Programme Notes Online

Chamber Music Series Royal Liverpool Philharmonic

Friday 19 April 2013 7.30pm St Georges Hall Concert Room

Yundi piano

FREDERIC CHOPIN (1810-1849)
Nocturne No.1 in B flat minor, Op.9 No.1
Nocturne No.2 in E flat major, Op.9 No.2

Robert Schumann, when he heard Chopin play the piano, compared the effect with the sound of an open-
air Aeolian harp, its strings softly stirred by the blowing of the wind in the trees. The most intimate of
Chopins piano pieces, exploring fine shades of instrumental colour, do often possess something of that
ethereal quality. Some of them are so subtly assembled into groups that they can be performed as an
integer, as the first two of his 21 nocturnes will be tonight. This is music much of which is quiet and slow-
paced, yet within which Chopin found scope for the interplay of darkness and light, employing the long
bel canto lines and intricate filigree detail of Bellinis operas to create a mysterious, vibrant world in which
little is explicitly stated yet much is implied.

Chopin did not invent the keyboard nocturne that honour goes to the Irish composer John Field but
his achievement was to impose the discipline of a single unified structure, as well as that of his own
genius, upon the various intensities of feeling he wanted to express. To hear several Chopin nocturnes in
succession is to realise how artfully he rang the changes on a format usually consisting of a lyrical opening
statement, a contrasted middle section in a different key, and an elaborate reprise of the introduction.

His earliest nocturnes, such as those of Op.9, are stylistically among the simplest. No.1 in B flat minor
could indeed be called the prototype, on account of its clarity of line, its hovering main theme, its
arpeggiated accompaniment, and the striking independence of the left and right hands. A contrasted
middle section was here not yet a major concern, and the music seems to drift dreamily onwards from its
opening bars. No.2 in E flat major is also all-of-a-piece, its contrasts seamlessly stitched into its overall
design. The soft rapture of its opening theme soon ensured that this would become the most famous
Chopin nocturne of them all.

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827)
Piano Sonata No.23 in F minor, Op.57 Appassionata

Allegro assai
Andante con moto
Allegro, ma non troppo presto

Along with the Waldstein Sonata, Op.53, the Appassionata has been called one of the works that
brought Beethovens middle period to the boil. It has also been called the most concise, the most
spaciously grand, the most romantic, the most assertively rhetorical, the most tragic and, more
didactically, a sonata whose opening movement is almost rigidly symmetrical in structure, in spite of its
violence. It is certainly a milestone in Beethovens output, and understandably one of the most famous of
all his works. Its emphatic air of finality several years would pass before he produced another piano
sonata suggests Beethovens own recognition that it marked the end of a line.

Though the division of his output into three periods early, middle, late is now more often challenged
than it used to be, there is no doubt that the gulf separating the drama of the Appassionata Sonata,
Op.57, from the restraint of the A major, Op.101, and some of the intervening works, incorporated vast
stylistic changes. The danger lies in assuming that late automatically means better, rather than simply
different. In fact, the only way to appreciate either of these great sonatas is on its own terms, and to note
that they lie on opposite sides of a complicated dividing line. The evocative title of the Appassionata, we
should remember, was not Beethovens own, but it is undoubtedly apt and a lot nearer the truth than Sir
Donald Toveys description of the music as tragic through and through. The closest the Appassionata
gets to tragedy lies not in its minor-key ending, which was something that mattered to Tovey, but in its
storminess.

Yet it is a tremendous work to have erupted between the calm of the Triple Concerto, Op.56, and the
lyricism of the Fourth Piano Concerto, Op.58. Even the report by Beethovens pupil Ferdinand Ries of
how the composer hummed and howled the torrential semiquavers of the finale during a walk together,
and how, on returning home, he rushed to the piano to pound out the notes on the keyboard without
taking off his hat, suggests that they must have struck him like lightning.

But the knowledge that he was simultaneously sketching the imprisoned Florestans dungeon scene in
Fidelio suggests something else, at least about the first movements opening descent to the lowest note on
the keyboard (the finale of Op.101 at one point goes a semitone lower, thanks to the extended keyboard by
then available). The hollowness of the opening motif results from the notes being played two octaves apart
a striking effect. The second subject, when it arrives, sounds like a heroic major-key inversion of the
first. The fact that it appears to have been an inspired afterthought stresses again the powerful
improvisatory nature of the music. Or does it? The observant Charles Rosen, after all, considers the first
movement to be so scrupulously assembled that that it falls into four unmistakably clear-cut sections
exposition, development, recapitulation, coda each of them beginning with the main theme.

The central andante, a short set of variations, is not so much a slow movement as an introduction to the
finale, though its steady progress towards its climax again suggests something carefully planned. The
finale proves every bit as turbulent as Riess description of its genesis makes it seem. Yet, even after it
appears to have run its swirling course, it is not quite over. With a grinding change of gear, the speed
increases and the music as the finale of the Seventh Symphony would later also do heads straight for
the abyss.

INTERVAL

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Piano Sonata No.8 in C minor, Op.13 Pathtique

Grave allegro
Adagio cantabile
Rondo: allegro

In what he called his Grande Sonate Pathetique, Beethoven explored, experimented with, and developed
the pianos range of emotional and technical possibilities as they stood in the year 1798, when he was still
in his twenties. Like Tchaikovsky after him, he employed his descriptive title in its passionate rather than
pathetic sense, and broke new ground in doing so.

