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Andrew Hsu GYA Recital – April 26 & 27, May 7, 2014
Three Mazurkas, Op. 56
No. 1 in B major
No. 2 in C major
No. 3 in C minor
Frédéric Chopin
1810-1849
In the most general sense, the mazurka is a Polish folk dance in triple meter from the
Mazovia district near Warsaw. “Mazurka” is actually an umbrella name for a number of
related dances: the fiery Mazurek, the lively Oberek or the slower and more sentimental
Kujawiak. All three dances originated from the older Polska, a dance in which a strong
accent falls on the second or third beat of the measure, accompanied by a tap of the heel. The
mazurka spread into Germany in the eighteenth century as a social dance, but it was
primarily Chopin, who introduced it into art music as an expression of his nationalistic
feeling. His more than 50 mazurkas reflect its multiple origins in that they encompass a
variety of moods and tempi while still retaining the characteristic rhythmic signature. Like
his waltzes and polonaises, the mazurkas were not meant for actual dancing. The common
pianistic style of infusing them all with multiple rubato passages would make any dancer
stumble over his feet.
Chopin was an innovator who stretched tonality and chromaticism to their limits for his time.
In this aspect, he resembles his contemporary Hector Berlioz. He composed his first Mazurka
at age ten, the last two in the year of his death. They became the vehicle for some of his most
innovative writing, involving a large variety of moods, constant mixing of major and minor
modes and uncommon modal scales.
Chopin composed the Mazurkas Op. 56 in 1843 and published them a year later. At the time
he was deeply in love with the novelist George Sand (née Lucile Aurore Dupin), a love that
was reciprocated.
No. 1: This mazurka toggles two large musical sections with contrasting rhythms. The first
repeats an uneven rhythm motive in which a rest and an upbeat enhance the accent on the
second beat of the measure. The second part is a filigree of even eighth notes over a repeated
chordal figure in the left hand that accentuates the second beat of each measure. The
Mazurka concludes with a coda.
No. 2: There are a number of surviving drafts of this short, cheerful piece, revealing insight
into the composer’s method of working. Over a drone in the left hand, imitating the small
Central European bagpipe, the right hand plays the classic uneven mazurka rhythm. There
follow a swift series of new melodies, including a little canon. Of the three Op. 56 Mazurkas,
this is the most dancelike.
No. 3: This is the longest and most reflective of the three Op. 56 pieces. Its wandering
modulations and irregular phrasing suggest a reminiscence of a dance rather than the dance
itself, especially in its periodic return and reconsideration of the opening melody.
Fantasy
Aaron Hsu
A fantasy is usually defined as something describing the unreal, the imaginary. Therefore,
something fantastic is then, by nature, implausible or extraordinary. When composers began
to apply the term to short keyboard works, the works in question were often improvisations
or at least improvisatory in nature, as opposed to the structured sonatas and suites of the time.
Thus, the term fantasy then became a term to describe of piece of music that could not be
described by its form or otherwise, but only by its content. One could consider the term
fantasy to be the first programmatic title in the history of music, long before the rise of the
character piece in the nineteenth-century—at least it is more telling than piece, for instance.
Given its history, then, it is rather difficult for one to define what a ‘fantasy’ is: we do know
that it describes something imaginary, and that it is often improvised or imagined, but
perhaps this ambiguity of denotation and form provide the charm of the fantasy. We, as
listeners, are forced to judge the work purely based on the sounds we hear, rather than the
external formal articulations that are so often favored in highly organized works.
--Note by Andrew Hsu
Piano Sonata
Aaron Copland
1900-1990
The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Aaron Copland was the creator of what has become
an almost stereotypical “down home” American musical style, as exemplified by his suites of
“Americana” ballets, including Billy the Kidd, Rodeo and Appalachian Spring. So thoroughly
ingrained is the Copland American sound that we have been hearing it authentically or in
imitation in countless film and TV scores, not to mention decades of commercials. Starting in
the late 1930s, Copland, by then a well-respected “serious” composer, brought a fresh new
sound to Hollywood as well, to replace the heavily orchestrated fare of what he called
“Dvorák - Tchaikovsky generalized music.”
Less well known are Copland’s many compositions for small forces, including his major
keyboard works: the Piano Variations, Piano Fantasy and Piano Sonata. He composed some
of his shorter piano works for friends or personal use, often using material left over or
extracted from larger orchestral works.
The Piano Sonata was commissioned in January 1939 by playwright and director Clifford
Odets, who regarded Copland’s Americana as “slight” and, according to a letter to Copland
from Harvard undergraduate Leonard Bernstein, wanted something more substantial from
such a talented composer. The Sonata was just about finished two years later when it was lost
to a burglary. One day in June 1941 as Copland was about to leave New York to go to his
summer teaching job at Tanglewood, his car was vandalized and two suitcases stolen, one
with his clothing, the other containing the manuscript. Although the thief was apprehended,
the manuscript was lost and Copland had to reconstruct the Sonata immediately from
memory. In the fall of that year he went on a tour of South America sponsored by the State
Department, premiering the work in Buenos Aires.
The Piano Sonata presents a completely different face from the populist American works that
immediately preceded it. It was complex, difficult “absolute music” that deliberately harked
back to the Classical sonata structure. Commenced on the cusp of the outbreak of World War
II, it sounds the death knell of European civilization. And it is all about bells. The musical
bell metaphor pervades all three movements and ties the work together. While Copland never
specifically related the Sonata to the war, he described it as “a serious piece that requires
careful and repeated study.” When it was completed, he returned to his more popular – and
patriotic – voice with Lincoln Portrait, Fanfare for the Common Man and Rodeo. The war
association, however, is reinforced implicitly in the motivic connections between the Sonata
and his 1949 setting of “I Heard a Funeral in my Brain” (from Twelve Poems of Emily
Dickenson).
