Marc-André Hamelin, Piano   View Bio   Tuesday, October 21, 2008

PROGRAM

PROGRAM NOTES

Piano Sonata, Op. 1 Alban Berg (Born in Vienna, 1885; died in Vienna, 1935)

Alban Berg completed his Sonata, Opus 1, in 1908, the year he turned twenty-three. It had its first performance in 1911, when Etta Jonasz-Werndorff introduced it in Vienna at a concert of music by students of Arnold Schönberg. (The other composers were Anton von Webern and the forgotten Karl Horwitz, a gifted but tragic figure who lost his hearing through illness and died at forty-one.) Berg, the scion of a Viennese family that fairly crackled with literary, theatrical, musical, artistic, and business talent, had studied with Schoenberg since 1904, when he was nineteen.1 He worked with him in a nourishing, trying, often exceedingly dependent relationship until 1910; indeed those aspects of their connection lasted until Berg’s death in 1935.

Right away, Schoenberg was impressed by the lyric gift that was evident in the songs his young pupil brought to him, but he was also worried about his short-windedness and his unease in dealing with larger designs. The Piano Sonata, with its fifteenminute span, was in that sense a breakthrough and something like a graduation exercise, and for that reason, and with his teacher’s blessing, Berg made it his official Opus 1.

It is not a sonata in the familiar, i.e. post-Scarlatti sense of a multi-movement work. If this were in fact the first movement of a multi-movement sonata, that would have to be an enormous work, comparable in scale to one of the late Schubert sonatas. Berg casts his single movement in sonata form, and this must be one of the last works to request a repeat of the exposition. Tonality is in a state of crisis here. The music clearly begins and ends in B minor. That claim needs to be qualified slightly. As for the end, there is no doubt whatsoever: the bass motion in the last four bars is Fsharp/ B, just as it would be in a classical piece in B minor, and the last two bars consist entirely of Bminor chords. The beginning is not so immediately clear: the first three chords could be going anywhere at all, though the third and fourth measures then bring clarity and an unmistakable, totally firm and settled cadence on B minor.

Those harmonic anchors are there, but listening, we are much more likely to be aware of and affected by a harmonic pulse so rapid as to annihilate our feeling for a clear tonal center. Berg gives a tempo marking of “mässig bewegt (moderately moving),” but just as his harmonies are on ever-shifting ground, so does he constantly modify the speed. The first twelve measures alone bring seven modifications of tempo and one brand-new one. Tempo—and this is one of the most original features of this arresting debut—has become an articulative and structural tool in its own right. The Berg Sonata, a work of great beauty, is Tristan-plus music of passion, yearning, melancholy, capable of thunderous climaxes as well as of the most tender addresses.

—Michael Steinberg

1. The Berg family accomplishment that had the widest impact was that of Alban’s older brother Hermann, who, having emigrated to the United States, gave the world the teddy bear.

Piano Sonata No. 2 in B-flat minor, Op. 35 ("Funeral March") Frédéric Chopin

(Born in Żelazowa Wola, near Warsaw, 1810; died in Paris, 1849)

This great sonata has always evoked divided opinions. Schumann was the original provocateur in this respect when he reviewed it in 1841 and wrote that calling this work a sonata was a “caprice, if not an outburst of wild spirits” on the composer’s part. What Chopin had done, Schumann wrote, was to “yoke four of his wildest children together, perhaps in order to smuggle them into places where they would not otherwise gain entry.” But he did acknowledge the unmistakable individuality of this music: “To look at the first measures of this sonata and to have any doubt as to their authorship would be unworthy of a connoisseur’s eye. Only Chopin begins like that, and only he closes this way: with dissonances through dissonances within dissonances.” More searching analysis corroborates what pianists and audiences have always known: the piece works. It did come into being by stages; that is, Chopin wrote the famous Funeral March in 1837, and only two years later did he hit on the idea of building three more movements around it. The March, even though it is not the most original music in the Sonata, is still its emotional core, and Chopin did not mind at all when people began calling the work Sonate funèbre.

