Survey
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
Simon Trpčeski plays Chopin Tuesday 24 November 2015 7.30pm, Hall Chopin Four Mazurkas, Op 24 Polonaises – Op 26 Nos 1 & 2; Op 44 interval 20 minutes Simon Fowler Two Nocturnes, Op 48 Scherzos – No 1, Op 20; No 2, Op 31 Simon Trpčeski piano This concert will finish at approximately 9.30pm Part of Barbican Presents 2015–16 Programme produced by Harriet Smith; printed by Mandatum Ink; advertising by Cabbell (tel. 020 3603 7930) Confectionery and merchandise including organic ice cream, quality chocolate, nuts and nibbles are available from the sales points in our foyers. Please turn off watch alarms, phones, pagers etc during the performance. Taking photographs, capturing images or using recording devices during a performance is strictly prohibited. The City of London Corporation is the founder and principal funder of the Barbican Centre If anything limits your enjoyment please let us know during your visit. Additional feedback can be given online, as well as via feedback forms or the pods located around the foyers. Welcome Welcome to this evening’s concert, the second in our series of Keyboard Visionaries. The Macedonian pianist Simon Trpčeski certainly lives up to that billing, and has been hugely acclaimed in the Romantic repertoire, and Chopin in particular. that fascinated the composer throughout his life. Dances of the peasantry and the aristocracy respectively, in Chopin’s hands they are transformed to reveal a completely new world. Chopin, too, was a visionary – a fact that perhaps wasn’t fully appreciated in his own time, nor in the decades following his early death. The nocturnes, by contrast, remind us of Chopin’s love for opera, and specifically bel canto. His obsession with creating a singing line on the piano is famous and it is in the nocturnes that this quality finds some of its most inspired outpourings. What Simon Trpčeski’s programme vividly demonstrates, however, is the sheer range of Chopin’s music, and his almost unrivalled genius for taking an established genre and developing it in ways that transcended tradition. The mazurka and the polonaise are both good examples of this – and are forms As for the scherzos, they occupy a more violent, edgy world. Mastering all these elements requires an artist of the highest interpretative calibre (not to mention one possessing a fearsome technique). Which is where Simon Trpčeski comes in! Huw Humphreys Head of Music Barbican Classical Music Podcasts 2 Stream or download our Barbican Classical Music podcasts for exclusive interviews and content from the best classical artists from around the world. Recent artists include Iestyn Davies, Joyce DiDonato, Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Evgeny Kissin, Maxim Vengerov and Nico Muhly. Available on iTunes, Soundcloud and the Barbican website Four Mazurkas, Op 24 (1833) No 1 in G minor; No 2 in C major No 3 in A flat major; No 4 in B flat minor Programme notes Fryderyk Chopin (1810–49) Polonaises C sharp minor, Op 26 No 1 (1835) E flat minor, Op 26 No 2 (1835) F sharp minor, Op 44 (1841) Tonight’s all-Chopin recital begins with a genre indelibly associated with the composer: the mazurka. Perhaps even more than the nocturne, waltz and polonaise, he raised this form to an entirely new artistic level without sacrificing its essential features. And within its modest span he conducted experiments more radical than anywhere else, not only harmonically and melodically, but in the possibilities of the form’s essential asymmetry too. Nor, in bringing it into the salon, did he lose any of the dance’s essential wildness or primitivism. the point by beating time to his playing, the latter is said to have lost his temper completely, screaming with rage. Mind you, that wildness and primitivism wasn’t to all tastes. The critic and second-rate poet Ludwig Rellstab (set by Schubert to such sublime effect, proving that you can in fact make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear) had this to say: 3 ‘In search of ear-rending dissonances, torturous transitions, sharp modulations, repugnant contortions of melody and rhythm, Chopin The term ‘mazurka’ in fact refers to not one but is altogether indefatigable. All that one can three dances from the Mazovia region of Poland chance upon is here brought forward to produce – the mazur, the oberek and the kujawiak. All the effect of bizarre originality, especially the three are in triple time, with strong accentuation strangest tonalities, the most unnatural chord on the second or third beat, but beyond that positions, the most preposterous combinations in they encompass a vast range of moods, just as regard to fingering. But it is not really worth the Chopin’s own mazurkas do. And that is both trouble to hold such long philippics for the sake the challenge and the allure for performers, of the perverse Mazurkas of Herr Chopin. Had especially if accounts of the composer’s own he submitted this music to a teacher, the latter, it is playing are to be believed. There’s a famous story to be hoped, would have torn it up and thrown it of Meyerbeer hearing Chopin play a mazurka at his feet – and this is what we symbolically wish with such free rubato that he assumed Chopin’s to do.’ timing was off. He pointed out that it sounded as if it was in 4/4, so prolonged was the first beat. Rellstab penned that diatribe in 1833, the year Chopin insisted he was playing in triple time. that yielded Chopin’s first mature fruits in the When Meyerbeer (perhaps unwisely) laboured genre – Opp 17 and 24. No longer are they brief diversions – instead they begin to take on an altogether more profound musical expression and a sense of the epic that belies their duration. While the G minor Mazurka that opens the set is technically undemanding, Chopin gives it a sly exoticism; this contrasts with the C major Second, with its dainty musical-box theme and a secondary idea in the distant realm of D flat major. The confiding quality of the Third lends it great charm, and it fades away in a coda of the utmost delicacy. When Chopin was teaching the last of his Op 24 set, in B flat minor, his demands were so specific in terms of voicing and control of colour that, as his student Wilhelm von Lenz had it: ‘One was barely allowed to breathe over the keyboard, let alone touch it!’ The very opening commands attention with its bold chromaticisms, something he subsequently uses to give the mazurka a gritty edge, an effect deepened by the almost violent juxtaposition of different moods. Only in the final section is some kind of resolution reached. Just as we heard in the Op 24 Mazurkas, it is with the two Polonaises of Op 26 that we first find Chopin truly subsuming the original genre into something more far-reaching. Like the mazurkas, he wrote polonaises throughout his life; and if the mazurkas are Chopin’s most private utterances when it comes to nostalgia for his embattled homeland, then the polonaises are the most public. That is fitting, of course, for the one is humble in origin, the other courtly. Of all the Polish dance genres that feature in Chopin’s output, it was the polonaise that provoked in him the greatest outpouring of both pride in and nostalgia for his homeland. With its two-part opening, a central trio and a recapitulation, all underpinned by the characteristic polonaise rhythm, the C sharp minor Polonaise, Op 26 No 1 may be cast conventionally enough. But it’s what he does within that framework that elevates it to new heights. For a start, the trio section functions almost as a self-contained nocturne – indeed, its opening has a kinship with the D flat Nocturne, Op 27 No 2 written the same year – but this develops into an exquisite bel canto duet, one Chopin’s biographer James Huneker described as ‘tender enough to woo a princess’. It is the contrast between drama and lyricism that gives it such impact. No 2 is nothing less than a full-scale tone-poem, with an underlying turbulence as unhinged as anything Chopin ever wrote. The fact that its opening rumbling is marked pianissimo gives it a sinister edge. With its frequent flarings into violence it’s perhaps unsurprising that in the 19th century it acquired various nicknames: ‘Siberian’ or ‘Revolt’ among them. By the time of the F sharp minor Polonaise (1841), such a simple title could give little hint as to what lay within: Liszt described it as ‘the lurid hour that precedes a hurricane’. And indeed Chopin is out to surprise us, not least in an obsessive-sounding passage, marked tempo di mazurka, in which he doesn’t just bring together two dance forms, but unites that of the aristocracy (the polonaise – never more buttoned up and precise than here, the almost obsessively repeated left-hand F sharp octave holding the music in a stranglehold, despite a brief slip down to F natural) with that of the peasantry. But it’s a peasantry that has left its muddy footwear at the door, for this is one of his most elegant examples, contrasting with the opening section in its lighter textures and a focus on the upper registers of the keyboard. For all the shattering demands Chopin makes on the pianist, however, the virtuosity grows from the music itself, and is never applied from without. The Polonaise gradually reasserts itself with a show of strength, the left hand as menacing as ever. And though there’s a softening of mood, the violent ending is vehemently in the minor. 4 interval: 20 minutes Two Nocturnes, Op 48 (1841) No 2 in F sharp minor; No 1 in C minor Programme notes Fryderyk Chopin Scherzos No 1 in B minor, Op 20 (c1835) No 2 in B flat minor, Op 31 (1837) Those of Op 48 don’t look that tricky on paper. But that’s deceptive (as so often with Chopin), for their interpretative challenges are considerable. And while the composer was still only just into his thirties at this point, some have detected in his works from this time a ‘late’ style, one in which all that is inessential is discarded and in which a deeper level of profundity is apparent. No 2 (which Simon Trpčeski plays first tonight) demands subtlety of the highest order – it’s all too easy to make the wispy opening melody overly defined; and the art of keeping time with the left hand as the right hand floats free – an obsession of Chopin’s – is never more tested than here, contrasting with the recitativelike central section, yet another reminder of Chopin’s love for the opera house. The tolling opening of the left hand in No 1 is also immediately striking, but so too is the strikingly spare nature of the right hand’s rhetoric. The stern minor is ameliorated by an answering passage in C major, which soon begins to build, Chopin introducing rumbling octaves that grow to a climax. The main idea then returns, now above agitated triplets, tension maintained virtually up until the end, the music only subsiding at the very close. 