Garrick Ohlsson, piano PROGRAM NOTES - The Broad Stage

Eli and Edythe Broad Stage

Santa Monica College Performing Arts Center

Jane Deknatel, Director, Performing Arts Center

Garrick Ohlsson, piano

FRI / FEB 23 / 7:30 PM

Garrick Ohlsson, piano

PROGRAM NOTES

Please reserve your applause until the end of each entire work.

PROGRAM

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

Sonata in C minor, Op. 13, “Pathétique”

Grave, Allegro di molto e con brio

Adagio cantabile

Rondo: Allegro

Alexander Scriabin (1871-1915)

Selections

Etude, Op. 65, No. 1

Etude in D-flat Major, Op. 8, No. 10

Prelude, Op. 59, No. 2

Poème, Op. 32, No. 1

Sonata No. 5, Op. 53

Intermission

Franz Schubert (1797-1828)

Sonata in B-flat Major, D. 960 (Op. posth)

Molto moderato

Andante sostenuto

Scherzo: Allegro vivace con delicatezza

Allegro ma non troppo

The following notes are copyright Susan Halpern, 2018.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

Sonata in C minor, Op. 13, “Pathétique”

i. Grave, Allegro di molto e con brio

ii. Adagio cantabile

iii. Rondo: Allegro

When this sublime work of Beethoven’s was first published in 1799, it carried the

unusual title Grande Sonata Pathétique, a forward-looking expressive idea of the

kind that became popular in the 19th century. Unusual in having a formal

descriptive title, this work is similar to, but different from, a programmatic sonata.

The name Pathétique was not actually Beethoven's idea; his publisher gave it the

extravagant title Grande Sonata Pathétique, and the name stuck. The title uses

the word grande to indicate a work large and important enough to be published

as a separate piece rather than as part of a collection; pathétique signifies that

the music sought to express emotion: the French term means “moving” or

“affecting.” Beethoven intended to evoke a specific mood without any narrative.

The title page also made a practical 18th century point, specifying that the work

could be performed on either harpsichord or piano.

The Sonata Pathétique is a great expression of the Romantic sensibilities current

and popular in German literature that had had little outlet in music earlier.

Ignaz Moscheles (1794-1870), a splendid pianist/composer, wrote of his rapture

on discovering this sonata during his student days, when his teacher had

forbidden him Beethoven’s “crazy” music. Early critics recognized the sonata’s

great emotional power and sought non-musical explanations for it, yet Beethoven

did not intend the music to have any programmatic explanations. Beethoven’s

biographer, Barry Cooper, feels this sonata “surpasses any of his previous

compositions in strength of character, depth of emotion, level of originality, range

of sonorities and ingenuity of motivic and tonal manipulation.”

i. Grave, Allegro di molto e con brio

The intensity and mood of the pathos is evident from the beginning of the

introduction which incorporates “sharp contrasts of dynamic and register,

harsh dissonance, chromaticism and a mixture of very long notes, very short

ones and dramatic rests,” all reinforcing the mood. The tragic, slow opening,

Grave, is not simply a formal introduction but an organic part of the movement;

its return signals some of the important points of its structure. Beethoven utilizes

it again to begin the development section of the Allegro di molto e con brio;

it then reappears in the recapitulation a few measures before the movement’s

end, where dramatic silences are substituted for the initial chords. The intense

and dramatic silences are given a meaning that is the equivalent of notes;

this innovation is an indication of Beethoven’s genius.

ii. Adagio cantabile

The slow movement, Adagio cantabile, an exquisitely written, almost orchestral

presentation of a simple three-part structure, has one of the most beautiful

melodies that Beethoven ever composed. Needing to give it a programmatic

spin, some critics have unnecessarily suggested a Romeo and Juliet feeling

exists in it.

iii. Rondo: Allegro

Although the movement begins with a graceful, innocent little melody, the Rondo

finale, Allegro, cannot be explained as a light-hearted closing movement that

Beethoven wrote in a joyous or carefree moment. It has an extended structure,

serious in tone, which mixes grace and passion and embodies dark moments

when the romantic fervor of the first movement momentarily returns. After the

third return of the movement’s own main theme, the dramatic tension grows.

The ending explodes, bringing the work to its conclusion in the minor mode.

