Daria Rabotkina: Notes on the Program
THURSDAY
GRANADOS
“I fell in love with Goya’s psychology, his palette, with himself and the Duchess of Alba, with his pretty wife, his models, his quarrels, loves, and courtships. That pinkish white on the cheeks in contrast, to me, with the black lace and embroidered velour, those bodies of swaying waists, mother-of-pearl, and jasmine hands resting on jet ornaments have dazzled me – they intrigue me. I would like to combine the sentimental, the amorous, the passionate, the dramatic, and tragic, as Goya did.” – Granados
Long hailed as a preeminent, emblematic musician of Spain, known for exceptional skill in improvisation at the piano, at chamber music, and, above all, as a composer, Enrique Granados came originally from Barcelona, in Catalonia, and was well acquainted with other notable musicians of his time, including Fauré, Saint-Saëns, and Casals. In his music, one quickly hears those qualities of piquant harmonies and of rhythm, particularly reminiscent of flamenco dancing, etc., that make Spanish music immediately recognizable and greatly loved.
Opening this evening’s recital is the fourth movement of six, extracted from his most famous work for the piano, Goyescas, a suite begun in 1909 and premiered in 1911. The suite reflects Granados’s amazement, during a visit to Madrid’s Prado Museum in 1896, at seeing Goya’s romantic paintings (and their cartoons for tapestries) of majos and majas: men and women considered to be among the “lower classes” of Spanish society. The vivid visual artwork, and Granados’s reflections on them, lend us a wonderful glimpse of the activities of a flamboyantly dressed group of people at their leisure, flirting perhaps.
The suite is, of course, narrative, meaning that it elaborates a story, much on the order of Schumann’s Carnaval or Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. As such, it gives performers a grounding in story-telling that allows them to expand upon extra-musical ideas through the music itself. Such was the enthusiastic response of Goyescas’s first audiences, particularly at the Salle Pleyel in Paris in 1914, that Granados, responding to an appeal from the Paris Opera, went on to turn that material into an opera. The short of the rest of the story is that the opera’s premiere actually took place in the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1915. It was so well received and made him such a celebrity that President Wilson asked him for a recital at the White House, thus making him and his wife miss their originally planned voyage directly back to Spain. Re-routed subsequently via England, their boat from Liverpool to Dieppe was torpedoed and both died at sea. With his death at age 48, Spain lost one of its best and most promising artists.
The single movement to be heard today, dedicated by Granados to his wife, is a maiden’s poignant nocturne to which a nightingale sings an ornate, cadenza-like response. Of the whole set, Granados once wrote, “In Goyescas, I intended to give a personal note, a mixture of bitterness and grace … [this is a publishing world thing – but I was told never to use three periods, but the actual ellipsis character! It’s a thing – from a typesetting perspective there is a difference in spacing!] rhythm, color, and life that are typically Spanish; a sentiment suddenly amorous and passionate, dramatic, and tragic, such as is seen in the works of Goya.”
For notes on other works on this program at The Reser, please consult the notes below.
SATURDAY
SCHUBERT
Moments Musicaux, D. 780
“O imagination! thou greatest treasure of man, thou inexhaustible wellspring from which artists as well as savants drink! O remain with us still, by however few thou are acknowledged and revered …”
(Franz Schubert’s journal entry, March 1824)
Not a listener in this audience would be unfamiliar with Schubert and the enormous output of German Lieder (600 of them!) synonymous with his career. What may be lesser known, in a postmodern world that reveres ownership and ever-more personalized material goods, is that the last Viennese address that Schubert called home (and where five of the six Moments Musicaux performed today were composed) was the only place he ever lived that contained a piano. Let that sink in: In his short 31 years on earth, Schubert never bought, leased or borrowed a piano of his own – and yet he managed to write keyboard music that not only counts among the most beloved of all piano repertoire, but are also considered exemplary of the oscillation between the classical and romantic worlds he straddled.
