Debussy: "Estampes", for piano

We know that Spanish folklore had a great influence on many of the French composers of the second half of the 19th century. The presence of Granados, Albéniz, or De Falla in Paris at the time is one of the factors. However, the folklore that attracted the French was not always peninsular. It could come from the colonies. From Cuba, for example. It is the case of the "habanera", a dance and rhythm with origin in Havana to which an extensive list of authors, headed by Georges Bizet (the author of the most famous one), made use of. He'll be followed by Massenet, Chabrier, Lalo, Saint-Saëns, Fauré, Ravel... The list goes on.

Of course, Claude Debussy could not be missing from the count. His 1903 piano triptych, Estampes, gained popularity thanks to a second movement of sensual harmony, a habanera entitled "Afternoon in Granada".

In his forties, the author of "Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune" was enjoying the success of his first opera, Pelléas et Melisande. The possibility of a second lyric work seemed like a natural continuation, but the idea gradually lost momentum as the maestro turned his attention to writing for the piano. Among the production of that year, 1903, stands out what was to be Debussy's first great piano work.

C. Debussy (1862 - 1918)

Estampes, for piano
Premiered in January 1904 by his friend Ricardo Viñes at the Salle Erard of the Société Nationale de Musique, this is a collection of three short pieces for piano: Pagodes (a piece of Javanese music), the habanera already mentioned, and Jardins sous la pluie (as if a child were watching the rain fall behind the glass of a window).

A new style
In less than fifteen minutes in length, Debussy proclaims here a new style, signaling the birth of a more intimate and delicate piano technique than was in vogue, a technique that does not require virtuoso feats, rather on the contrary, he sees in the piano a friendly factory of dreams and a companion for imaginary journeys.
Claude Debussy never traveled to Spain. But he could have imagined an afternoon in Granada...

Sections:
00:00  Pagodes. Modérément animé
05:55  La soirée dans Grenade. Habanera movement
11:14  Gardens under the rain. Net et vif

The rendition is by brilliant Russian pianist Anna Zassimova.

Chopin, Black Keys Étude - 9 performers

Chopin was not known for openly admiring his fellow pianists. But neither did he ever boast about his own work. Thus, in reporting to his friend Fontana on the finale of the Funeral Sonata, in 1839, he pointed out quite simply that in the last movement "the left hand chats with the right hand". Such "chattering" is today regarded as a model of atonality in its embryonic state.

Ten years earlier, he had written to another friend that he would love playing for him some "exercises" he had just composed. They are three pieces that would carry the numbers 1, 2, and 5 in the series of 12 Études Opus 10, published in Paris in 1833 with a dedication "to my friend Franz Liszt".

In 1829, Chopin was 19 years old. He was still in Warsaw, attending his third year of the conservatory. Two years earlier his younger sister Emilia had died, presumably of tuberculosis or something similar. Following this sad event, the family moved house. On the lower floors sleep his two sisters (our author is the second child). Frédérick was assigned the attic. And there he drove his old piano. There he dreams and composes his "exercises".

Etude No 5, opus 10
It is also known as the Etude "of the black keys", composed in G flat major. The demands are high. In addition to the respected and renowned "thumb pass" over the black keys, the performer must achieve a "pearly" performance in speed, with rapid but also light hand movements.

The very short etude lasts less than two minutes.
The video presented here is based on the performances of nine pianists, most of them Russian. There is something for everyone.

The performers are:
00:06  Stanislav Bunin, Russian
01:57  Boris Berezovsky, Russian
03:42  Fujiko Hemming, Swedish
05:27  Lang Lang, Chinese
06:55  Samson François, French (now deceased)
08:41  Vladimir Ashkenazy, Russian
10:21  Valentina Lisitsa, Ukraine
12:00  Lukas Geniušas, Russian
13:52  György Cziffra, Hungarian (dead 1994)

P. I. Tchaikovsky, "Francesca da Rimini", symphonic poem

Francesca da Rimini, an Italian noblewoman who lived in the 13th century, was the daughter of Guido da Polenta, governor of Ravenna at the time. Long at odds with the Malatesta family of Rimini, Prince Guido wanted to secure a future peace by marrying Francesca to Giovanni Malatesta, the eldest son of his adversary, a brave but handicapped boy.
It was not a good idea. Giovanni had a brother, Paolo, a good-looking guy and healthy in both his legs... Yes, for Giovanni was lame.
Paolo was married, but as soon as Francesca arrived in Rimini he fell in love with her, and Francesca with him. They became lovers. When Giovanni, the lame, found out about the relationship, he murdered them both.
Francesca da Rimini was only twenty-five years old.

The crime caused an enormous commotion in the region. And the tragic story instantly and later inspired literary works, operas, and symphonic poems on a level unthinkable today. Dante Alighieri, a contemporary of Francesca and Paolo, immortalized the story in Canto V of The Divine Comedy: Francesca and Paolo are in Hell (as expected) although Dante's gaze is compassionate. Forbidden love and passion can also be the subject of art. The same thought Tchaikovsky who, curiously (or not so much), felt identified with the tragic affair of illicit love, six hundred years later.