Alexander Scriabin (1871-1915)

Selections

Etude, Op. 65, No. 1

Etude in D-flat Major, Op. 8, No. 10

Prelude, Op. 59, No. 2

Poème, Op. 32, No. 1

Sonata No. 5, Op. 53

Alexander Scriabin traveled back and forth between Russia and Western Europe

(and, in 1906-1907, the United States), working as a pianist and composer and

pursuing his attempts to expand the borders of music in several directions.

He experimented with harmony and form, became involved in subjective material

that affected his music (such as mystic-religious beliefs of Indian or other Asian

origin) and was concerned with the direct translation of tone into color. He was

seriously affected by theosophy and Asian mystic-religious beliefs, and with the

direct translation of tone into color. In 1905 he first fell under the spell of the

writings of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891), who had founded her

Theosophical Society in 1875, in New York. Soon Scriabin began filling

notebooks with mystical verse, including a Poem of Ecstasy that became the

literary basis of an orchestral work of that title, Op. 54, as well as of Piano Sonata

No. 5, which he wrote at the same time. After 1907, he became more radical in

his appropriation of unusual scales for his music.

For a long time, many musicians dismissed Scriabin’s works as aberrations

foreign to the mainstream of European music. They thought his music strange,

difficult and extravagant. Serge Koussevitzky, both Scriabin’s benefactor and

conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1924 to 1949, was one of the

few who often included Scriabin’s orchestral music in his programs. In the 1960's,

however, the new interest in Asian mysticism began to be reflected in more

frequent performances of all of Scriabin's music. The music Garrick Ohlsson has

selected for this program includes that which highlights Scriabin’s early espousal

of late 19th century Romanticism as well as that which displays his later passion

and involvement with mysticism.

Ohlsson has commented that Scriabin’s keyboard writing is among the most

challenging in the repertoire: “These pieces are very difficult to play, right up

there with the toughest works of Rachmaninoff or Prokofiev or Liszt.” Ohlsson

further has said: “I completely understand when people don’t get Scriabin or don’t

like him. He has such a strong flavor. And because his musical language evolved

so much — from the hyper-romantic to the almost atonal — you never know

exactly what you’re going to get when you see his name on a program. I love his

sheer inspiration, and the way he has of being over the top. If he’s languorous,

he’s so languorous. He never does anything by half measures.”

Études

The original purpose of an étude was as a study-piece to teach skills; not until

Chopin’s time was it ever intended to display them. Throughout its history,

however, the etude, often based on a single theme, has focused on a single

technical problem of execution.

In his early piano works, Scriabin emulated Chopin and Liszt as composers for

the piano, combining elements of expressivity and virtuosity that he found in their

music with hints of the advanced musical language that he would later develop.

Like them, he wrote many études, or studies, concentrating on a technical

problem of performance, but with such intrinsic musical interest that the étude

became a concert piece rather than just a technically demanding practice

exercise. Scriabin's Études span four creative periods; he composed 24 Études

in three sets: Op. 8, published in 1894; Op. 42, in 1903, and Op. 65, in 1912.

The Études, Op. 65 are intended for the performer to display a command of the

intervals of perfect fifths, major sevenths, and ninths, in inverse order. Scriabin’s

own piano technique was exemplary, although his hands were very small,

making playing more difficult for him than for the average person. Commentators

have noted that the fact that he could play these pieces with comparative ease

was beyond astonishing. Scriabin used a limited palette to emphasize the interval

under scrutiny, yet created substantial poetry.

The earliest grouping, Op. 8, shows us the young Scriabin as he was developing,

still influenced by Chopin and Liszt, but also making his own voice shine through

these short works, which display his unique, individualistic style while following in

a distinct line from those of his models. The very brief Étude Op. 8, No. 10 mixes

staccato and legato writing in playful music. It exhibits perpetual motion and has

been described as having a hesitant, rhythmic eccentricity. With some six against

five figurations, it is most demanding music; the virtuosic runs ascend to the high

register without sacrificing any charm, clarity and beauty.

Prelude, Op. 59, No. 2

Between 1888 and 1914 Scriabin composed ninety Preludes for piano, not

preludes to anything but simply short, free-form expressive mood pieces.

