JUNE 27 JOYCE YANG, PIANO
Friday, 8:00pm
Spanish Courtyard
Tickets: $35.00, $25.00
Twenty-one year old Joyce Yang, the 2005 Van Cliburn Competition silver medalist, made her Caramoor debut with a very personal selection of works from the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.
ABOUT THE MUSIC
Lowell Liebermann
b. 1961
Gargoyles, Op. 29
Lowell Lieberman was born in New York City, grew up there, and still lives there. He began piano studies at age eight and formal composition studies at fourteen. A year later he made his performing debut at Carnegie Recital Hall—playing his own Piano Sonata, Opus 1. He attended The Juilliard School, where he earned bachelor's, master's, and the Doctor of Musical Arts degrees (the last in 1987). While at Juilliard he continued his piano studies with Jacob Lateiner while studying composition with David Diamond and Vincent Persichetti. He also studied conducting with Laszlo Halasz and served as assistant conductor for the Nassau Lyric Opera Company.
Mr. Liebermann has been one of the most prolific composers of his generation, and one of the most frequently commissioned and performed. Moreover, musicians who have premiered one work of his have often come back to premiere the next in the same genre, a clear sign that he composed music that the soloists themselves found satisfying. Pianist Stephen Hough, for example, premiered both his first and second piano concertos in 1988 and 1992 (the Baltimore Sun called the latter work "perhaps the best piece in the genre since Samuel Barber's Concerto"); both concertos have been recorded by Hough, under the composer's direction with the BBC Scottish Orchestra, on Hyperion. Flutist James Galway premiered his Flute Concerto in 1992 and his Concerto for Flute, Harp, and Orchestra (a genre created by Mozart) in 1995. In May of 1996 his opera The Picture of Dorian Gray, based on the novel of Oscar Wilde, had a very successful premiere in Monte Carlo—the first opera by an American composer to be performed there.
His own instrument, the piano, naturally appears with great frequency in his work, as a solo instrument, with orchestra, or in a chamber ensemble. Gargoyles, a series of four etudes for piano solo, is a work from the composer's twenties that has been particularly successful; it is one of the most frequently recorded piano compositions of the last half century.
Commissioned by the Tcherepnin Society, Gargoyles was composed in 1989 and premiered by Eric Himey at Alice Tully Hall in New York on October 14 that year. The title naturally conjures up visual images of Medieval churches and other old buildings, which were decorated, especially along the roof peak and eaves with ornate, bizarre carvings of monsters whose presence on the architectural structure was thought in some circles to protect the building and its inhabitant from evil spirits.
Mr. Liebermann's gargoyles are challenging works for the advanced pianist, calling upon great reserves of technique and expression in dark, tense, challenging moods.
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Johannes Brahms
1833-1897
Klavierstücke, Op. 119
In his early years Brahms was active as a concert pianist and was concerned, in part, to create works of virtuosic flair and power, which could show off his prodigious keyboard skills (though at the same time they paid knowing homage to the masters of the past in a way far beyond the abilities of most virtuoso pianist-composers). But after completing his Variations on a Theme of Paganini, he composed no more solo piano works for fifteen years. In that time he also largely gave up appearing as a pianist, certainly not as a highly touted virtuoso whose principal claim to fame was digital dexterity. The two sets of piano works that he published in 1879-80—the eight Klavierstücke, Opus 76, and two Rhapsodies, Opus 79—were the first in a series of "philosophical miniatures," as one Brahms scholar calls them, relatively small works which are nonetheless major expressions of a keen musical mind, exploring new subtleties, making fewer and fewer notes mean more and more. He continued in this vein in four more sets comprising twenty short pieces—Opus 116, 117, 118, and 119—written in 1892-93.
When Brahms wrote of these pieces to Clara Schumann, he described the opening Intermezzo in B minor as "a gray pearl," adding "Do you know them? They look as if they were veiled, and are very precious." What Brahms calls the "gray" quality comes from the ambiguous harmonies that grow out of chains of descending thirds that are a special feature of this piece, suggesting one harmony, then (as new notes follow) suggesting another.
