CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Leif Ove Andsnes

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Thursday, April 24th, 2008 at 8:00 PM

Leif Ove Andsnes, Piano

BACH Toccata in E Minor, BWV 914
BEETHOVEN Sonata No. 13 in E-flat Major, Op. 27, No. 1, "quasi una fantasia"
SIBELIUS "Commodo" from Kyllikki, 3 Lyric Pieces, Op. 41
SIBELIUS Elegiaco, Op. 76, No. 10
SIBELIUS The Birch Tree, Op. 75, No. 4
SIBELIUS Barcarola, Op. 24, No. 10
GRIEG Ballade in the Form of Variations on a Norwegian Folk Song in G Minor, Op. 24

DEBUSSY Preludes, Selections from Books I & II

Encores:
D. SCARLATTI Sonata in C-sharp Minor, K. 247
D. SCARLATTI Sonata in D Major, K. 492
SIBELIUS Etude, Op. 76, No. 2

Program Notes:

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH Toccata in E Minor, BWV 914
Born March 21, 1685, in Eisenach; died July 28, 1750, in Leipzig.

Composed around 1706, Bach’s Toccata in E Minor received its Carnegie Hall premiere on November 12, 1938, with Sergei Rachmaninoff, piano.

Much of Bach’s music for domestic keyboard (as opposed to organ) grew out of his life as a teacher—not least the teacher of his children, of whom there were always new ones to instruct. The seven pieces he called “toccata,” however, come from an earlier period, this E-minor composition perhaps dating from before he was married, when he was still in his first permanent position, as organist at the Neue Kirche in Arnstadt, a small town near Erfurt.

Like its companion pieces, the E-Minor Toccata is in several sections—in this case, a short introduction, a four-part fugue, an adagio, and a three-part fugue. The introduction develops out of a question-answer dialog between a tiny motif (down a half step and back up) and longer phrases. In the way of such conversations, the answers progressively change the nature of the question without by any means exhausting its potential, for this tiny idea features again in each of the fugues. The intervening slow passage raises questions of its own in its harmonic circlings, and has to deal with an early crisis in the form of an extraordinary diminished-seventh tremulation. The second fugue, maintaining sixteenth-note motion throughout, is a toccata in the more general sense.


LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Sonata No. 13 in E-flat Major, Op. 27, No. 1, “quasi una fantasia”
Baptized December 17, 1770, in Bonn; died March 27, 1827, in Vienna.

Composed in 1800–01, the Sonata in E-flat Major, Op. 27, No. 1, received its first Carnegie Hall performance in Carnegie Lyceum (now Zankel Hall) on May 12, 1899, with Florence Traub, piano.

Intimate song, fugal elements, non-standard form: this piece has all the elements of Beethoven’s late style, and yet it comes from two decades earlier, when the composer was just at the threshold of what is usually designated his “middle period.” Recognizing the work’s unusualness, he called it a “sonata quasi una fantasia,” as he did its companion piece, Op. 27, No. 2, the so-called “Moonlight” Sonata. When he considered what he had written, evidently the fantasia model, continuous yet open to sudden diversions, seemed as close as the sonata. Op. 27, No. 1 plays without a break, through a sequence of movements that is thoroughly atypical and thoroughly satisfying.

Exceptionalness starts with the opening, which, in song strains, has more the character of a slow movement. Its first section has an ABA form, made of regular phrases, the “middle eight” introducing expressive slips into C major. Though the ensuing Allegro is decisively an interruption, it takes up the C-major tonality and is still in regular phrases, if suggesting dance more than song. The song theme, repeated at the end, becomes a dialog between the hands.

Then comes a short scherzo in C minor, with a trio in A-flat, whose syncopations carry over into the repeat of the scherzo to add a lustrous ripple to its arpeggiations. The condensed adagio, restoring A-flat, is again in ABA form, ending with a cadenza-style flourish that prepares for the final allegro, which brings back the E-flat of the opening. Here at last is a movement in sonata form; one might almost think the work is finally beginning just as it is coming to an end. However, with the end of this end in sight and the coda readying itself for the final affirmation, the music stops on a dominant chord so that the principal part of the adagio can return, in E-flat. The gesture’s rightness is so complete as to defy explanation.