Dussek, its true, had already written a similar work in the same key, and Mozarts great C minor Fantasy
and Sonata (K475 and K457) was notable for the same sort of sombre restlessness. But Beethovens slow
introduction brooding, ominous, disturbing, meticulously annotated was something entirely new, and
his back references to it in the course of the succeeding allegro were strokes of dramatic genius
unparalleled at the time. Even the works first densely dark low chord possessed a deliberate shock value,
though how it sounded on a late 18th-century instrument would have been very different from how it
sounds today.

The groping music of the introduction, with its stark contrasts between loud and soft tone, bursts finally
into the long, violent allegro which fills the rest of the movement with flashes of lightning and rumbles of
thunder. When the introduction briefly returns, at the start of the central development section and again
in the coda, its sudden halting of the action leads on each occasion to an even more agitated resumption of
the allegro.

Respite comes in the slow movement, the famous adagio cantabile bathed in the warmth of A flat major
(a contrasted key Beethoven would employ again later in the slow movement of his C minor Symphony).
The music is nocturnal, poignant as well as peaceful, though the poignant passages invariably lead back to
the tender serenity of the main theme. But the sweet repose of the ending is instantly shattered by the C
minor finale, which brings back the storm and stress of the opening movement, though without its big
theatrical gestures.

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Piano Sonata No.14 in C sharp minor, Op.27 No.2 Moonlight

Adagio sostenuto
Allegretto
Presto agitato

I generally have some pictures in my mind while composing, Beethoven once remarked a rash
statement, perhaps, when you consider the aptitude of publicists, publishers, and people in general to
apply scenarios to music when nothing visual was ever intended. Beethovens Piano Sonata in C sharp
minor has been identified with one indelible picture from the moment it was published, but it was not
Beethoven himself who called it the Moonlight.

Piano sonatas were among the works with which he made his first impact on Vienna, as soon as he arrived
there from provincial Bonn at the age of 21. Haydn, having passed through Bonn en route to London the
previous year, encountered the young composer on his way home and clearly influenced Beethovens
decision to move to Vienna rather than Paris, the other city on which he could be said to have had designs.
As a gifted pianist, soon to become though all too briefly the greatest in Europe, Beethoven chose the
piano as the primary vehicle for his inspiration and startled Viennese listeners with the audacity of his
music and the way he played it.

The difference between a Mozart sonata and a Beethoven one must have been immediately apparent.
Even in the earliest works, there was a new, emphatic, volatile quality about the fast movements, a new
romance and pathos about the slow ones, quite foreign to previous composers.

Mozart, while he could produce the pearly, moonlit beauty of the concerto now nicknamed the Elvira
Madigan, could not have written any part of the Moonlight Sonata. Yet in theory, had he lived a little
longer, he might have gone in that direction; and though Beethoven considered the Moonlight
sufficiently different from his previous sonatas to call it (along with its immediate predecessor, Op.27,
No.1 in E flat major) a sonata quasi una fantasia, the link between fantasy and sonata was something
perfectly familiar to Mozart. Indeed, he had composed one dramatic example of such a work himself, the
dual Fantasy and Sonata in C minor, whose only snag is that its two halves do not really work as an entity
they simply cancel each other out, as the pianist Artur Schnabel once complained.

Beethovens achievement in the Moonlight was to merge fantasy and sonata into a unity, greatly to the
works advantage, and in so doing he paved the way for the compressed sonata-like format of Schuberts
Wanderer Fantasy. Moreover, the strange, slow opening movement, which provides the main element of
fantasy in Beethovens sonata, is nocturnal enough to make the nickname by which generations of music-
lovers have known it seem as apt as Beethovens own more abstract description of the music.

Yet the nickname applies exclusively to the first movement, with its mysterious arpeggios and trancelike
chords which together seem deliberately to conceal the fact that the music, misty and almost motionless
though it is, is actually constructed in traditional sonata form. Beethoven, as Alfred Brendel has succinctly
put it, builds even when he dreams.

But the dreams did not conceal the truth from the composer. He was clearly aware, as Charles Rosen
asserts in his book on classical style, that the first movement of the Moonlight is nothing if not
extraordinary. Melody and accompaniment are meshed in such a way that it is impossible at times to say
which is which. On the one hand, there is the soft triplet figure which is sustained without interruption
throughout the movement. On the other, there is the persistent dotted rhythm of what is usually called the
soprano melody, to which it is umbilically connected.

The rest of the work comprises two more movements, each of them requiring a mark-up in tempo. First,
heading straight out of the opening adagio, comes a not-so-moonlit, though not unmysterious, interlude
which sounds like a scherzo or minuet with a curiously offbeat pulse. Thereafter the explosion of the
minor-key finale is so sudden and unprecedentedly violent that, if the music can be called nocturnal at all,
it is in its evocation of the thunder and lightning of a night sky. Nothing like its hammering chords and
streaking arpeggios had been written for the piano before. The very notes of the original manuscript look
windswept.

Programme notes by Conrad Wilson 2013

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