Prelude Op. 59, No. 2 was written in 1910, five years before the composer’s

death. It is notated as "Sauvage, Belliqueux" (Savage/wild, belligerent).

The work bears no key signature, and its final cadence concludes with a discord.

(See below: Sonata No. 5 had already ended away from the tonic.) This work has

been said to preview a frightening foreshadowing of war and destruction.

Poème Op. 32, No. 1

By the time Scriabin composed the Poèmes (published in 1905), his style had

fully matured although his artistic persona was still evolving; his tonal idiom

would become less stable, his harmonies more daring, his sound world more

mystical and ethereal.

Written in 1903, a productive time for Scriabin, Poème, Op. 32, No. 1, in F-Sharp,

Andante cantabile, can be understood as a kind of lyric love song, marked by

intensities of passion, rooted in the post-Romantic style. Composed when

Scriabin had just given up his professorship at the Moscow Conservatory and

begun to write in the mystical style that would characterize his late works,

this Poème is probably based on material from an opera that Scriabin was

working on between 1900 and 1902. The glistening and rather dreamy yearning

principal theme with its lush accompaniment is reminiscent of Chopin and also

has some sonorities of Debussy. Scriabin never went beyond the sketches for

the opera whose central character was to be a nameless magician, poet,

composer, philosopher, obviously a self-image, whose life ends with an ecstatic

love-death in the arms of his muse, personified by a beautiful princess, but the

music found its way into other compositions including this one. As the music

progresses, it seems more restless although it has an overall good-natured,

carefree, playful character.

Sonata No. 5, Op. 53

Scriabin completed Sonata No. 5 in 1907 and published it with this bit of his

verse at the head of the score: "I bring you to life, Oh mysterious forces. Sunk in

the dark depths of the creative spirit in the timid beginnings of life, I bring you

courage!" The sonata that discusses and illuminates these "mysterious forces"

consists of a single long movement that can be heard as falling into four large

sections, but the sections do not define the structure in any way.

Delicate harmonies, largely built with intervals of fourths, rather than the more

traditional thirds, predominate; they culminate in a kind of outburst. What Scriabin

seems to have wanted to achieve was the expression of emotion in a constant

state of flux along with (or by means of) a constant change in tonality, rhythm,

meter, and tempo. The range extends from irate fury to voluptuary ecstasy and

from the languor of weariness to the hyperactivity of delirium.

Franz Schubert (1797-1828) Sonata in B-flat Major, D. 960 (Op. posth)

i. Molto moderato

ii. Andante sostenuto

iii. Scherzo: Allegro vivace con delicatezza

iv. Allegro ma non troppo

Schubert’s oeuvre exploded with a burst of creative energy during the last three

months of his brief life. In addition to a few outstanding sacred choral works,

he composed some of the finest of his instrumental masterpieces during this

period: the huge String Quintet, a piano trio and three magnificent piano sonatas.

He finished this one, the last and greatest of them, on September 26. He had

intended to dedicate the sonatas to an important pianist and composer,

Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1778-1837), but in 1838, ten years after Schubert’s

death, the publisher of the first edition took the liberty of dedicating it to

Robert Schumann, who did so much for Schubert’s posthumous reputation.

Schumann brought about the first performance of Schubert’s great C-Major

Symphony in 1839 and then coined the unforgettable phrase about its “heavenly

length,” but he did not understand Schubert’s sonatas very well, finding them too

loose and rambling. He thought that they were either early works mislabeled as

later works, or, in fact, late works written when the composer’s final illness had

weakened his powers. Other musicians even found fault with Schubert’s

continuous, apparently infinite flow of musical ideas, which they saw as an

unsatisfactory substitute for a thorough development of a few of them.

Their analysis, too, misunderstood what Schubert had achieved because he

unquestionably did develop his themes, but in a manner different from

Beethoven’s analytic treatment of the small motives into which he broke down his

subjects. Schubert sought instead to develop large musical entities without

disturbing the integrity of his long melodies. The resulting spaciousness of the

sonatas gives them their own “heavenly length.” It also makes substantial

demands on the performer’s musical intelligence and sensibility, even more than

it does on his technical expertise.

