Part of: Great Artists II
Rachmaninoff modeled his solo piano preludes on Chopin’s contribution to the genre. Dating from the first decade of the 20th century, the preludes of Rachmaninoff’s Op. 23 and Op. 32 display his trademark blend of Russian-flavored lyricism and dazzling virtuosity. The later Op. 39 Études-tableaux (Pictorial Etudes) are conceived on a larger and more complex scale.
Scriabin began his career as a Romantic composer-pianist in the Lisztian mold and ended it as a proto-Modernist. The last of his 10 piano sonatas is suffused with an aura of otherworldliness and caprice, in keeping with the improvisational quality that a contemporary critic detected in his playing: “It seemed as if he was creating a piece that you know well from a printed score right there on the stage in front of the piano.”
Insatiably curious and constitutionally incapable of falling into a rut, Hungarian composer György Ligeti continually reinvented his musical language over the course of his life. He once said that “all cultures, indeed the whole wide world is the material of art!” Ligeti’s adventurous exploration of rhythms, harmonies, and textures is evident in the three short, technically demanding etudes we hear on this evening’s program.
Prokofiev composed his three so-called “war sonatas,” nos. 6–8, more or less simultaneously between 1939 and 1944. All three works were marked by his experience of the Soviet Union’s “Great Patriotic War,” but the Sonata in B-flat Major is far from militaristic in spirit. The dreamily romantic character of the first two movements may reflect the composer’s love for Mira Mendelson, the ambitious young writer who would become his second wife in 1948.
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