The second Intermezzo, in E minor, is built on a dactylic rhythmic figure that progressively develops and transforms itself into a middle section that is a graceful waltz. The main material returns, but a ghostly hint of the waltz signs off at the end. The third Intermezzo is shorter, with a cheerful character that pervades it to the ending flourish.
The last piece is Brahms's final Rhapsody, shorter than any of his earlier rhapsodies, but with the same muscular feeling of narrative progression. The main theme is an assertive idea in a heroic E-flat, cast at the beginning in five-bar phrases that Brahms thought of as "Hungarian." A minor-key passage with strong triplets forms the principal contrast, followed by a decorative grazioso passage with arpeggios and grace notes. After another statement return to the minor-key triplet passage, Brahms gradually approaches the main theme again through various allusions to its elements, finally breaking out in brief but heroic climactic statement.
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Carl Vine
b. 1954
Piano Sonata No. 1
Australian composer Carl Vine started his musical life studying the cornet, then switched to piano and organ. He took degrees in physics and music, afterwards working as a pianist and as a sound engineer. By the time he was twenty-one, he was working as a pianist for the Sydney Dance Company, and two years later he composed the first of many scores for dance pieces.
Gradually the range of his work has extended to many genres (including four symphonies and a large amount of diverse chamber music). As a pianist, he has written often for his own instrument. His 1990 Piano Sonata No. 1, inspired by the 1945 Elliott Carter sonata, has been recorded half a dozen times already, choreographed, and hailed as the most important keyboard sonata since Carter’s own.
Not surprisingly for a composer long active with dance companies, Vine’s music makes exceptionally vivid use of rhythm. The approach that links his piano sonata to Carter’s is its two-movement plan beginning with a slow movement, then moving to a fast movement. But it is more complex than that, because in both movements there are many layers of activity that generate very complex cross rhythms. The “narrative” of the piece grows from mysterious darkness at the opening that grows to a brilliantly virtuosic close. One of the composer’s main concerns in the work—drawn from Carter’s approach in his sonata—is the interrelationship of diverse tempi, which, in sounding against one another tie the piece together.
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Johann Sebastian Bach
1685-1750
Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue in D minor, BWV 903
It was probably toward the end of the Weimar period (1714-1717), when he was frequently active as a performer, that Bach composed five large and virtuosic fugues, each paired with an introductory prelude. Dating is difficult, however, if only because Bach may well have kept the piece to himself for some years, precisely to display his performing abilities, before allowing his students to copy it, and he may well have revised it more than once during that time. At all events, the first of these virtuosic fugues is Bach’s single best-known keyboard piece outside the great collections. It may actually be a written-down version of the kind of improvisation that Bach carried off so brilliantly, pairing up the free form of the fantasy with the strictness of the fugue, and both of unprecedented expressive and harmonic complexity.
Certain works of Bach’s positively require the tuning system that we take for granted as natural in modern pianos: a “tempered” system in which all twelve semitones in the octave are equal in size. Musicians in Bach’s day were intensely aware that this was a subtle falsification of the natural overtone series used since time immemorial as the basis of tuning. Older music could avoid the question because it simply did not exploit wide-ranging harmonies or unusual keys, so that natural tunings, with pure fifths and thirds that make up the basic chords of the home key and closely related keys would work perfectly well. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, if it were to be played at a single sitting (which would never have happened in his day) required subtle adjustments to the tuning so that each of the keys would be very slightly “mistuned” by the same degree, yet all of them would sound passably correct.
But the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue was even more of a challenge, because within the confines of a single piece Bach covers almost the entire harmonic universe, and the instrument must be tuned in such a way that widely diverse keys will sound well. To Bach’s early biographer Forkel, the work was “unique, and never had its like.” Certainly there are many other fantasy-and-fugue combinations in Bach’s output, combining a free-form movement with one that follows a strict contrapuntal procedure. But in both parts of this work, Bach astonishes us with a panache and freedom and harmonic daring that even he never again approached. The Fantasy begins in a familiar style for such works, essentially unfolding a series of chords broken into scales and arpeggios, though the choice of chords is exceptionally rich. Before long we barely retain any sense of the home key, and by the time Bach reaches the dominant and starts the second phase of the fantasy, we may well feel hopelessly lost. At midpoint, Bach shifts to a “recitative” style, with irregular melodic phrases, as if set to the kind of narrative text that links arias in a Baroque opera, though here, of course, there is no text. And here the harmonic exploration goes even further before finally returning to the tonic, D minor.