JEAN SIBELIUS Comodo, from Kyllikki—Three Lyric Pieces, Op. 41; Elegiaco, Op. 76, No. 10; “The Birch,” Op. 75, No. 4; Barcarola, Op. 24, No. 10
Born December 8, 1865, in Tavastehus, Finland; died September 20, 1957, in Järvenpää, Finland.

Composed in 1904, “Comodo” was first performed at Carnegie Hall on April 24, 1955, with Harry Fuchs, piano. Composed in 1903, “Barcarola” received its Carnegie Hall premiere in Carnegie Recital Hall (now Weill Recital Hall) on March 22, 1980, with Erik Tawastjerna, piano. Tonight’s performance marks the Carnegie Hall premieres of “Elegiaco,” composed in 1916, and “The Birch,” composed in 1914.

Sibelius’s piano music remains underappreciated. He wrote a lot of it, all the way from his late 20s to his mid-60s, when he was on the point of abandoning composition. Apart from an early sonata and a set of three middle-period sonatinas, his works for the instrument came in sets of pieces, from which Mr. Andsnes chooses four: two from the time of the Violin Concerto (1903), and, between these, two from a decade later, when the composer’s more considerable projects were The Oceanides and the Fifth Symphony. The outer, earlier pieces are more developed, the middle ones miniatures. Mr. Andsnes starts with the finale of Kyllikki, a set of three pieces named for a female character in the Finnish epic that provided subjects for many of Sibelius’s works, the Kalevala; the movement is a dance with a slow middle section. “The Birch Tree” comes from a set of tree portraits.


EDVARD GRIEG Ballade in the Form of Variations on a Norwegian Folk Song in G Minor, Op. 24
Born June 15, 1843, in Bergen, Norway; died there September 4, 1907.

Composed in 1875–76, the Ballade in G Minor received its Carnegie Hall in Chamber Music Hall (now Weill Recital Hall) on November 25, 1891, with Leopold Godowsky, piano.

Grieg created this, his weightiest piece for solo piano, during the winter of 1875–76—a bleak period in his life, personally and artistically. Both his parents had recently died, one shortly after the other. He began to feel religious doubts. And, as a composer, he wanted to find a new way toward larger forms, recognizing that the freshness of his Piano Concerto, now several years old, lay behind him. The Ballade seems at once to express and to resolve these anxieties; it was composed, he wrote, “with my life’s blood in days of sorrow and despair.”

What enabled him to draw on that blood was a simple folk song, but one with a number of affecting features. It repeatedly falls through the half step from the tonic to the leading note, as if losing its footing, and the effect is enhanced by a halting rhythm. The middle section fails to secure an escape, and the opening is repeated. Important, too, is the chromatically descending bass line Grieg finds for this part of the melody.

The work proceeds as a sequence of 14 variations, ranging widely in character but forming altogether a strong dramatic contour. Much of the piano’s 19th-century history is being surveyed here, and some of its 20th century—Debussy—prefigured. “One can hear in this piece,” Mr. Andsnes has said, “Grieg’s resignation, melancholy and anger––an anger that is almost barbaric towards the end. Yet there are also moments of unbelievable beauty.”


CLAUDE DEBUSSY Selections from Preludes, Books I and II
Born August 22, 1862, in St. Germain-en-Laye, France; died March 25, 1918, in Paris.

Composed in 1909–10, Book I of Debussy’s Preludes received its first complete Carnegie Hall performance on January 23, 1929, with Walter Gieseking; the first Carnegie Hall performance of any Prelude from Book I took place on March 31, 1914, when William Murdoch played “La cathédrale engloutie.” Composed in the years 1911–13, the Book II Preludes received their first complete Carnegie Hall performance on January 31, 1945, with Robert Casadesus; the first performance at Carnegie Hall of any of the Book II Preludes took place on November 24, 1914, with Leonard Borwick, who played “Bruyères.”

For Bach, the keyboard prelude was an approach to a fugue. Chopin made it an approach to nothing at all, and Debussy followed him in this—though it might be said that the Debussy prelude is an approach to the subject evoked by its title, which in each case is placed at the end of the printed music, not at the top. Comparison might be made with another prelude, the composer’s orchestral Prélude à “l’après-midi d’un faune,” written to precede Mallarmé’s poem. The piano preludes, too, are gestures toward an image, not illustrations.

