CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Till Fellner

Zankel Hall
Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 at 7:30 PM

Till Fellner, Piano

MOZART Rondo in A Minor, K. 511
SCHUMANN Fantasy in C Major, Op. 17
LISZT Légend No. 2: St. François de Paule marchant sur les flots, S. 175/2
HOLLIGER Elis, Three Night Pieces (1966 revision)
RAVEL Gaspard de la nuit

Encore:
LISZT Au Lac de Wallenstadt, S. 160

Sponsored by Ameriprise Financial

Program Notes:

By Robert Markow

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART Rondo in A Minor, K. 511
Born January 27, 1756, in Salzburg; died December 5, 1791, in Vienna.

Composed in 1787, Mozart’s Rondo in A Minor received its Carnegie Hall premiere on January 7, 1893, with Ignacy Jan Paderewski.

This Rondo finds Mozart in one of his most pensive and melancholic moods. It consists of a main subject in A minor embracing two episodes, the first in F major, the second in A major. Each episode retains its own rhythmic identity—the one in F major with continuous sixteenth notes, the one in A major with rapid triplet figuration, yet there is an underlying sense of unity throughout due to the pervasive rocking of the siciliano rhythm and frequent use of an ornamental turn (the first notes of the piece). The Rondo is both a masterpiece of aching beauty and a work of daring chromaticism that looks forward to Chopin.


ROBERT SCHUMANN Fantasy in C Major, Op. 17
Born June 8, 1810, in Zwickau; died July 29, 1856, in Endenich.

Composed in 1836–38, Schumann’s C-Major Fantasy received its first Carnegie Hall performance in Carnegie Recital Hall (now Zankel Hall) on April 24, 1891, with Leopold Godowsky.

Schumann’s Fantasy Op. 17 represents one of the towering landmarks of the 19th-century piano repertory. It is quintessentially music of the Romantic period—sprawling in form, passionate in character, utterly personal and unorthodox in conception. Bernard Jacobson calls it “perhaps the most fruitful blend of expansive thought and lyrical content [Schumann] ever achieved.” To Franz Liszt it was “a noble work, worthy of Beethoven.”

Schumann wrote this work during his “piano decade” (the 1830s). His original plan was to donate the proceeds from sales of the music to a fund for the erection of a Beethoven memorial in Bonn, but the project fell through. He at first called it a “grand sonata” and gave the subtitles “Ruins,” “Triumphal Arch” and “Ring of Stars” to each of the three movements. His publisher Kistner was not enthusiastic about the idea. Schumann thereupon changed the title to “Fantasie” and withdrew the subtitles, but the work was eventually published by another firm, Breitkopf und Härtel.

Schumann appended to this final version of the score an enigmatic verse by Friedrich Schlegel: “Through all the tones sounding in this colorful earth-dream, there emerges one ethereal tone for the person who listens in secret.” The reference is autobiographical. At the time Schumann began working on the Fantasy, the father of his beloved Clara Wieck had forbidden the two to meet or even to correspond. Thoroughly dejected, and for a time believing that he had lost Clara forever, Schumann found the only avenue of communication left open to him was through music. The “one ethereal tone” (or rather tones) in Schlegel’s verse became a quotation from Beethoven’s aptly named song cycle An die ferne Geliebte (“To the Distant Beloved”). This theme is quoted directly at the end of the first movement, but throughout the movement, beginning with the opening five-note descending figure in the right hand, there are numerous scattered allusions to it. The text of the song quoted runs thus: “Take them, then, these songs I sang you, songs of passion, songs of pain. Let them like an echo tender all our love call back again.”

Schumann wrote to Clara in 1838 that “I think the first movement is more impassioned than anything I have ever written—a deep lament for you.” Indeed, the opening bars of the Fantasy surge with drama and restlessness: over a foaming, turbulent left-hand figuration is heard a long, soulful outpouring of impassioned lyricism. The movement falls into three large sections corresponding roughly to the exposition with two main themes, development and recapitulation of standard sonata form. Extremes of emotion, from wild exuberance to deepest introspection, express the spiritual world to the fullest.

The second movement, in the “heroic” key of E-flat major, contains two closely intertwined ideas: a proud march theme and a rhythmic figure of alternating short and long notes. The final presentation of this rhythmic figure is one of the most fearsomely difficult passages in the entire piano repertory, with many rapid leaps to the extremes of the keyboard. The quieter central section of the movement is typically Schumannesque in its gently poetic musing, the presence of the melody in an inner voice, and the use of complex, syncopated rhythms.