The beginning of the mostly tempestuous first movement is both extraordinarily forceful and extraordinarily subtle. We hear what appears to be a slow introduction, one of the briefest in all music, but one that defines the tragic spirit of the Sonata with magnificent economy and strength. The first gesture, a downward plunge of a diminished seventh (D-flat to E-natural), is surely derived from and homage to the opening of Beethoven’s last piano sonata, Opus 111. These four measures—and they do indeed proceed from dissonance to dissonance—do not even amount to a sentence, let alone a paragraph; rather, beginning in medias res, they comprise a single cadence that lands on the tonic chord, B-flat minor, and with that landing the agitated quick tempo is also established. Chopin specifically directs that this tempo must be exactly double that of the opening Grave measures; or, to put—and hear—it another way, those opening measures are already in the main tempo, but in very long notes.

The classical side of Chopin comes out in his request that the exposition be repeated, and, though most printed editions get this completely wrong, the movement is to be repeated from the very beginning, not from measure 5 where the change from Grave to Doppio movimento (Double Speed) occurs. That the opening Grave is not an introduction but already part of the movement becomes unambiguously clear in the development, which fuses the motif of the falling diminished seventh with the agitato quick theme.

Two other things about this movement should be mentioned. It has an expansive contrasting theme, lyric, and scored in rich chords, and this provides momentary respite from the turbulent atmosphere. Because the breathless agitato idea is constantly present in the development, Chopin skips it when he comes to the recapitulation and moves right into the lyric second theme. (Tchaikovsky imitated this, and for the same reason, in the first movement of his Symphonie pathétique.

The second movement is a Scherzo in E-flat minor, and, as Schumann points out, no more jocular than many of Beethoven’s scherzi. Or, one might add, those four furious, hyper-energized Scherzi of Chopin’s own. Chopin would revisit the thrilling upward chromatic chord sequence three years later when he wrote what is now his most famous Polonaise, the A-flat major, Opus 53. The trio, a little slower and in major, is a melody so charming that it is a wonder it was missed by those who raided Chopin to hack out “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows” and “Till the End of Time.”

Next comes the dark and famous Funeral March. Schumann found it somewhat “repellent,” opining that “an Adagio, perhaps in D-flat, would have had an incomparably more beautiful effect.” It is an odd complaint in view of the fact that the trio is in fact a slow, nocturne-like movement in D-flat. Earlier I mentioned Chopin’s love of and indebtedness to Italian opera, something often commented on in connection with the Nocturnes, the slow movements of the Concertos, and the so-called “Cello” Etude, Opus 25, no. 7 in C-sharp minor, but here is an instance I had not seen mentioned until an article by Will Crutchfield earlier this year. There Crutchfield, a conductor one of whose special interests is the Italian bel canto style, pointed out that Chopin’s march comes close to being a quotation of a similar piece in one of Chopin’s favorite operas, Rossini’s La gazza ladra (The Thieving Magpie)—one of those operas of which most of us have no idea of what happens after its very popular overture.

We have now experienced three variants of one pattern: an emotionally turbulent movement (also physical turbulent in the case of the first two), spelled by something more melodious and serene, the second theme in the first movement and the trios in the Scherzo and Funeral March. Rachmaninoff, who made a fabled recording of this Sonata in 1930 (and was one of very few pianists to pay attention to Chopin’s directions about the tempo relationships in the first movement), used to make a drastic emendation to the Funeral March. Instead of having the main part of the march rise to a climax and sink back to piano, he turned the entire thirty-measure span into one gigantic crescendo, then suddenly cutting into the immense fortissimo at which he had arrived with the sweetly pianissimo trio. Then, the trio concluded, he picked up the march fortissimo and made its whole return one continuous decrescendo. It is not what Chopin composed, and so the procedure is at the very least questionable. (It may well have originated with Anton Rubinstein, the great Russian pianist of the generation before Rachmaninoff.)

