Part of: Distinctive Debuts
Distinctive Debuts is supported by endowment gifts from The Lizabeth and Frank Newman Charitable Foundation and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.
Although most concertgoers more readily associate Haydn with symphonies and string quartets than keyboard music, he wrote dozens of masterful sonatas, variations, and other works for both harpsichord and piano. Composed in 1776, the B-Minor Sonata was earmarked for the older instrument, but the music’s passionate character and vividly dramatic contrasts are unmistakably pianistic.
The second of Chopin’s three piano sonatas is built around the famous funeral march that serves as its slow movement. From the volatile first movement to the brief, etude-like finale, the Sonata in B-flat Minor enacts a struggle between discordant and ultimately irreconcilable forces. Even Schumann, one of Chopin’s earliest and most loyal supporters, found the work’s enigmatic message hard to fathom.
Equally renowned as a composer and pianist, Rachmaninoff used the theme-and-variation form as a vehicle for displaying both his compositional ingenuity and his virtuoso technique. Variations on a Theme of Corelli, written in 1931 and based on a popular Baroque chord progression known as the “folia,” anticipates his dazzlingly inventive Paganini Variations, composed in 1934 for piano and orchestra.
A seminal figure in the Romantic movement, Liszt was also a musical visionary whose works prefigured many of the major compositional developments of the 20th century. His vast catalog includes some thousand works in many genres, but he is best known for his brilliantly virtuosic and richly poetic piano music. The introspective lyricism of the Consolation in D-flat Major contrasts with the bravura character of the Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2.
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