Debussy’s presentation of his preludes in books of 12 was a further gesture toward Chopin, and thereby Bach, but there is no overriding harmonic scheme, as there was with those predecessors. The composer himself, and pianists close to him, seem not to have performed either book as a whole, but rather to have made selections, as Mr. Andsnes does here.

“Le vent das la plaine” (“The Wind on the Plain”). Wind is continuous movement. Debussy creates his own in a toccata of troubled major seconds, through which, characteristically, a simple melody is heard, along with luminous descents of seventh chords and some brusque gusts.

“Les collines d’Anacapri” (“The Hills of Anacapri”). Again there is a texture of toccata motion, now generally consonant, and folk-like melody. The introduction—prelude to the prelude—might suggest bells or sunshine, Anacapri being a town on the island of Capri. Guitar music weaves in for the middle section.

“Des pas sur la neige” (“Steps in the Snow”). The steps are slow. “This rhythm,” Debussy notes, “must be the equivalent in sound to a landscape background, sad and frozen.” The melody above seems to be moving toward resolution, “like a tender, sad regret.” However, the steps go on.

“Ce qu’a vu le vent de l’ouest” (“What the West Wind Saw”). Another wind and another toccata with emergent tunes, but darker and heavier, working toward a big climax and noisy as it leaves.

“La sérénade interrompue” (“The Interrupted Serenade”). Now a guitar again. The serenader’s song, “expressive and a touch supplicatory,” is interrupted by a habanera from down the street. Still, he goes on.

“Brouillards” (“Mists”). Arpeggios, played softly and resounding over one another, produce the misty impression, with melody in the background and a weird apparition in double octaves at the extremes of the keyboard.

“La puerta del vino” (“The Wine Gate”). The subject is one of the gates of the Alhambra in Granada, imagined through a watercolor, for Debussy never visited Spain. Now the habanera is in the foreground and, though there may be some straying into reverie, it is not interrupted.

“Bruyères” (“Heaths”). Opening with a strand of unaccompanied melody like a folk song, this is one of the most calm and consonant of the preludes.

“La terrasse des audiences au clair de lune” (“The Terrace for Moonlit Audiences”). Debussy was good at moonlight. Here it is, summoned by falling scales, parallel chords in the upper treble, and harmonic stasis. The title phrase came from a newspaper article by René Puaux, reporting on the Delhi Durbar of December 1911, when the new British monarch, George V, was ceremonially honored as emperor of India. Debussy was probably little concerned with pomp, but he appreciated evocative prose.

“Ondine” (Water Nymph). Marked “scherzando,” the piece has quite as much to do with the nymph’s seductive capriciousness as with water music, of which more had been heard in Ravel’s treatment of the subject in Gaspard de la nuit.

“Canope” (Canopic Jar). Canopic jars were used in ancient Egypt as receptacles for mummified organs. The music, marked “very calm and slightly sad,” is a marvelous example of how Debussy moves from one idea to another through delicate allusion.

Copyright © 2008 by The Carnegie Hall Corporation

Paul Griffiths is the author of numerous books on music, including
The New Penguin Dictionary of Music and, most recently, A Concise
History of Western Music (Cambridge University Press).

Leif Ove Andsnes, Piano
Leif Ove Andsnes has been performing regularly in the world’s premier concert venues since he first attracted international attention in the early 1990s. Playing solo and duo recitals as well as concertos with leading orchestras throughout each season, Mr. Andsnes is also an avid chamber musician who joins favorite colleagues every summer in Norway at the Risør Chamber Music Festival, of which is he co-artistic director. The New Yorker has called the Norwegian pianist “one of the intimidating few who possess power and personality in equal measure,” while the Financial Times has called him “an eminently sensual musician, an artist capable of grace and introspection.” The New York Times has described Mr. Andsnes as “the most accomplished pianist of the new generation.”