At the same time—and this is always true even of Rachmaninoff’s performances—it is, if I may express myself this way, a profoundly understanding distortion, this extreme heightening of the contrast between the grim march and the consoling trio. Unconsciously, we perhaps expect the finale to follow the pattern once more. Certainly the music, quick and sotto voce almost beyond rational intelligibility, begins by suggesting just that. The two hands move in unharmonized octaves throughout, but the implied harmonies are Chopin’s most extreme—with dissonance through dissonance within dissonance. But the emotional punch is that the lyric relief never comes. Schumann hated it, this most fantastical and Schumannesque of Chopin’s inventions.

“It is a mockery, not music,” he wrote—we’ve heard plenty of that one over the years—and the close suggests “a sphinx with a sardonic smile.” In his searching discussion of this sonata in his book The Romantic Generation, Charles Rosen demonstrates that this “mockery” is worked out with classic precision. This minute and a half of music is one of the Romantics’ most haunting triumphs.

—Michael Steinberg

A NOTE ABOUT CHARLES-VALENTIN ALKAN

The neglect and obscurity into which [Alkan] has fallen is, as the American novelist and poet Henry Bella-mann observed, ‘one of the most puzzling things in the history of modern music.’ To those coming afresh to the music on this recording, it is an observation worth bearing in mind.

Who was Alkan? He was one of the greatest composerpianists in history. He had a voice as original and individual as Chopin or Liszt, and a keyboard technique that even Liszt admitted was the greatest he had ever known. Hans von Bülow described Alkan as ‘the Berlioz of the piano’; Busoni thought that Alkan’s études were ‘the most significant after Chopin and Liszt’. These are not insignificant figures whose views can be dismissed lightly. The uninitiated must at the very least be intrigued, while committed Alkanists can only nod smugly, gratified that such distinguished names echo their own opinions. Much of Alkan’s life is shrouded in mystery. This was so even when he was alive, his self-imposed isolation only adding to the fascination. There are only two images of him, one a portrait taken in his early forties (see above), the other with his back to the camera holding an umbrella. When he died in 1888, an obituary in Le Ménestrel opened: ‘Charles-Valentin Alkan has just died. It was necessary for him to die in order to suspect his existence.’ The author goes on to recall the name and work of ‘an artist infinitely greater than thousands of his more celebrated and praised contemporaries’.

He was born Charles-Valentin Morhange in the Marais, the Jewish quarter of Paris, where his father, Alkan Morhange, ran a little boarding school. After his sister Céleste in 1812 and Charles-Valentin’s arrival on 30 November 1813 came further four brothers between 1816 and 1827, all destined for musical careers. His musical progress was prodigious, making his first public appearance at the age of seven-and-a-half as a violinist. His debut as a pianist had to wait until he was twelve (2 April 1826) when he played a number of his compositions in a concert at the home of the extraordinary inventor and piano manufacturer Henri Pape. He was already known simply as ‘Le jeune Alkan’ having dropped his given surname in favour of his father’s first name (Alkan being the equivalent of the English ‘John’). A favourite of his teacher Joseph Zimmerman at the Conservatoire where he had enrolled at the age of six, Alkan was soon introduced to the elegant salon life of Paris. By the age of twenty-four, concert announcements referred to him as ‘the celebrated Alkan’ and he had taken up residence in one of Paris’s most fashionable addresses, the Square d’Orléans where his neighbours were Zimmerman, Kalkbrenner, Dumas fils and, later, Chopin and George Sand. All seemed set for a brilliant career playing concerts, teaching and composing. It was not to be.

