Wednesday January 20, 2010

Lakewood Cultural Center Performing Arts Series
Yeol Eum Son, piano
Claude Debussy: Preludes No.3 (The Wind in the Plain), No.4 (The sounds and fragrances swirl through the evening air), No.5 (The Hills of Anacapri), No.6 (Footsteps in the Snow), No.7 (What the West Wind saw) & No.8 (The Girl with the Flaxen Hair), Book I
Frédéric Chopin: Waltzes No.9 in A flat major, Op.69 No.1 (L'adieu), No.11 in G flat major, Op.70 No.1& No.5 in A flat major, Op.42 (2/4)
Alexander Scriabin: Etudes No.10 in D flat major, No.11 in B flat minor & No.12 in D sharp minor (Patetico), Op.8 (11/5/09)
Also, Leopold Godowsky: Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes from Die Fledermaus by Johann Strauss, Jr.
Yeol Eum Son, piano
Harmonia Mundi 907507 Track 13 9:59
Charley anticipates the Albers Trio's recital at the Lakewood Cultural Center tomorrow.
Sergei Rachmaninoff: "Andante" (3rd movement) from Cello Sonata in G minor, Op.19
Julie Albers, cello; Orion Weiss, piano
Artek 22 Track 3 5:39


Claude Debussy (1862-1918): Preludes, Book I
No. 3. Le vent dans la plaine (The Wind in the Plain): Animé
No. 4. Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir (The sounds and fragrances swirl through the evening air): Modéré
No. 5. Les collines d'Anacapri (The Hills of Anacapri): Très modéré (Roy Howat: from a bottle of Italian wine?)
No. 6. Des pas sur la neige (Footsteps in the Snow): Triste et lent
No. 7. Ce qu'a vu le vent d'ouest (What the West Wind has seen): Animé et tumultueux
No. 8. La fille aux cheveux de lin (The Girl with the Flaxen Hair): Très calme et doucement expressif

Like Bach and Chopin, Debussy wrote a set of keyboard preludes. Bach did it twice in The Well Tempered Clavier, covering all the major and minor keys. Debussy's single effort, with no sequence of keys--indeed, five keys were not used at all--was divided into two books of twelve each. The first was sketched in 1907; the actual composition took just two months in 1910. A clue to his intent might be a remark we made before starting the second book. “Who can ever know the secret of musical composition?" he said. "The noise of the sea, the curve of the horizon, the wind in the leaves, the cry of a bird; all leave impressions on us. And suddenly, when one least wills it, one of those memories spills out of us and expresses itself in musical language.” To indicate the primacy of the music over the inspirations, he printed the titles at the ends of the scores.
"The Wind in the Plain" (No.3) comes from the epigraph to Paul Verlaine's poem “C'est l'extase” from Ariettes oubliées, which Debussy had set as a song cycle in 1887. “The wind on the plain holds its breath” is a line from a poem by Simon-Charles Favart. In his biography of Debussy, Oscar Thompson refers to "the racing lilt of lively breeze, with here and there a momentary gust of biting wind. But this is no tempest. It ends in thin air, wisplike, on a note marked "laissez vibrer" (let it vibrate) instead of gravitating to an expected cadence."
"The sounds and fragrances swirl through the evening air" (No.4) is a line from Baudelaire's poem Harmonie du soir (Evening Harmony), which Debussy set as a song in 1889. Thompson calls it "melancholy, languorous music, sensuous in every detail, if not strictly the poet's 'vertiginous waltz.' The air is heavy with perfumes and vibrant with sounds that seem to swoon in the dying day. All the senses, with those of touch and smell added to those of sight and hearing, seem to enter into the caress and the gentle intoxication of this fantasy."
Roy Howat thinks No. 5 ("The Hills of Anacapri") was inspired by the label on a bottle of Italian wine? Again, Thompson describes "a snatch of folksong and a hint of cowbells, a carefree popular refrain, with its frank tune passed from bass to trebl; a songlike middle section with diatonic harmonies leading on to a badinage of tunes and bells, fragmentarily recalled, the a close marked 'lumineux' (luminous) as if there were blazing sunlight in a tonic chord with added sixth."
There is no traceable source of the inspiration for "Footsteps in the Snow" (No.6). Debussy directed that the rhythm "should have the sonorous value of a melancholy ice-bound landscape." André Suarès remarked that "this stumbling rhythm, persistent, like a false step on q treacherous surface, the step of a foot which slips and catches itself, evokes marvelously the gray horizon over a pale expanse of ice. But how much more the crushing silence of space where the heart can be heard beating and almost stops, sick with unhappiness, haunted by melancholy, palpitating with doubts and regrets. The little breath of wind which holds the snowflake every now and then in its falling, only to toss it aside; the long, interminable road; the nostalgia for the light which is not there and for the warm caress: this solitude, infinite, in a word, the solitude of our soul, wandering along absorbed in itself, a solitude which all the deserts and all of the winters of earth never approach."
"What the West Wind has seen" (No.7) was inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale, "The Garden of Paradise,” in which the four winds recount their recent feats. The West Wind (Zephyr) comes from the Atlantic, bringing storms and shipwrecks, with the sounds of Spanish guitars in the coda. Thompson claims the music represents "the vision of a hurricane and of a sea lashed to a fury, but retaining the sensation of a nightmare rather than of terror actually experienced."
No.8 was inspired by one of Leconte de Lisle's Scottish Songs about “the girl with the flaxen hair, the beauty with lips of cherry,” or even Robert Burns's “Lass with the lint white locks.” Roland Nadeau says “the soft initial melody begins unharmonized; we are stirred by a sense of gradual apparition. There is a strong suggestion of the pentatonic mode, which...tends to generate gentle, transparent chords. Debussy draws upon this tendency to produce a delicate sheen, an harmonic texture that just fits the mood of the poem.”

Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849): Waltzes
No. 9 in A flat major, Op.69 No. 1 (L'adieu)
No. 11 in G flat major, Op.70 No.1
No. 5 in A flat major, Op.42 (2/4)

Pianist John Ogden called Chopin's waltzes "the brightest jewels in the greatesty salons of the time." Louis Ehlert said they are dances of the soul and not of the body. James Hunker referred to "their animated rhythms, insouciant airs and brilliant, coquettish atmosphere, the true atmosphere of the ballroom."
The Waltz No.9 was a gift for Marie Wodzinska, with whom Chopin was in love. When he departed after a visit with her family 1835, she wrote: “On Saturday, after you had left us, we all walked sadly about the drawing room where you had been with us a few minutes earlier. Our eyes were filled with tears...You were the sole topic of conversation. Felix repeatedly asked me to play that Waltz (the last thing you played and gave to us). They enjoyed listening as I enjoyed playing, for it brought back the brother who had just left.”
After Chopin's death in 1849, his childhood friend Julian Fontana returned from America to Paris, so he could prepare various works for publication that had never been issued. Though Fontana had studied piano at the Warsaw Conservatory, scholars wonder if Fontana might have "completed" some unfinished Chopin scores. The Waltz No.11 is among these. In it, writes Frank Cooper, Chopin “opposed an initial joyous outburst with a central section both songlike and sentimental.” It was later orchestrated and used in the ballet Les Sylphides.
The Waltz No. 5 dates from 1840. “If Chopin had written it for dancing," wrote Robert Schumann, "more than half of the dancers would necessarily be represented by countesses. This waltz is aristocratic to the tips of its toes.” In his book on Chopin, Huneker writes: "The prolonged trill on E flat, summoning us to the ballroom, the suggestive interminglinbg of rhythms, duple and triple, the coquetry, hesitation passionate avowal and the superb coda, with its echoes of evening--have not these episodes a charm beyond compare?" Herbert Weinstock writes, "In reality a potpourri of, or free fantasy on, waltz melodies, the A-flat major is held together very loosely by recurrences of the chief melodies and by constant reappearances of a promenade-like interlude...a device very like that used by Schumann in Carnaval."

Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915): Etudes, Op.8
No.10 in D flat major
11 in B flat minor
12 in D sharp minor (Patetico)

A classmate of Rachmaninoff's at the Moscow Conservatory, Scriabin was also a virtuoso pianist, who slept with Chopin's scores under his pillow. His Twelve Etudes, Op.8, published in 1895, are said to owe a debt to Chopin. In liner notes to his recordings of the works, pianist Morton Estrin has a caution: "Why should this come as a great surprise?" wonders pianist Morton Estrin, "Every significant piano work owes something to the composer who virtually invented the instrument. What is surprising--and wonderful--is that Scriabin, who was in his early twenties when he composed these pieces, had something to add to Chopin, something very individual to say."