A failed opera turns into a successful symphonic poem
The story intrigued Pyotr Tchaikovsky to no end, and when a friend, also a literary critic, proposed to him, in 1876, to compose an opera based on the fatal episode recreated by Dante, he immediately set to work. But the subsequent plans failed and the opera was never completed. His brother Modesto then suggested to Piotr the composition of a symphonic poem with the material sketched for the failed opera.

By that time, Antonina Milyukova had already written Tchaikovsky a good number of letters, but it was still a year before the master decided, clumsily, to marry her in order to silence the doubts about his sexual orientation. Tchaikovsky did not wish for Francesca's fate, and opted for "lawful" love, even if it was not part of his nature.

"Francesca da Rimini", symphonic poem, in E minor, op 32 (Fantasie d'aprés Dante)
Dedicated to a friend and former student, the work was composed in just three weeks in the summer of 1876, in Moscow, after the composer returned from a visit to Beirut to listen to Wagner's "musical dramas".
It premiered in Moscow in February of the following year, under the direction of Nicolas Rubinstein, in a concert scheduled by the Russian Musical Society.

Sections
Although the work is in a single movement lasting approximately 25 minutes, it is customary to distinguish in it an introduction and three sections, marked andante lugubre, allegro vivo, andante cantabile non troppo, and allegro vivo. As in any programmatic work, each of them is related to the story that is being "told", in this case, the lovers' torments in their afterlife, in Hell.

The Russian Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of Russian conductor Mark Gorenstein.

Shostakovich, the pianist - "Dances of the Dolls"

Like most illustrious composers, Dmitri Shostakovich was a remarkable pianist. We know that he entered the Petrograd Conservatory to study piano at the age of thirteen and that he graduated there in 1926 with the composition of a symphonic work (as it was to be, his enthusiastically received First Symphony). But around the same time, the young pianist and future composer were earning some money as an accompanist for silent films. And in 1927 (the composer was 21 years old), he ventured to participate in the first Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw. He did not win, but he reached the finals, obtaining a worthy Honorable Mention.

Had he won, a career as a virtuoso performer would have shaped history differently. Possibly we would not know the Fifth Symphony or the Seventh (Leningrad Symphony). Neither his chamber music nor his extensive catalog of music for the cinema (where the soundtrack of the Soviet "Hamlet", from 1963, stands out without parallel).

He did not win, but an honorable mention in Warsaw was no mean feat. Despite his ultimate dedication to composition, as a performer, Shostakovich did not stop appearing in public until an advanced age, preferably with his own works.

Shostakovich, at 25
(1906 - 1975)

Dances of the Dolls
However, the music he composed for piano only occupies a small portion of his entire oeuvre, although the 24 Preludes, from 1932, and the 24 Preludes and Fugues, from 1950, stand out among them.
On a notoriously lesser level, the suite of short pieces that the composer called Dances of the Dolls, stands out for its simple charm. It's a compilation of works taken from his ballet suites, which at the same time were taken from ballets, from his music for the cinema, or from incidental music for various works.

Compiled in 1953, the little suite consists of the following seven charming miniatures:

0:00   Lyric Waltz
1:24   Gavotte
2:25   Romance
4:36   Polka
5:48   Waltz - Joke
8:06   Hurdy - gurdy
8:34   Dance

The rendition is by the Russian artist Dmitry Masleev.

Maurice Ravel, "Spanish Rhapsody"

Ravel, an outsider?
Between 1900 and 1905, Maurice Ravel completed five attempts to win the Prix de Rome. The coveted prize rewarded the chosen composer with a four-year stay in Rome. None succeeded, and such a number of unsuccessful attempts only strengthened the thirty-year-old composer's anti-academic stance, favoring a certain outsider status that the composer would maintain in the musical Paris of those years.
The son of a Swiss father and a Basque mother, in 1907 Ravel made evident his closeness to his maternal heritage by giving life in the same year to two major works: his first opera, L'heure espagnole, and his first great work for orchestra, the Spanish Rhapsody.

The work has its genesis in a proverbial habanera for two pianos composed much earlier, in 1895, by a twenty-year-old Ravel, and warmly greeted by Claude Debussy, who also had his own fascination with Spain. Never published as an independent piece, in 1907 Ravel joined to the habanera a restful Prelude and two other dances: a Malagueña and a lively "feria" of carnival spirit, to form a symphonic suite of four sections.
The first version of the work was written for two pianos, and its orchestration was completed shortly before its premiere on March 15, 1908, at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris.

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)

A small-scale scandal
The premiere was attended by friends and students of Ravel, who provided the necessary irreverence on a stage characterized by high prices and comfortable stalls. Ravel's admirers, naturally,
filled the gallery.

They were the ones who, from the heights, demanded, loudly, that the "Malagueña" be encored so that the gentlemen on the second floor could "understand" it. It was one of the first riots of the Parisian public. (In 1913 the most famous of them will take place: the reception of The Rite of Spring, by Stravinski).

Movements
As already mentioned, the work is in four movements or sections:

00       Prélude à la nuit - trés moderé
05:23  Malaguena - Assez vif
07:55  Habanera - Assez lent et d'un rythme las
10:57  Fair - Assez animé

DePaul Symphony Orchestra Youth Orchestra, under the baton of American conductor Cliff Colnot.