Following the hair-raising harmonic adventures of the Fantasy, the Fugue is a return to a far more familiar world. It is, to be sure, based on a highly chromatic theme, one that Bach treats with singular freedom, in varied forms. Yet is has a clear sense of tonal design; its most unusual keys appear in the center, where they function like a distant goal reached in the course of a long walk that ultimately returns home. Many episodes call for a high degree of virtuosity on the part of the performer. For all its daring and difficulty, the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue was very popular with performers in Bach=s day and for the rest of the century, a fact attested to by the large number of surviving manuscript copies. Clearly they saw it as a rare musical challenge that they had to conquer.
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Robert Schumann
1810-1856
Carnaval, Op. 9, Scènes mignonnes sur quatre notes
More than a century and a half after the fact, it is easy to forget how essentially radical Robert Schumann’s early piano music seemed to both performers and audiences in the 1830s. Many of his pieces consisted of a string of miniatures of wildly varying styles and disconcertingly sudden changes of mood, often conceived with a literary program indicated by means of a quotation that many listeners did not even comprehend, or labeled with names like Florestan and Eusebius, representing aspects of Schumann’s own personality.
Even the composer’s fiancée and greatest musical supporter, Clara Wieck, finally implored him (in a letter of April 4, 1839) to try “for once” to write a piece that audiences could understand, “something without titles, something that is a complete, coherent piece not too long and not too short? I would so love to have something of yours to play in concerts, something written for an audience. Admittedly that is degrading for a genius, but politics demands it now.”
This letter comes from nearly five years after the composition of Carnaval, but Clara could have been referring to that work specifically, among others. It is striking, in fact, how little Schumann composed of the kind of virtuoso music that was making reputations in the 1830s—wildly decorated sets of variations on popular operatic arias, fantasies, capriccios, rondos, none of the “easy listening” music that made no real demands on the audience (though often requiring great dexterity from the performer). In Schumann’s view, this was music of the “philistines,” not the lovers of high art. He created an imaginary “League of David” (Davidsbund) named after the Biblical hero who slew the greatest of the Philistines, as a way of expressing his ideals.
On July 2, 1834, Schumann confided to his mother that he had been captivated with a young piano student named Ernestine von Fricken, who was “everything I might wish a wife to be.” This feeling did not last long, and eventually he jilted her, but in the meantime she inspired one of his earliest keyboard masterpieces. Ernestine had been born in the town of Asch, and Schumann (who was much interested in ciphers) realized that the four letters in the place name were also the four letters in his last name that could be expressed in musical notation as A, E-flat, C, B-natural (using the German names for the second and fourth notes; or, if parsed As-C-H, it would be A-flat, C, B natural). So he conceived the idea of using these pitches as the basis of a series of “variations.” But these are not the decorative variations that were so popular at the time, overlaying new and more virtuosic figures on a familiar base pattern. Rather they are “characteristic” variations, which use the basic pitches in a very free way to express different “characters”—but which, in the 1830s, seemed very bizarre and incomprehensible to listeners.
Schumann thought of the set as a kind of carnival celebration in which masked figures from the commedia dell’arte (Pierrot, Harlequin, Pantalon, and Columbine) make their appearance, to be joined by real-life composers (Chopin and Paganini), two of the women in Schumann’s life (“Estrella” is the Ernestine who inspired the set, “Chiara” is Clara Wieck, who was to become his wife), aspects of Schumann’s own personality (“Florestan”—named after the hero of Beethoven’s Fidelio—represents the heroic artist standing firm in his beliefs, “Eusebius” the inner-directed, sensitive creator) . There is even one mysterious movement, Sphinxes, in which Schumann presents three possible arrangements of the basic notes (SCHA, As-C-H, and ASCH) unadorned in extremely long notes, and apparently not intended to be played. Small wonder that listeners found the work confusing, incomprehensible, however brilliantly crafted the various movements were. The titles seemed to imply some kind of narrative (including the appearance of a Coquette, who demands a reply [Replique]), and later on there is an avowal (Aveu) of something—but of what, and to whom? And finally a heroic march (though, provocatively, in ¾ time!) of Schumann’s cohorts in the Davidsbund against the Philistines.