The third and last of the late sonatas, the Piano Sonata in B-Flat, has been called

both morbid and sublime. It is the most personal and poetic of the three last

piano sonatas; it is Schubert’s last instrumental work, completed on September

26, 1828. The composer performed the last three sonatas at a party held by

Dr. Ignaz Menz on September 27, only a day after he finished this last sonata.

He died less than two months afterwards. The pianist Claudio Arrau remarked,

“This is a work written in the proximity of death...one feels it from the very first

theme...the breaking off, and the silence after a long, mysterious trill in the bass.”

i. Molto moderato

The first movement of the spacious B-Flat Sonata opens sonorously; it is not fast,

but rather Molto moderato, deliberately paced, noble, elegiac, eloquent and full

of lyricism, as its huge sections assemble themselves into the order of the sonata

form. One of his longest first movements, its music ranges from the quietly and

gently subdued to the rhapsodic and dreamlike; one hears it punctuated by bass

trills (called “distant rolls of thunder” by Denis Mathews) and pauses. The early

20th century musicologist Donald Tovey described the broad cantabile principal

theme as “a sublime theme of utmost calmness and breadth.” Its second theme

provides a contrast with its lightness. Its development has been much

commented upon: a new idea is introduced in the bass, which evolves to become

a theme in its own right; it eventually yields to the first theme, even before the

recapitulation. The biographer Newbould admires this movement immensely:

he calls it “one of the greatest sonata movements of all time.” John Reed in his

biography of Schubert, says it is “the most personal and poetic of all [piano

sonatas.]”

ii. Andante sostenuto

The second, nominally the slow movement, has an Andante sostenuto tempo

not a great deal slower than that of the first. The form is simple: three parts, as in

a song, the lyrical first and last parts substantially the same, with a contrasting,

dramatic middle section. This movement is meditative and profound with its

beautiful hymn-like broad lyricism of the middle section; it ends in a mood of

benediction. It is a contemplative dance, ranking with Schubert’s finest slow

movements for its sustained serious weight, its feeling of profound contemplation

and its sublimity of expression. At its end, it modulates to the major mode in a

poetic passage.

iii. Scherzo: Allegro vivace con delicatezza

Next Schubert provides a complete contrast in his bright and brisk third

movement. A relatively compact and emotionally uncomplicated Scherzo:

Allegro vivace con delicatezza, this is a quiet, fleet movement with airy textures

and soft dynamics, whose contrasting central trio section in the minor mode is

not bereft of tension and is marked by persistently syncopated rhythm. Schubert

makes an uneasy return to the initial Scherzo material with an improbable,

modulation to an adjacent key.

iv. Allegro ma non troppo

Last comes a long finale, Allegro ma non troppo, with both poetry and passion,

which combines the development and divergent tonal relationships of the sonata

form with those of the rondo, where an established theme recurs in alternation

with differing material. Schubert here pulls out all the stops in the variety of the

creation of many themes underpinned by thoughtful harmonies. The result is a

long and almost endless flow of jaunty music with a notable cheerful stomping

bass. A brief fast coda takes the sonata to its conclusion, rising to a final effective

and exciting climax. Here, as in the beginning of these three sonatas,

Beethoven’s influence becomes evident again.

COMING UP

CALDER QUARTET

Sunday, FEB 25, 2018 at 4:00 PM

Our artists-in-residence conclude their multi-year, Beethoven String Quartet cycle

with the first of three programs offering a stellar blend of classical and modern

pieces.

PROGRAM

Mendelssohn: String Quartet No. 2, Op. 13

Kurtág: Six Moment Musicaux for string quartet, Op. 44

Beethoven: String Quartet No. 15, Op. 132

The Calder Quartet residency at The Broad Stage has been made possible

in part by a generous grant from the Colburn Foundation.

COLBURN ORCHESTRA

RISING STARS, TIMELESS CLASSICS

Thursday, MAR 1, 2018 at 7:30 PM

The Colburn Orchestra makes its triumphant return to the Broad Stage for a

program of classical greats. Founded in 2003, the Colburn Orchestra is the

flagship ensemble of the Colburn Conservatory of Music.

PROGRAM

Rossini: L’Italiana in Algieri Overture

Nielsen: Flute Concerto

Beethoven: Symphony No. 3 “Eroica”

The Colburn Orchestra at The Broad Stage is generously supported by

Barbara and Heinrich Schelbert.