The Sonata is in three movements, two slow chordal outer movements surrounding an
extremely fast linear textured inner movement. Copland, in fact, demands both the slowest
and fastest metronome settings in the course of the piece. It is dissonant and tonally
ambiguous, but contains intermittent passages of lyrical melody. The first movement is
Classical sonata allegro form, pairing a three-chord tolling motive with a related but more
melodic second theme. The second movement Vivace serves as a scherzo with a very short
contrasting middle section that could be interpreted as a trio. The final movement, based on
another bell-tolling motive – this time consisting of four chords – is free in form, bringing
back the first movement motive towards the end.
None of the brief or extensive musical analyses, however, conveys the emotional weight of
the Sonata. Copland virtually hammers the listener with insistent repetition of the tolling
dissonances. The second movement is frenetic with constant meter changes; at first it seems
jazzy, but comes more to resemble the erratic rhythm of machine-gun fire. The conclusion is
drawn out in agonizing length. Although it resolves tonally over an extremely long pedal in
the bass, it is a mournful closure. It was 1941; Hitler was swallowing Europe, and America
was as yet on the sidelines.
Piano Sonata No. 15 in F major, K. 533/494
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
1756-1791
For the first five years after Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart moved to Vienna in 1781 he was
greatly in demand both as virtuoso performer and as composer, and his economic situation
was comfortable in spite of his spendthrift ways. But by the latter part of the decade, things
went sour. Mozart mythology, as well as musicological debate, has tried to explain how this
musical phenomenon could have so dramatically slipped out of favor. One theory at least has
been popularized in Peter Shaffer’s play (and film) Amadeus, which portrays the composer as
a musical genius lacking in financial acumen and what is now termed “emotional
intelligence.”
There is no evidence, however, that Mozart’s rivals at court either impeded his success or, for
that matter, poisoned him. What is more likely is that the decline in the Empire’s economy
and the fickleness in taste of Vienna’s moneyed elite was in part responsible for reducing
Mozart to writing dance music for local balls and publishing chamber pieces for home music
making in order to shore up his dwindling, and not always wisely managed, finances. By
1788 he was desperate, and keyboard sonatas, mainly aimed for home use by young lady
amateurs, was a way to raise much-needed cash.
He was, nevertheless, at the height of his powers, having just composed Don Giovanni and
working on The Marriage of Figaro, with Così fan tutte and The Magic Flute still to come.
On the other hand, he had been forced to compose his final three symphonies at this time on
spec.
In January 1788 Mozart composed an Allegro and Andante for the Piano Sonata in F, and
combined them with an expanded version of the Rondo K. 494, composed two years earlier.
He added a cadenza to the rondo to flesh it out and sent off the complete Sonata to his
publisher later that year.
The most interesting aspect of this Sonata is the second movement Andante. Composed in
binary form – an archaic ancestor of sonata form most familiar through the keyboard sonatas
of Domenico Scarlatti – the movement is full of harmonic surprises, unexpected modulations,
and dissonant chords. These oddities are all presented in a matter-of-fact manner,
unassociated with intense emotional feeling. It is almost as if Mozart had been improvising at
the piano, experimenting with new and unusual harmonies.
Piano Sonata, Op. 26
Samuel Barber
1910-1981
As one of America’s foremost composers of the twentieth century, Samuel Barber always
gracefully avoided being drawn into the doctrinaire world of the compositional “isms” of his
time, particularly serialism. Instead, all of his works, from music for solo piano to opera,
comprise a lush lyricism, often freely atonal, but more often flagrantly and unfashionably
tonal. Barber was not composing for the academy, but rather for audiences, musicians and
critics who embraced his more conservative idiom.
The Piano Sonata, commissioned by Irving Berlin and Richard Rodgers, was a landmark
event at the premiere in January 1950. The pianist was none other than Vladimir Horowitz,
for whom Barber wrote the work. And it was the first time a pianist of world stature had
premiered a major piano work by an American composer. The pianist and several critics
hailed it as the first important piano sonata written by an American, and Horowitz – not a
great aficionado of contemporary music – continually played and promoted it. “Barber is one
of the few American composers who knows how to write for the piano,” he wrote. “…Either
they [American composers] write music that is very pianistic, but has no substance, or write
music that has substance but isn’t pianistic.”
Barber finished the first movement in short order but took almost two years to finish the
Sonata, in part because he succumbed to the cultural and political distractions of Italy while
he was supposed to be working on it during a stay at the American Academy in Rome. Upon
his return to the United States, he doggedly set about completing the remaining three
movements, experiencing periodic creative blocks while Horowitz nagged him.
The Sonata is technically difficult and combines Barber’s romantic lyricism with passages of
chromatic complexity. Nevertheless, the structure and thematic development of all four
movements are characteristically transparent. The opening movement is dominated by a
heavy, chordal main theme, while the Scherzo is almost the reverse image, with rapid,
feathery chromatic pyrotechnics, punctuated by a few blue notes. The somber third
movement is the most tonally coherent, romantic and lyric. The final movement, a fugue that
can almost be called a fugal toccata, may have been inspired by the composer’s having just
purchased a complete Bach edition. Barber attributes its angry mood, however, to a phone
call from Mrs. Horowitz, complaining about the delay in delivering the Sonata and calling
him a “constipated composer.” “That made me so mad,” wrote Barber, “that I ran out to my
studio and wrote that [fugue] in the next day.”
Program notes by:
Joseph & Elizabeth Kahn
[email protected]
www.wordprosmusic.com