What does it all mean? Schumann’s original title (in German) was “Carnival: Jests on Four Notes,” suggesting that the whole thing was a kind of sport. But he chose to publish it with a French title, “Carnival: Charming little scenes on four notes,” which emphasized the presence of the thematic “atoms” at the basis of each number. The result is an endlessly varied composition with many different kinds of music linked by a slender thread, balanced by contrasts from one movement to another, each wonderfully immediate in its expression to the listener.
© Steven Ledbetter (www.stevenledbetter.com)
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ABOUT THE ARTIST
Joyce Yang, piano ~ In June 2005, at nineteen years of age, Joyce Yang was awarded the silver medal at the Twelfth Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. The prize package included $20,000, three years of U.S. concert engagements, and a compact disc recording on the harmonia mundi usa label. The youngest of the Cliburn Competition’s participants, she was the recipient of both the Steven De Groote Memorial Award for the Best Performance of Chamber Music, as well as the Beverley Taylor Smith Award for the Best Performance of a New Work. Of her spectacular finish at one of the world’s most prestigious showcases for young talent, she told reporters, “I’m still dreaming.” There is no doubt that Joyce captured the hearts of all who heard her!
The dream continued in summer 2006 as Joyce Yang appeared with the Philadelphia Orchestra at the Mann Center, the Chicago Symphony at the Ravinia Festival, the Aspen Symphony, and she opened the season of the National Symphony at the Kennedy Center. In November 2006, Joyce Yang made her New York Philharmonic debut with Lorin Maazel in Avery Fisher Hall, preceded by concerts with them in Korea. She appeared with them again in June 2007 in New York City and in July 2007 in Vail, CO, and is slated for June 2008 and the 2008/2009 season. Her 2006-2007 season also included engagements with the symphonies of Houston, Indianapolis, Fort Worth, Colorado, Kansas City, Colorado Springs, and Orlando, as well as numerous recitals throughout North America and in Europe, including appearances at the Kennedy Center for the Washington Performing Arts Society.
Joyce Yang continues to captivate audiences and colleagues with her warm and generous personality, combined with musicianship that belies her age. Upcoming engagements include recitals in Chicago presented by the Chicago Symphony, the Tonhalle in Zurich, Ft. Worth for the Van Cliburn Foundation, Seoul, Korea and six recitals in Hawaii. She appears with no fewer than fifteen orchestras throughout North America as well as continues her collaboration with the Takacs Quartet.
Born in Seoul, Korea, Joyce received her first piano lessons at age four from her aunt. She quickly took to the instrument, which she received as a birthday present, and over the next few years won several national piano competitions in Korea. By age ten she had entered the Korean National Conservatory, and subsequently made a number of concerto and recital appearances in Seoul and Taejon. In 1997, Joyce moved to the United States to begin studies at the pre-college division of the Julliard School of Music in New York.
During her first year at Julliard, she won its Pre-College Division Concerto Competition, resulting in a performance of the Haydn Concerto in D major with the Julliard Pre-College Chamber Orchestra. In April 1999, she was invited to perform at a benefit concert with the Julliard Orchestra, conducted by Leonard Slatkin. Winning at the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Greenfield Competition led to a performance of the Prokofiev Piano Concerto No. 3 with the Philadelphia Orchestra when she was just twelve.
Joyce Yang is featured in In the Heart of Music, the film documentary about the 2005 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. Her debut disc distributed by harmonia mundi usa includes live performances of works by Bach, Liszt, Scarlatti, and the Australian composer Carl Vine. She currently resides in New York City where she attends the Julliard School as a student of Dr. Yohaved Kaplinsky.
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