5 From the same year as the F sharp minor Polonaise come the two Nocturnes, Op 48. Chopin’s nocturnes have suffered more than any other genre from ill-judged performances – very probably because at least some of them are technically within the reach of amateurs and students; that, and the fact that their soaring lines are prone to exaggeration and Romantic overemphasis. But Chopin was, above all, a Classicist, for whom Mozart and Bach were gods. The great Hungarian pianist Louis Kentner (1905–87) once wrote that the nocturnes should not ‘suffer critical degradation because sentimental young ladies used them, in days long gone by, to comfort their repressed libido’. Indeed not! Simon Trpčeski ends with the first two of Chopin’s four scherzos. All Chopin’s titles transcend their genres, but that’s especially true in this instance. A scherzo originally implied a brief, humorous piece, though by the time he got to it, it had moved far from the sharp humour of Beethoven et al. And while Mendelssohn was busy spinning it into something airborne and vivacious, Chopin’s are more the stuff of nightmare, phantasmagorical creatures, utterly individual, utterly without humour, as if he’s battling against the very ethos of the form itself. The legendary pianist Alfred Cortot described them as ‘games, as it were, of terror, dances feverish and hallucinatory’, while Schumann famously referred to ‘cannons buried beneath flowers’. 6 Early audiences were literally transfixed by the opening of the First – did he really mean to play those notes? When it was first published in England it gained the title ‘The Infernal Banquet’, which Chopin, ever the purist when it came to nicknames, hated. The only respite comes in a lilting middle section where the composer, unusually, borrows a genuine Polish folk tune, before it is subsumed in a sea of chromaticism as the demonic opening material returns. The Scherzo No. 2 sets off in the gloom-laden key of B flat minor. The very opening, consisting of an unsettling whispered motif and its bellowed response, caused Chopin’s pupils no end of trouble. He is reported to have likened it to ‘a house of the dead’ but he was never satisfied with their playing of it, demanding it be more questioning, more hushed, and so on. It’s in utter contrast with the highly lyrical theme that follows, in a consoling D flat major. Beauty and the Beast indeed, and this discourse continues, with a chorale-like central section that builds in agitation, reaching a climax before the return of the opening theme and a coda that emphatically drives home the major-key ending. Programme notes © Harriet Smith Simon Trpčeski Simon Trpčeski piano Macedonian pianist Simon Trpčeski has established himself as one of the most acclaimed musicians to have emerged in recent years, praised not only for his technique and expression, but also for his warm personality and commitment to strengthening Macedonia’s cultural image. He is a frequent soloist in the UK, appearing with the City of Birmingham and London Symphony orchestras, Philharmonia, Hallé and the London and Royal Liverpool Philharmonic orchestras. Other engagements with major European ensembles include the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Russian National and Bolshoi Theatre orchestras, NDR Sinfonieorchester Hamburg, DSO and RSO Berlin, WDR Cologne, MDR Leipzig, Tonkünstler Orchestra, Danish National Symphony Orchestra and the Helsinki, Oslo, Rotterdam, Royal Flanders, Royal Stockholm, Strasbourg and St Petersburg Philharmonic orchestras. In North America he has performed with the Los Angeles and New York Philharmonic orchestras, Philadelphia and Cleveland orchestras and the Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Toronto Symphony orchestras, among others. Elsewhere he has performed with the New Japan, Seoul and Hong Kong Philharmonic orchestras, the Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney Symphony orchestras, and has toured with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. He has worked with leading conductors, including This season he performs across the globe, visiting the UK and giving concerts with the San Francisco, Atlanta, Vancouver and Detroit Symphony orchestras, Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra and Orquestra Sinfónica Portuguesa. He also tours with the Helsinki and Oslo Philharmonic orchestras. As a recitalist, Simon Trpčeski has given solo performances in New York, San Francisco, Washington DC, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Milan, Munich, Prague, Hamburg, Bilbao, Istanbul, Dublin and Tokyo. His award-winning discography includes works by Chopin, Debussy, Prokofiev, Rachmaninov, Scriabin and Tchaikovsky. His most recent releases are a recital on the Wigmore Hall Live label and Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concertos Nos 1 and 2 with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra under Petrenko on Onyx. Chamber music also forms an important strand of his musical life and he has appeared at festivals including Aspen, Verbier, Risør, Bergen and the Baltic Sea Festival in Stockholm. In 2011 he and cellist Nina Kotova performed works by Chopin for a theatrical event based on the composer’s life featuring the actors Jeremy Irons and Sinéad Cusack at the Tuscan Sun Festival in Cortona, Italy. He also has a regular duo partnership with cellist Daniel Müller-Schott. Simon Trpčeski works regularly with young musicians in Macedonia in order to cultivate the talent of the country’s next generation of artists. Born in the Republic of Macedonia in 1979, he studied in Skopje with Boris Romanov. He has received many awards, the most recent of which was the accolade of National Artist of the Republic of Macedonia. 7 Lubé Saveski Marin Alsop, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Lionel Bringuier, Sir Andrew Davis, Gustavo Dudamel, Charles Dutoit, Vladimir Jurowski, Lorin Maazel, Gianandrea Noseda, Sir Antonio Pappano, Vasily Petrenko, Robin Ticciati, Yan Pascal Tortelier and David Zinman. About the performer About the performer Mon 14 Dec Arcadi Volodos plays Brahms and Schubert A pianist steeped in the Romantic tradition explores two of its greatest composers ‘thoughtful, nuanced and mercurial’ (The Guardian on Volodos’s 2014 London recital) Photo: Arcadi Volodos © Marc Egido