The final movement evokes the spirit of the nocturne—dreamy, tender, a world without conflict. Biographer Joan Chissel sees it as “a profound benediction. Nothing in the earlier sonatas, or indeed any of [Schumann’s] previous works, springs from such deep places of the heart.” Twice the music rises to a magnificent climax and subsides. By the end, which has finally returned to C major after excursions to many foreign keys, the mood is one of quiet elation and serenity.


FRANZ LISZT Légende No. 2: St. François de Paule marchant sur les flots, S. 175
Born October 22, 1811, in Raiding, Hungary (today in Austria); died July 31, 1886, in Bayreuth, Germany.

Composed in 1863, Liszt’s Légende No. 2 received its first Carnegie Hall performance in Recital Hall (now Zankel Hall) on April 14, 1891, with Arthur Friedheim, piano.

Liszt’s two Legends are musical portraits of miraculous episodes in the lives of two saints named Francis. The first describes St. Francis of Assisi preaching to the birds, the second St. Francis of Paola (Liszt’s own patron saint) walking on the waters. Liszt owned a painting of the latter event by Eduard von Steinle, which he described as follows: “St. Francis is standing on the surging waters. . . . His cloak is spread out under his feet. One hand is raised towards the heavens, the other holds a live coal, symbol of the inward fire which glows in the breasts of all the disciples of Jesus Christ. His gaze is steadfastly fixed on the skies.” Lisztians generally regard this as one of the composer’s most extraordinary examples of musical scene painting.


HEINZ HOLLIGER Elis (Three Night Pieces)
Born May 21, 1939, in Langenthal (canton of Bern), Switzerland; now lives in Basel.

Holliger composed Elis in 1961 and revised the score in 1966. The first performance was given by Jürg Wyttenbach on January 18, 1962 in Basel. In 1964 Holliger prepared an orchestral version of the score, which Pierre Boulez conducted in its premiere in Stockholm that year. The piano version received its Carnegie Hall premiere on May 21, 1939.

Heinz Holliger wears three musical hats with equal distinction. His career began as an oboist, in which capacity he first played in the Basel Orchestral Society, then went on to tour the world as a soloist, make recordings, and reap a sheaf of awards. Already in his 20s, he was pursuing studies as a composer as well (his teachers included Sándor Veress and Pierre Boulez), and now has a sizable catalogue of works to his credit. Holliger is also renowned as a conductor, regularly leading the world’s major orchestras.

Holliger’s compositions are often inspired by poetic sources. Elis is one such work, composed at the age of 22. Elis Froebom was a 17th-century Swedish boy who took on mythlike qualities when he died in a mining accident on his wedding day. His perfectly preserved body was discovered decades later, while his bride had become old and shriveled. The subject appealed to the manic-depressive Austrian poet Georg Trakl (1887–1914), who himself died shockingly young of a drug overdose. Each of Holliger’s three short pieces is derived from a few lines from Trakl’s enigmatic Elis poems: I. “Elis, when the blackbird calls in the black woods, / This is your decline.” II. “Blue doves / Drink at night the icy sweat / Which runs from Elis’s crystal brow.” III. “A golden boat / Sways your heart, Elis, / In the lonely sky.”


MAURICE RAVEL Gaspard de la nuit
Born March 7, 1875, in Ciboure, Pyrénées-Atlantiques; died December 28, 1937, in Paris.

Composed in 1908, Gaspard de la nuit was premiered by pianist Ricardo Viñes on January 9, 1909, during a Société National concert at the Salle Érard in Paris. The first complete Carnegie Hall performance of Gaspard de la nuit took place in Chamber Music Hall (now Weill Recital Hall) on April 15, 1962, with Selma Mednikov, piano. The first performance at Carnegie Hall of any portion of Gaspard took place on April 6, 1912, with Harold Bauer, who performed “Ondine.”

Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit, celebrating its centennial this year, ranks as one of the most highly original, imaginative, evocative and technically difficult works in the piano repertory. Its composer made no bones about this surreal, hallucinatory music, describing it as “three romantic poems of transcendental virtuosity” in which he deliberately set out to surpass even Balakirev’s notorious Islamey in terms of sheer technical difficulty. Alfred Cortot called the composition “one of the most astonishing examples of instrumental ingenuity ever contrived.”Charles Rosen has called the second of the three pieces, “Le Gibet,” “an assault on the nerves of the listener, a creation of tension through insistence, like the Chinese water torture,” and Henri Gil-Marchex once enumerated 27 different kinds of touch in this one piece alone. Clearly, Ravel’s Gaspard is something special indeed!