In Vienna of the 1820s, light and undemanding entertainment for in-house performance was increasingly in demand – and for Schubert, a freelance musician, songs and “piano miniatures” provided the perfect vehicle to serve both his muse and keep a roof over his head (if not a piano in his parlor). Published in the last year of his life, and written between 1823 and 1827, the Moments Musicaux (literally “Musical Moments”) are brilliant examples of Schubert’s lyric genius and should be appreciated as songs-without-words, or brief glimpses into his poetic and adventuresome inner world. Listening to these pieces, one wants to imagine what the intimate musical gatherings or “Schubertiades” of his day must have sounded like, with the composer himself sitting at the piano. The different pieces are all contemplative in mood, congenial in tone and not far removed from the spirit of song, with the range of the melodies not extending beyond the range of the human voice. Music critic and biographer Karl Kobald describes them as “beautiful miniatures in music – tone-poems, intimate confidences from Schubert’s innermost soul; melodies in chords, elaborated with a delicate filagree of runs and flights of harmony that bring us straight into the blessed sphere of romance.”
(The term “Moments Musicaux”, incidentally, was not Schubert’s own label, but a term invented by his publisher, Marcus Leidesdorf, in the summer of 1828 – a fashionable sales-pitch for grouping together six different short pieces characterized by different moods and timbres. Despite the whimsical title suggesting something improvisatory, each is carefully crafted in a sectional form and many are dances of some kind – but unlike the movements of a sonata or suite, the pieces have no greater unity, other than the unity within each individual piece.)
For today’s performance, Daria chose to leave out no.1 (Moderato in C Major) and starts us off with No.2, the Andantino in A-flat major. This piece draws the listener into a state of reverie by introducing an almost speech-like melody – complete with the stops and starts of interrupted trains of thought. Almost immediately, too, one hears Schubert’s characteristic shifting between a melancholy minor tonality with the yearning for major resolution.
No.3, in F minor, is arguably the most popular of the six miniatures – and originally published in 1823 under the title “Air Russe”, presumably because of the dance-like rhythm and minor tonality associated with Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century (even though the middle section in F-major is more characteristically Viennese than Russian).
In No.4 in C-sharp minor, we hear echoes of J.S. Bach’s Prelude in C minor from Book I of the Well-Tempered Clavier – but Schubert transforms the turbulent figurations into a dance-like tune with a lilting middle section in the major.
No. 5 – the only fast piece of the set and possibly the most technically demanding – showcases Schubert’s penchant for dactylic rhythms (long-short-short, as in the words “beautiful” or “elephant”).
The penultimate piece’s abrupt and dramatic style stands in stark contrast to the sixth and last piece, first published in 1824 under the title “Les plaints d’un troubadour” (A troubadour’s lament). Yet again, one has to recognize the unequivocally vocal nature of Schubert’s melodies – and the yearning expressiveness of his characteristic enharmonic changes.
RACHMANINOFF
Moments Musicaux, Op. 16
“The new kind of music seems to create not from the heart but from the head. Its composers think rather than feel. They have not the capacity to make their works exalt – the meditate, protest, analyze, reason, calculate and brood, but they do not exalt.”
(Sergei Rachmaninoff)
While most classical piano lovers would likely know that Rachmaninoff was not only a gifted composer, but also one of the finest pianists of his day, it may be somewhat lesser known that he was also a talented conductor – and was offered several major posts in the US, most notably with the Boston Symphony Orchestra (which he declined). Although born in Russia, he died an American citizen, with a Los Angeles house that was an exact replica of his Moscow residence. Large and severe in stature (his enormous hands could famously span 12 piano keys; with his unsmiling stance he was once dubbed a “six-foot scowl”), Rachmaninoff is often associated with big works (his piano concertos and symphonies.) It is therefore especially poignant to find in a collection of early miniatures, such as his Moments Musicaux, so many of the characteristics that would eventually become distinctive of his mature style: expressive counterpoint, chromaticism, long melodies, huge bell-like sounds.
While Schubert’s Moments Musicaux were some of the last works he wrote, Rachmaninoff’s set of compositions bearing the same name were among his first mature works – composed at the age of 23 (his first piano concerto created a storm when he published it at age 18, in 1891.) Not unlike Schubert, Rachmaninoff, too, had to eke out a living as a musician and, quite simply, wrote these pieces in exchange for a paycheck. In a letter to a fellow Russian composer, he wrote, in the fall of 1896: “I hurry in order to get money I need by a certain date ... This perpetual financial pressure is, on the one hand, quite beneficial ... by the 20th of this month I have to write six piano pieces.”