A series of events led him, increasingly, to shun society. From 1838 to 1844 little is known of him, a period coinciding with the birth of his natural son, the pianist Élie-Miriam Delaborde (1839–1913). He returned to the concert stage playing just three recitals (two in April 1844, one the following year). In 1848, when Zimmerman retired from the Conservatoire as head of the piano department, Alkan was thought of as his natural successor. Instead, and despite petitioning from his friends, the post went to Zimmerman’s former pupil and friend Antoine Marmontel. Alkan was bitterly disappointed. Becoming increasingly frustrated at his lack of recognition, after giving a chamber concert in May 1849 he did not play again in public for nearly twenty-five years. By then, though only in his mid-sixties, he was in poor health, a frail little white-bearded man with ‘skinny, hooked fingers’. Busoni recalled hearing him alone in an empty room playing Bach on an Erard pédalier (pedal piano). ‘I listened, riveted to the spot by the expressive, crystal clear playing.’ This was followed by Beethoven’s Opus 110. ‘What happened to the great Beethovenian poem … I couldn’t begin to describe. [The performance] affected me with an enthusiasm such as I have never experienced since. This was not Liszt— perhaps less perfect, technically—but it had greater intimacy and was more humanly moving…’

Much of Alkan’s music is of surpassing difficulty, taking it way beyond the realm of the amateur and playable only by virtuosi with transcendent techniques. Published only sporadically and without a champion, what hope did it have when born without life-support even in that piano-ridden age? In the annual series of Six petits concerts that Alkan inaugurated in 1873, although he programmed a number of his own works, his main attention was on all the major keyboard composers from Couperin to Saint-Saëns, taking in Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, Kessler and Czerny en route, as well as Field, Moscheles and Chopin (but, notably, no Liszt). The series ended in 1877 and Alkan retired into obscurity, only occasionally being coaxed back into the limelight at social gatherings when, it was said, he was a most lively conversationalist. Visitors to his home tended to be rebuffed. When Friedrich Niecks, Chopin’s biographer, called on him and asked the concierge whether Monsieur Alkan was at home, the reply was a decisive ‘No.’ On further enquiring when he could be found at home, the reply was an equally decisive ‘Never’ (though when Niecks encountered Alkan at Erard’s a few days later ‘the reception of me was not merely polite, but most friendly’).

Alkan died on 29 March 1888. The cause of death was one of the most improbable in musical history— crushed to death by a bookcase that toppled over as he reached up to retrieve a book in his Paris home. Apart from his immediate family, there were just four mourners at his funeral. Concerto for solo piano Charles-Valentin Alkan Opus 39, Nos. 8–10

(Born in Paris, 1813; died in Paris, 1888) The development of the piano in the early nineteenth century ran hand-in-hand with technical advances. A great number of études were published aimed at specific areas of technique, most of them devoid of musical merit until the collections by Moscheles (1827) and Chopin (1833 and 1837) carried the genre into the realm of poetry. Liszt developed this further with his Études d’exécution transcendante, published—after several revisions—in 1851; these twelve studies were more extended, of far greater technical difficulty and demanded huge reserves of physical stamina when played in concert.

Three years earlier, Alkan had published in two volumes his Douze études dans tous les tons majeurs, Op 35. Starting in A major and moving up in a logical progression of fourths (A, D, G etc.), they are of a similar length and scope to Liszt’s Études. In 1857 came the companion to Op 35, following a similar cycle of fourths: Douze études dans tous les tons mineurs, Op. 39. Here the pianistic stakes are raised— considerably. Indeed, Ronald Smith, that indefatigable champion of Alkan, suggests that the very term ‘étude’ must seem singularly inappropriate, ‘that is until one considers these works as studies in the translation of orchestral sonorities into their pianistic counterpart.’ These twelve studies span 277 pages and contain some of the most uncompromising writing in the entire literature of the piano, ‘our only remaining evidence,’ says Smith, ‘of a technique that caused even Liszt to feel uneasy when playing in Alkan’s presence.’