Ravel’s inspiration to write Gaspard de la nuit derived from vivid and macabre poems by the French Romantic poet Aloysius Bertrand (1807–1841), to whose work Ravel was introduced by the pianist Ricardo Viñes, a fellow pupil at the Paris Conservatoire. Each of the three pieces is dedicated to a different musician, respectively Harold Bauer, Jean Marnold and Rudolph Ganz.

Ondine. Ondine is a beautiful, mischievous water sprite who tries to attract mortal men to her magical kingdom through seductive singing. Ravel portrays her in the rare key of C-sharp major (seven sharps!) with glistening, delicate, “water-music” as befits Bertrand’s description of “Ondine who skims over the drops of water that resonate on the diamond-shaped segments of your window illuminated by the dismal rays of the moon.”

Le gibet. A sinister atmosphere of desolation and ghostly terror pervades “Le gibet.” The dynamic markings never rise above mezzo-piano. In some of the eeriest sounds in all music, Ravel portrays a corpse hanging from a gibbet, swaying in the wind against a sky reddened by the setting sun. The implacable tolling of a distant bell, represented throughout by the piano’s persistent B-flat octaves, is set against a richly varied harmonic landscape. So pervasive is this tolling B-flat that “Le gibet” has been called “a fantasia on one note.”

Scarbo. No less eerie than “Le gibet,” “Scarbo” portrays the unpredictable, lightning-like appearances and disappearances of the malicious dwarf Scarbo, who changes his shape, size and color at will. The scintillating, hallucinatory effects require such technical dexterity as to have earned Gaspard an almost mythic status among pianists.

Copyright © 2008 by The Carnegie Hall Corporation

Robert Markow writes program notes for orchestras and concert societies across North America; he is also a contributor to American Record Guide, Opera News, and Opera magazine.

Till Fellner, Piano
Born in Vienna, Till Fellner studied with Helene Sedo-Stadler before going on to study privately with Alfred Brendel, Meira Farkas, Oleg Maisenberg, and Claus-Christian Schuster. He first gained international recognition by winning first prize at the prestigious Clara Haskil International Competition in 1993.

Since then, Mr. Fellner has performed with many of the world’s most famous orchestras and has appeared in major concert halls and at important festivals in Europe, the US, and Japan. He has worked with many leading conductors including Claudio Abbado, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Christoph von Dohnányi, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Heinz Holliger, Marek Janowski, Sir Charles Mackerras, Sir Neville Marriner, Kent Nagano, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Leonard Slatkin, Claudius Traunfellner, Franz Welser-Möst, and Hans Zender. In the chamber music field he plays regularly with Heinrich Schiff and in a trio with Lisa Batiashvili and Adrian Brendel. In addition, he appears in lieder recitals with Mark Padmore.

Engagements last season included orchestra concerts in Montreal, Paris, Munich, London, Vienna, and Budapest under the baton of conductors such as Kent Nagano, Sylvain Cambreling, Philippe Jordan, Sir Neville Marriner, and Zoltán Kocsis. Additional highlights included a duo tour with Heinrich Schiff and recitals throughout Europe, North America, and Japan.

Mr. Fellner’s engagements in the current season include performances with the Orchestre National de France with Kurt Masur, the Philharmonia Orchestra in London under Sir Charles Mackerras, and the Munich Philharmonic and Lothar Zagrosek. A long-term project performing and recording all of Beethoven’s piano concertos with Kent Nagano and the Montréal Symphony will start at the end of May 2008. In addition, Mr. Fellner performs solo recitals in many European and North American cities; chamber music concerts with Viviane Hagner, Lisa Batiashvili, and Adrian Brendel; and lieder recitals with Mark Padmore.

Beginning in fall 2008, Mr. Fellner will perform a complete cycle of Beethoven’s piano sonatas in seven concerts over 2 seasons. The complete cycle will be presented in New York, Tokyo, London, and Vienna, among other cities.

Till Fellner has recorded numerous CDs; his latest release is Book I of Bach’s Well-Tempered Klavier (ECM Records).