Whether he was hurrying or not, the result is a meticulous and sophisticated concert work, where, although considered as a set, each piece stands on its own with and individual tone and mood. Each of the six pieces reproduces a musical form of a previous musical era (the nocturne, song without words, barcarolle, virtuoso étude and theme & variations) – but the clearest, most overt nod to the past is, of course, in his naming the work after Schubert’s.
And just like Schubert shows us his lyric genius in his op. 94, Rachmaninoff here gives us a glimpse into the heart of his melodic originality and technical mastery. In many ways, these pieces with their dense textures and virtuosic challenges also foreshadow some of Rachmaninoff’s later Préludes and Études-tableaux – where elaborate figurations, dense multi- layered textures, chromatic harmonies, and pianistic challenges will be driven to even greater heights.
Daria has chosen to skip the first two pieces (Andantino and Allegretto) and plunges us straight into the third – the Andante Cantabile in B Minor. Written shortly after the death of the composer’s cousin, Alexander Satin, we hear a sense of despondency and brooding in the lament of the opening theme, which transforms into an explicit funeral march in the reprise. Listen to the menacing left-hand staccato octaves that clearly outline the first four notes of the Dies Irae motive – G-F#-G-E – a theme with which Rachmaninoff was fascinated and that he frequently used, as both explicit and disguised quotations.
No. 4, the Presto in E minor, is arguably the most famous of the set – and, with its bravura left-hand writing and agitated rhythms in the right, is indebted to Chopin’s Revolutionary Étude (Op. 10 no.12.) The virtual storm Rachmaninoff brews up requires a pianist with virtuoso technique and musical perception (even more so for a pianist with much smaller hands than the composer himself!) – cascading over the entire keyboard and culminating in a prestissimo marked fortississimo!
In direct contrast to this climactic drama, arrives No. 5, the Adagio sostenuto in D-flat major. This passionate and lyrical, yet gently understated piece is written in the style of a barcarolle (from Italian “barca” – boat, a traditional gondolier’s song in a gentle, rocking rhythm), and with its repetitive, almost monotonous left-hand accompaniment, it creates the feel of stasis reminiscent of Chopin's Berceuse, Op. 57.
No.6 – Maestoso in C major – is all glory and majesty, encompassing the whole range of the keyboard with swooping, seemingly infinite melodies set in the form of a canon with thick three-part texture. If exaltation was what Rachmaninoff was after, this is as good as it gets!
AURANDT
Sonata in B-flat Minor
It is a happy thing that Daria brings to us in these recitals a delightful, but undeservedly largely unknown piece. She is one of the greatest players of this sonata (videos of her performances in Chapel Hill in 2018 are available on YouTube) and it could bear repeated hearings. One hopes that it might be taken up by many other pianists.
The mood throughout is dramatic, sometimes bordering on the kind of scores written not too long ago for Hollywood, arguably in respectful imitation of the great Russian tradition. It demands for virtuosity are huge, but never flippant or just showy. Mr. Aurandt here has crafted quite a dramatic work, poignant in its emotional range. About writing a new work, the great American composer Morton Gould, in a letter to author Gary Lemco some years ago, remarked that crafting a new composition lay “fraught with danger – that of being judged less on its own merits than by an amalgam of its influences.” Aurandt arguably has overcome any chance being judged in this way as its character is easily, quickly perceived, whole and not derivative.
So, who is Paul Harvey Aurandt, Jr.? Many in this audience will have heard a radio broadcast sometime in the 33 years of its being promulgated (1976-2009), called The Rest of the Story. The program was most often an examination of the background of current events by its decidedly conservative host, Paul Harvey, stage name of Paul Harvey Aurandt, Sr. It was, indeed, his son, composer of today’s sonata, who wrote and produced the show. Composer Paul had a performing career that he diminished in the 1970s, about the time of the composition of this sonata. Other, deeper biographical information about him has been difficult to find. Further research into his catalogue may reveal other treasures!
