Chopin, Waltz in A flat, Op 42

In the summer of 1840, the singular family formed by Chopin, the writer George Sand and her children, Solange and Maurice, could not repeat what had happened the previous year when they packed their belongings and left to enjoy three months of well-deserved rest in the summer house that Sand kept in Nohant, 200 km south of Paris. This time there was no budget, since the last work of the tireless and prolific writer had turned out to be a failure, and there was no way to pay for the three-month stay at the summer house, at four thousand francs a month, not counting travel expenses.

Summer in Paris
So they remained in Paris. George Sand would edit and rewrite her works, and Chopin, who had already begun to get used to composing only in Nohant, would have to readjust his routine and work in Paris during the summer. Otherwise, he had no pupils during those months. And despite the unusual circumstances, 1840 was a fruitful year, a year of uninterrupted work at 16 Rue Pigalle. For example, the Fantasia in F minor, and the sinuous Waltz in A flat, opus 42, published that same year without a dedication, date from that date.

Waltz in A flat, opus 42
Robert Schumann, an enthusiastic admirer of Chopin and who had already spoken highly of the Etude opus 25 No. 1, wrote of this waltz that "if it were ever to be danced, only the countesses would have to do it". We do not understand what he really meant, perhaps that it required extreme elegance to do so.
The superimposition of a binary rhythm in the right hand and a ternary rhythm in the left hand in the main theme, together with the speed here infused by Russian pianist Boris Berezovsky, make the dance impracticable even for the countesses. A scintillating coda (2:37) brings the little piece to a close, crowned by vigorous unison notes in the low register.

György Ligeti, Two Études for piano

György Ligeti, one of the most important avant-garde composers in the second half of the 20th century, widely known after Stanley Kubrick included excerpts of his work in the soundtrack of the film 2001 Space Odyssey, began his musical career by simply writing a waltz. He was 14 years old and had recently begun his first piano lessons in a small town in the Transylvania region of Romania.
The Second World War would interrupt his studies.

The postwar period
But he survived the holocaust (his father and brother did not). After the war, Ligeti will have to face the new authorities and try to create a new post-war musical language immersed in a society living in isolation from modern Western trends. After the crushing of the Hungarian revolution of 1956, he fled to the West, settling in Vienna. There he met Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez.

Experiments

György Ligeti (1923 - 2006)

But the experiments of the European avant-garde leaders rather disorient him. He had always been somewhat skeptical of electronic music and also of dodecaphonism. After three years in the Cologne circle, he abandoned the electronic trend to study an intricate rhythmic approach proposed by the Mexican composer of American origin, Conlon Nancarrow.

Études for piano

From the seventies onwards, Ligeti added to his search an interest in the rhythmic aspects of African music. In the following decades his work will see an accentuated emphasis on polyrhythm, leading him to propose very complex rhythmic structures. An example of this is his trilogy Études pour piano, three books each containing from six to eight études written between 1985 and 2001. They abound in influences as varied as gamelan, African polyrhythms, Béla Bártok, Nancarrow of course, and even reveal a debt to the American jazz pianist Bill Evans.

Chinese pianist Yuja Wang offers us the Étude No. 4, Fanfares, from Book I, and the Étude No. 4, Der Zauberlehrling (The Sorcerer's Apprentice) from Book II. 

Strauss / Grünfeld, "Soirée de Vienne"

Unlike their contemporaries and fellow musicians in much of Western Europe, the pianist and composer Alfred Grünfeld and his brother Heinrich, a cellist, were not sent by their parents to study law or to pursue a career in arms. On the contrary, from a very early age their audacious parents – the father, a leather merchant – raised them to develop an adult life as renowned professional musicians. It will be the older brother, Alfred, who will reap the greatest successes.

Alfred Grünfeld, pianist
Born in Prague in 1852, he was just over ten years old when he was sent to Berlin to study piano. Remarkably gifted, at 21 he was already settled in Vienna, developing a successful career as a piano teacher and concert pianist in the European musical capital of the time, where he remained until the end of his days, delighting Viennese audiences with his slightly syrupy, if very novel, piano transcriptions of the waltzes of Johann Strauss Jr.

Alfred Grünfeld (1852 - 1924)

A recording pioneer, in 1899
Also the author of a couple of operettas that did not stand the test of time, Grünfeld was the first major professional pianist to make recordings, the first of them in 1899 for the nascent Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft label. By 1914, he had made more than a hundred.

But as a composer – or rather an arranger – he is remembered today mainly for his Strauss transcriptions, which from time to time some intrepid pianist gives as an encore at the end of a slightly modern program, as compensation.

