes Don Juan’s narcissism. The blossoming of Szymanowski’s new style was only possible because he, as Prokofiev, remained mostly oblivious to the war.
Unlike Prokofiev, though, he was deeply troubled by the war and its consequences. The same is true of Busoni, whose cosmopolitan nature could barely cope with brother-nations destroying one another. After the premiere of his Fourth Sonatina, subtitled “in diem nativitatis Christi MCMXVII,” the review highlighted the “ringing of bells and Christmas atmosphere seen with the eyes and felt with the heart of an artist shaken by the griefs of the world.” Busoni was a true citizen of the world: Italian by birth, he lived most of his life in Germany, and briefly in cities like Moscow, Helsinki and Boston. During the war years, though, he settled in Zurich. The war became a personal issue for him when his son Benvenuto, an American citizen, was recruited to the army after the USA’s declaration of war in 1917. Dedicated to him, the Fourth Sonatina is a desperate, yet serene cry for peace. Remarkable in its transparent concision, yet supremely rich in emotional content, the 8-minute work navigates through the quasi-barcarolle simplicity of the first few pages, towards a more spiritually-driven second theme, presented in octaves in the low register, that eventually fades and gives place to a mysterious chorale. An Italianate dance, based on the second theme, interrupts the chorale’s prayerful introspection as a distant memory. After the dance loses momentum, the chorale returns as a distant menace. A recapitulation occurs, in the format of a 4-part fugato that finds its way to austere transfiguration. In his later years, Busoni composed in a distilled language combining the polyphony
of Bach, the textural/structural transparency of Mozart and the pianism of late Liszt. He eventually called this style Young Classicism. In 1920, he declared: “This art will be old and new at the same time at first. We are steering in that direction, luckily, consciously or unconsciously, willingly or unwillingly.” That could certainly be as well applied to Ravel’s Le tombeau de Couperin, at once a memorial to the greatness of Baroque French music and the victims of World War I. With each of its six movements dedicated to a friend the composer lost on the battlefield, Tombeau uses the glories of the past to convey a much-needed patriotic statement in a moment of extreme grief. The music of Tombeau is never dark, but its luminosity is overcast by an inevitable elegiac mood. The textural transparency of the “Prélude,” with its pentatonic-like perpetual motion, gives way to a bleak “Fugue” whose contortioned-yet-strict counterpoint is mind-boggling. The nostalgic “Forlane,” one of the long-forgotten dances that Ravel rescued for his suite, liltingly brings one back to the rich harmonies of Valses nobles et sentimentales, whereas the “Rigaudon” provides a delightful relief, despite its melancholic trio section. The “Menuet,” a dance Ravel always cherished, is the emotional core of the suite, featuring the work’s most memorable melodic material and a quasi-Schubertian major-mode sadness. The middle section, a “Musette,” presents harmonic progressions hinting at the sound world of the Piano Trio’s “Passacaille,” written shortly before that. The recapitulation, juxtaposing both “Menuet” and “Musette” materials, is a Ravelian miracle. The concluding “Toccata,”
with its typical French hand-crossings (when hands continuously stumble upon each other) and motoric quality, is an homage not only to Couperin but also Saint-Saëns, another towering figure in French music. Glenn Watkins argues that the “Toccata”’s steely tone suggests the motion of a fighter plane. Airborne or not, it is a piece of utmost resilience, with an unshakable strive for survival. The coda, featuring the only perennial fortissimo in the entire suite, is a moment of catharsis and an anticipated claim of victory. For Ravel, even if France is not a winner, its cultural legacy is, and will endure nevertheless.
Upcoming Events dec 14 Early Instrumental Performance Class Recital A performance of early instrumental music by students in Daniel S. Lee’s and Arthur Haas’ MUS 626 class. 3:00 p.m. | Sudler Recital Hall free
Catherine Russell Ellington Jazz Series “One of jazz’s most celebrated vocalists, an incandescent performer who can make a century-old blues song as fresh and bracing as tomorrow’s bad news.” — San Francisco Chronicle 7:30 pm | Morse Recital Hall Tickets start at $22, students $10 jan 17
dec 14 Yale Percussion Group YSM Ensembles Works by student composers Krists Auznieks and Miles Walter receive premieres on a program that features percussionist and School of Music alumna Jisu Jung. 7:30 p.m. | Morse Recital Hall free dec 15
dec 16 Bassoonarama YSM Ensembles A performance by students from faculty bassoonist Frank Morelli’s studio. 7:30 p.m. | Sudler Recital Hall free
David Shifrin & Friends Faculty Artist Series Works by Mendelssohn, Enescu, Poulenc, and Paganini, with faculty pianist Robert Blocker, and students and alumni from the clarinet studio. 3:00 p.m. | Morse Recital Hall free
Melvin Chen Horowitz Piano Series A performance of Janaček’s In the Mists, faculty composer Hannah Lash’s Six Etudes and a Dream, and Shostakovich’s infrequently performed Piano Sonata No. 2 in B minor. 7:30 pm | Morse Recital Hall Tickets start at $15, students $7
jan 22
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