SUNDAY
GRIFFES
Roman Sketches, op. 7
Although he wrote a rather small catalogue of works, composing for only about twelve years, American composer Charles Tomlinson Griffes is known to many pianophiles for his lovely music that somehow straddles the best traditions of “German romanticism” along with masterful “impressionistic” tendencies and more than a touch, as can be heard in the second piece today, “Clouds,” of the aesthetic of modernism. Having spent time in Europe in the fascinating years surrounding the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, he was certain influenced by styles then prevalent there, but has his own very individual compositional voice. The exotic, mysterious sounds of French impressionism are there, but he also studied Scriabin’s music and even undertook that composer’s practice of “synthetic scales.”
On his return to the U.S. in 1907, he became director of music studies at a boys’ school in Tarrytown, New York – and despite this position being, in Griffes’s own words, “grim and unrewarding”, it did offer him financial stability and a bit of free time to compose. He was at the school for only 13 years, dying of influenza in New York City during the worldwide Spanish flu pandemic of that era.
His best-known works are the White Peacock for piano and a tone poem, The Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan, after the fragment by Coleridge. His piano sonata of 1917-1918, along with much chamber and vocal music, is more than well worth seeking out. In the Roman Sketches, to be heard today, brilliant timbres, deep and intense sonorities, plenty of pedal, along with dreamy atmospheres, justify his being called “the” American impressionist.
Here again we have music that, in a sense, responds to a literary inspiration. Each of the four sketches in the set carries a quotation from poems by the late romantic English poet William Sharp, written in 1891, Sospiri di Roma (Sighs of Rome.) Their brief texts are worth citing.
Acqua Paola:
Shimmering lights,
As though the Aurora’s
Wild polar fires
Flashed in thy happy bubbles,
Died in thy foam.
Some listeners will be reminded of the watery music of Liszt and Ravel (“Ondine” from Gaspard, Jeux d’eaux, etc.), with its accompaniment in the upper part of the keyboard and the melody in the lowest voice. Ascending and descending arpeggios evoke the flowing of water.
Clouds:
Mountainous glories,
They move superbly;
Crumbling so slowly,
That none perceives when the golden domes
Are sunk in the valleys
Of fathomless snows.
Composed in 1916, Clouds has a calm, meditative mood, reflective of clouds, described by one author as “certainly one of the most beautiful compositions that Griffes ever wrote. It is an exquisitely colored and a mystically tranquil utterance.” Experimental in form, it bears passages of bi-tonality, free chordal progressions, and complex metrical patterns.
Griffes’s biography is quite interesting and in our contemporary time an annotator could be faulted for not noting his being gay in a time when such was quite scandalous, but looking into all that must be left to you, our audience. Perhaps it is best to concentrate on his originality within his embrace of the aesthetics then dominant in both Europe and America.
SCHUMANN
Humoreske, op. 20
“To compose is to remember music that has never been written.” – Schumann
Written in 1839, Schumann’s Humoreske was, like Kreisleriana, written very quickly in a fit of inspiration. Writing to pianist Clara Wieck, who later would become his wife, he said of the composition, “The whole week I have been sitting at the piano, composing and writing, wlaughing and crying all at once. All this you will find nicely portrayed in my opus 20, the grand Humoreske, which is also about to be engraved. You see, that’s how quickly things go with me: conceived, written out, and printed. And that’s how I like it.”
Lovers of Schumann’s music (that’s all of us, isn’t it?) will quickly recognize Schumann’s trademark quickly changing extremes of mood. Those mood changes/episodes follow one another without a break in one continuous movement. The title, oddly, is a bit of a source of confusion, compounded by Schumann’s claim that the piece is actually “not very cheerful, perhaps my most melancholy work.” In expressing his innermost emotions musically, Schumann certainly did not eschew irony, even humor.
This is no mere salon music. It has been described as subtle, heartfelt, elusive, even mysterious, beautiful, challenging, but some critics wonder whether the Humoreske even has a coherent structure. Some consider it a cycle of shorter pieces, albeit without breaks. The constantly varying moods keep the listener intrigued, if sometimes a bit seeking a vantage point.