Mr. Andsnes opens his 2007–08 season with the international release on EMI Classics of Ballad for Edvard Grieg, a recording to commemorate the centenary of the death of Norway’s most famous composer. Mr. Andsnes plays Grieg’s stormy Ballade in G Minor on the album, and will play the work frequently in recital this spring. Highlights this season have included performances of Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in Belgium, Rotterdam, Paris and Philadelphia; Mozart concertos with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe in Germany and Austria; Rachmaninoff with the Royal Concertgebouw; and Grieg with the Dresden Staatskapelle and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. In January 2008 he appeared with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, and soon afterward performed Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with the New York Philharmonic under Riccardo Muti. Mr. Andsnes returned to the US in April for an extensive recital tour, playing in Atlanta, Birmingham, Washington, New York, San Francisco, and Seattle. His final engagements in the US this season feature performances of Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Esa-Pekka Salonen and with the San Francisco Symphony under Michael Tilson Thomas.

Leif Ove Andsnes has numerous other important European engagements this season, including a tour with the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra in Norway and Spain and solo recitals in Amsterdam, Berlin, Brussels, Cologne, Copenhagen, Florence, Hamburg, Lisbon, London, Milan, Prague, Rome, Rotterdam, Vienna, Zurich, and elsewhere. He will give several duo recitals with cellist Heinrich Schiff in January and February and violinist Christian Tetzlaff in May. Mr. Andsnes and the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra can also be heard this spring playing Mozart’s piano concertos Nos. 17 and 20 on a new recording from EMI Classics. Their previous Mozart recording, featuring the concertos Nos. 9 and 18, was a worldwide bestseller and selected by the New York Times as one of the Best CDs of 2004.

This fall, Virgin Classics releases a recording of piano quintets by Brahms and Schumann pairing Mr. Andsnes with the Artemis Quartet. Mr. Andsnes’s previous recording for EMI Classics is the fourth and final release in a Schubert series with tenor Ian Bostridge; Mr. Andsnes’s performances of the composer’s final three great sonatas, taken from these recordings, will also be issued in a two-CD set in 2008. The New York Times called his performance of the late C-minor sonata on the disc “an elegant, sensitive and exciting account.” The New York Times listed the duo’s recording of Schubert’s Winterreise among the Best CDs of 2004. On Horizons, which won a 2007 Classical Brit Award, Mr. Andsnes performs more than 20 short works he has played throughout his life, often as encores. A recording of Rachmaninoff’s First and Second piano concertos with the Berliner Philharmoniker under Antonio Pappano was named a Gramophone Editor’s Choice and won the 2006 Classical Brit Award. Leif Ove Andsnes’s wide-ranging discography includes sonatas by Haydn, Schubert, Chopin, and Schumann; a Liszt recital; Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1; and concertos by Mozart, Britten and Shostakovich. Mr. Andsnes has recorded exclusively for EMI Classics for more than a dozen years.

Mr. Andsnes is a frequent guest at such leading summer festivals as Aspen, Ravinia, Tanglewood, Verbier and New York’s Mostly Mozart, and he has performed at the celebrated Last Night of the Proms in London’s Royal Albert Hall. During the 2004–05 season, Carnegie Hall presented Mr. Andsnes as a Perspectives artist, the youngest performer to be so honored. He has been the subject of television programs including England’s South Bank Show.

Leif Ove Andsnes has received Norway’s most distinguished honor, Commander of the Royal Norwegian Order of St. Olav. In August 2007 he received the prestigious Peer Gynt Prize, awarded by members of parliament to honor personalities from Norway for their achievements in politics, sports and culture. Mr. Andsnes has also received the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Instrumentalist Award, the Gilmore Artist Award, and three Gramophone Awards—including the most recent one for his Grieg and Schumann piano concertos with the Berliner Philharmoniker and Mariss Jansons, and he has received numerous Grammy Award nominations. Saluting his many achievements, Vanity Fair named Andsnes one of the Best of the Best in 2005.

Mr. Andsnes was born in Karmøy, Norway, in 1970 and studied at the Bergen Music Conservatory under Czech professor Jiri Hlinka. Over the past decade he has also received invaluable advice from the Belgian piano teacher Jacques de Tiège, who, like Hlinka, has greatly influenced his style and philosophy of playing. Mr. Andsnes counts Dinu Lipatti, Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, Sviatoslav Richter, and Géza Anda among the pianists who have most inspired him. Mr. Andsnes currently resides in Copenhagen and Bergen, and also spends much time at his mountain home in the Hardanger area of Norway. He is also a professor at the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo.

Mr. Andsnes’s concert attire is graciously provided by Issey Miyake. Further information can be found at the artist’s web site, andsnes.com.