Soirée de Vienne
In Evgeny Kissin's version, one of Grünfeld's greatest successes is presented here, a paraphrase of Viennese waltzes entitled "Soirée de Vienne", a highly technically demanding piece. Grünfeld was a minor composer, of course, but as a performer, he must have been an outstanding pianist.

Mussorgsky, Pictures at an Exhibition

Less than a month it took the Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky to complete the piece that, discounting the opera Boris Godunov, would become his masterpiece, the suite for piano Pictures at an Exhibition.
Starting on June 2, 1874, before the end of the month he had finished his last tribute to his great friend and companion of gatherings and sorrows, the painter and architect Viktor Hartmann, who died of an aneurysm at the age of 39. Mussorgsky was devastated. From that moment on he could not stop thinking about the best way to pay his respects to his friend who had died overnight.

Exhibition of Hartmann's work
In January 1874, the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg decided to hold an exhibition of Hartmann's works as a formal tribute to the artist. About 400 works, including paintings, sketches, and some writings, were exhibited for two months. Mussorgsky attended the exhibition and, like any visitor, went through the paintings, stopping at a painting and then moving on to the adjacent one. There he realized that this was where the homage should lie: the music should describe precisely what he was doing at that moment, observe a picture carefully, relate it, and then move on to the next.

Descriptive music
Eleven pictures were chosen by Mussorgsky to construct the work, consisting of the musical description of the paintings linked by a melancholy piece he called "Promenade", with which the piece begins, and which will later be heard throughout the work, acting as a unifying element as the stroller moves from picture to picture.

Plenty worthy of being catalogued as "descriptive music", the work was initially called "Hartmann Suite", and was not published until 1886, five years after the composer's death, under the title we know it today.

Sections
Its parts, and the corresponding Hartmann paintings, are as follows:

00        Promenade
01:28  Gnomo / Promenade II  03:48
04:33  The Old Castle / Promenade III 08:35
09:03  Tuileries (Children's Quarrel after Games)
10:05  Cattle / Promenade IV 12:50
13:36  Ballet of Unhatched Chicks
14:52  "Samuel" Goldenberg and "Schmuÿle" (two paintings)
16:52  Limoges. The Market
18:20  Catacombs
19:50  With the Dead in a Dead Language
21:38  The Hut on Hen's Legs
25:16  The Great Gate of Kiev

Countless orchestrations of the work, or of some of its sections, have been made, including a popular arrangement by the British progressive rock band Emerson, Lake & Palmer, in 1971. The orchestral version that usually goes on stage is the one made in 1922 by Maurice Ravel, and to which, incidentally, the work owes much of its popularity.

However, in this opportunity, we present the original version for piano, which is also usually modified, according to the interpreter. The excellent Russian master Mikhail Pletnev offers us his rendition of Mussorgsky's original version, skipping Promenade V.

Chopin, Etude Opus 25 No. 11

In the nineteen years he lived in Paris, Frédérik Chopin gave only thirteen public concerts. He did not like crowds, and so he once remarked to his friend Franz Liszt, a year his junior, adding to his words an ambiguous hint of irony:

"I am not fitted to give concerts, the public intimidates me. I feel choked by its breath, paralyzed by its curious glances, struck dumb by all those strange faces. You are destined for that, because you do not conquer the public, but you have the necessary means to pummel them!"

Indeed, listening to Franz Liszt, the ladies would fade away, and end up slumped in their boxes, having lost all their composure. Chopin, on the contrary, was made to enrapture a small audience of no more than ten or twelve listeners, in the private salon of some lady of the high Parisian aristocracy, or at the home of a noble compatriot, exiled like him.

The intimate atmosphere

In these salons, also frequented by Liszt, Berlioz, Délacroix, poets, and other artists, Chopin was in his element. And if he was in the mood, he could play for a couple of hours in a row. Obviously, in this intimate atmosphere, he did not play his greatest works, those with the greatest breath, but he improvised, or unveiled the last prelude, a nocturne, an elegant waltz, or even an etude.

Marie d'Agoult (1805 - 1876)

In 1935 he had finished the twelve Etudes of Opus 10, dedicated to his friend Franz Liszt, irony aside. The new series, opus 25, will be dedicated to Countess Marie d'Agoult, who, among other merits, played the piano and was the partner of his friend Franz.

Etudes from Opus 25 - No. 11 in A minor

Out of the twelve studies that make up the series, ten of them were composed simultaneously with those of Opus 10. Only the first and the last one were added at a later date, for their joint publication in 1837. Etude No. 11, with its scant three and a half minutes in length, is the longest of the series and, like its companions, constitutes an inescapable piece in the piano repertoire of our day. The technical challenges demand bursts of arpeggios from the right hand in opposition to a powerfully rhythmic motif from the left hand.

The performance is by the Ukrainian pianist Valentina Lisitsa, now settled in the USA.