One particularly fascinating feature of this work appears in the second section marked Hastig (hastily.) Written on three staves instead of the usual two, top for the right hand, bottom for the left, the player has to wonder about the middle one. Marked as innere Stimme (inner voice), it is not to be played! Of this, the distinguished musicologist and author Charles Rosen wrote, “… it is also an inner voice that is never exteriorized. It has its being within the mind and its existence only through its echo.” That is, the inner staff is heard only in the mind, a ghostly presence coming from the combined figurations of the right and left hands. Research thus far has not revealed a similar thing by another composer.
Thus, we listeners face a major composition replete with vividly contrasting moods, truncated and sometimes elaborated themes, and, ultimately, a “monument” that must be considered one of the most difficult of Schumann’s piano pieces to love unreservedly. Through all its ups-and-downs, its whimsy (a reasonable definition of humoresque), and its unusually cavalier ending, we arrive at the composer’s own explanation of the proceedings as “a way of looking on the emotions with ironic detachment.”
DE FALLA
Dances from El sombrero de tres picos
The harmonious efforts which our guitarists produce unconsciously represent one of the marvels of natural art.” – de Falla
The great impresario of dance, Sergei Diaghilev, of the Ballets Russes, was introduced to de Falla by Stravinsky in 1916 (we all remember the tale of Diaghilev and Stravinsky with The Rite of Spring at the Paris Opera, etc., no doubt), and Diaghilev immediately wanted some of de Falla’s spicy music for new choreographies for his company. Such is the genesis of The Three-Cornered Hat, commissioned by Diaghilev in 1919 and premiered that same year in London. It recounts an elderly man’s comic and frustrating attempts to seduce a miller’s wife. The music to recount the tale is full of the infectious rhythms of Spanish dance, sultry, exotic, and, at moments, mysterious. One hears flamenco rhythms and modal harmonies characteristic of Andalusia. The original choreographer for El sombrero, Léonide Massine, said about his inspiration for the Miller’s Dance,
I began by stamping my feet repeatedly and twirling my hands over my head. As the music quickened, I did a series of high jumps, ending with a turn in mid-air and a savage stamp of the foot as I landed … The mental image of an enraged bull going into the attack unleashed some inner force which generated power within me … For one moment it seemed as if some other person within me was performing the dance.
It was de Falla himself who transcribed the three movements to be heard today. They have more than endured as favored pieces in the piano recital repertory. You will be forgiven if you find that you have to shout “¡Olé!” at the end.
PROKOFIEV
Ten Pieces from the ballet Romeo and Juliet, op. 75
“In my view, the composer, just as the poet, the sculptor or the painter, is in duty bound to serve man, the people. He must beautify life and defend it. He must be a citizen first and foremost, so that his art might consciously extol human life and lead man to a radiant future.” – Prokofiev
Prokofiev’s music happily appears often on piano recital programs, including those by PPI, what with nine terrific sonatas and myriad other pieces for piano, to nearly universal audience delight. It is a well-advised thing, though, to remember during reveries induced by that fine music that Prokofiev-the-man lived a rather challenging life. Living outside Russia for some nine years, mostly in the United States and Paris, he returned to his homeland in 1936, owing mostly to the darkening situation that would come to engulf all of Europe, indeed, all the world.
In the first summer after his return, on a commission too complicated to describe, he composed a new ballet, Romeo and Juliet, in a tiny cottage outside Moscow, wrestling with “telling” Shakespeare’s complex tale, disagreements from Soviet authorities about the music itself, political upheaval, and on and on. Later, in 1948, he was denounced by authorities in the purge of the Union of Soviet Composers. The sad tale goes on, but now is not the time to recount it. It is fair to say that his music has always been more revered in the West than in his native land.
Of course, many composers have written music responding to Shakespeare’s original: Berlioz with a dramatic symphony, a fantasy overture from Tchaikovsky, operas by Bellini and Gounod, even Bernstein’s adaptation in West Side Story. The source, the inspiration for all this music is, to say the least, quite enduring. Prokofiev’s score has been popularized even further by cinema and television; for example, “Montagues and Capulets” is even excerpted in incidental music for The Simpsons!
From that magnificent orchestral work for the ballet, Prokofiev himself transcribed ten movements for solo piano, the suite that we will hear today. Together they reveal how this great, if beleaguered, composer perceived character and communicated profound emotion, capturing the dramatic sweep of one of the world’s great love stories. The pianissimo ending of the suite is nearly unbearably poignant.