The first three studies (Comme le vent, En rythme molossique and Scherzo diabolico) are followed by the four that comprise the Symphony for solo piano (recorded by Mr. Hamelin on Hyperion CDA67218). Studies 8, 9 and 10 are grouped together as the Concerto for solo piano, a work that is, on one level at least, the pianist’s ultimate calling card. The set concludes with the rarely heard Ouverture, the second longest of the studies, and No. 12, Le festin d’Ésope (The Feast of Aesop), the best known of Alkan’s works (also recorded by Mr. Hamelin, on Hyperion CDA66794). The first movement of the Concerto is a colossal 72 pages in length, its 1,343 bars making it longer than Beethoven’s entire ‘Hammerklavier’ sonata. It takes just under half an hour to perform. Alkan casts the movement in the unfamiliar key of G sharp minor, with frequent excursions into the relative major (B), maintaining the same five sharps of the key signature despite a plethora of accidentals throughout indicating passages in remoter keys, until five pages before the end when he modulates triumphantly into the four flats of the tonic major (A flat). To help underline that this is a concerto (and not a symphony, sonata or fantasy), Alkan indicates ‘tutti’ and ‘solo’ passages which generally, but not always, indicate sonorous orchestral textures contrasted with more lyrical pianistic ones. The petulant opening subject, for example, is marked ‘tutti’ and ‘quasi-trombe.’ For such a gargantuan movement, a route map is in order with approximate timings:

0’00 first subject: Allegro assai
0’47 second subject: E major with variant in G sharp minor
1’35 third subject
2’24 hushed anticipation of the ‘solo’ entry
3’11 ‘solo’ entry: various treatments of first subject
5’45 second subject: B major
8’06 brilliant section based on first subject
9’33 third subject: E minor
10’10 ‘tutti’ first subject: B major
10’34 fourth subject ‘solo’ (initially in G major) leading to review of all previous themes
15’28 66 bars with a hypnotically repeated G sharp
17’50 ‘tutti’ —
17’59 ‘solo’ —
18’08 ‘tutti’
18’16 ‘solo’ reflecting on previous material
22’35 chorale
23’57 coda of diabolical repeated notes, ‘quasi tamburo’
26’43 key signature changes to A flat major for exultant restatement of principal themes.

After this epic roller-coaster ride, the succeeding movements are relatively straightforward in structure, though few pages allow any resting on pianistic laurels. Moving upwards in Alkan’s tidy-minded sequence of fourths, the second movement in C sharp minor (Adagio) begins like its predecessor with an orchestral hint: ‘quasi-celli’. The ‘soloist’ enters (0’40) with the mournful initial idea followed at 3’48 by the second subject. All seems set for a reassuring time with writing that could at one moment be by Chopin, at another by Liszt. But the ever-resourceful Alkan is always ready to unsettle those expecting a conventional journey. Sardonic punctuations and unlikely modulations hint at something darker to come. And indeed the storm clouds quickly gather, leading (who would have anticipated it?) to the stark drum beats of a funeral march (6’40). After a calming passage in D flat major (7’59), we return to the opening lament now underpinned by rumbling thunder. Distant drum beats again. The opening cello theme. Everything dying away to nothing—except for one last spiteful jab.

The Concerto’s third movement (logically keyed in F sharp minor) is marked Allegretto alla barbaresca. Immediately, we are flung into a feverish brew of conflicting ideas—an initial flourish that sounds like the Rakoczy March, a polonaise lasting a mere eight bars, followed by a ‘tutti’ marked ‘quasi-ribeche’ (the rebec is an early stringed instrument played with a bow that originated in Arabia). We might be in the souks of Cairo. This brief and brutal paragraph, one that must have shocked Alkan’s early listeners, leads to an extended ‘solo’ section of scintillating Parisian delicacy. So within the space of two pages we visit Hungary, Poland, Egypt and France. The nine minutes of music that follow are among the most thrilling and relentlessly taxing ever written for the piano. Op. 39 No. 10 is one of the great pianistic highwire acts that should have you on the edge of your seat as it concludes in a riotous blaze of F sharp major.

— Jeremy Nicholas
© 2008 This program note is based on the booklet written for Mr. Hamelin's recording of Alkan's Concerto for Solo Piano on Hyperion CDA67569 and is reproduced by kind permission of the author.