Igor Stravinski, the pianist / Petrushka - Three Movements / Yuja Wang

For a Russian composer temporarily settled in Paris in 1921 and facing the rigors of the post-war period, the offer of five thousand francs for the composition of a piano piece was not negligible. That was the sum the piano virtuoso Arthur Rubinstein promised Igor Stravinsky for a Russian character piece in which he could display his grandiose technique.

Three Movements from Petrushka

Stravinsky recalled the pieces he had sketched in 1911 for an orchestral piece with prominent piano participation, which he had reoriented into a ballet at the behest of Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev. Those sketches and excerpts from the ballet eventually formed the solo piano piece Three Movements of Petrushka, ten years after the debut of the successful ballet starring Petrushka, the puppet that comes to life, in the Russian tradition.

Stravinsky, the pianist

Rubinstein, the dedicatee of the work, was highly pleased with it, performing it on numerous occasions. Of course, he was also interested in making known the piano work of the Russian composer, whom, until today, we do not easily relate to piano writing, although Stravinsky was an extremely talented pianist who, during most of his adult life, devoted half of each year to giving concerts and the other half to composing.

The Path
Prior to the undertaking that culminated in the Three Movements, the future author of The Rite of Spring and The Firebird had surprised musical circles in his twenties with a piano sonata in 1903. Then came, in 1908, the Four Studies of opus 7, which already showed maturity and a piano language full of promise. But the significant new contribution to the piano will come in 1921 with this brilliant "reduction" of the ballet Petrushka, plagued with difficulties, and which, despite the nearly one hundred years since its invention, is still today among the most "spectacular" works of the piano repertoire.

The three movements

The work is known for its enormous technical and musical difficulties. Almost without respite, they capture its three movements with a great display of polyrhythm, extensive and fast jumps, very fast scales, as well as glissandos and tremolos everywhere. Its parts are:

00:00  No 1 Danse russe (Russian Dance)

02:29  No 2 Chez Pétrouchka  (Petrushka's Room)

06:48  No 3 La semaine grasse (The Shrovetide Fair)

The rendition, dazzling, is by the brilliant pianist Yuja Wang.

Mozart, Horn Concerto 3 in E-flat major

The horn, or French horn, is one of the wind instruments that the child Mozart heard more than once at home, in Salzburg, when Leopold met with his friends to make chamber music. From then on he loved its timbre, which, together with the flute or the oboe, was more "pastoral" than the harpsichord or even the stringed instruments. And from that time, too, dates his closeness to Joseph Leutgeb, the most skilled horn player of his time, an essential guest in the evenings Leopold organized at his home in Getreidegasse.

The enterprising "horn man"
The four horn concertos composed by Mozart in Vienna between 1783 and 1791 are dedicated to Leutgeb. The horn player had left his position in the Salzburg court orchestra in 1771 to start a commercial "venture" in Vienna in his forties. It was a store specializing in cheese and related foodstuffs, but as the story goes, without giving up music altogether. The venture was partially financed by Leopold through a loan that Leutgeb was never able to repay, despite the continuous reminders of the debt that Mozart read in the letters he received from his father. The horn player had failed, irretrievably, but Wolfgang was there to support him and return him to music.

Wolfgang, the playful one

The friendship and affection professed were great. But this does not detract from the fact that, in the vein that characterized the Salzburg genius from childhood, he made healthy fun – if one can say so – of the unsuccessful entrepreneur. Surprising – to say the least – are the singular invectives in Italian that Mozart allowed himself to intersperse in the autograph pages of the four concertos. He called him a thousand names: seccatura di coglione, trillo di pecore, porco infame, are a few of them. Leutgeb did not take it badly. He understood that the brilliant son of his friend Leopold was having fun with him, not at his expense.

Horn Concerto No. 3 in E-flat major, K. 447
The four horn concertos (plus a quintet he composed later for horn and strings - K. 407) are masterpieces for the instrument, brilliant and solid, which enriched horn music, not very abundant at the time. The concerto K. 447 in E flat major is the third that Mozart composed for Leutgeb. Its solo parts abound in passages that are quite a challenge for the interpreter, even more so if one considers the precariousness of the instrument of the time.

Movements:
00:00  Allegro
08:10  Romanza. Larghetto
12:54  Allegro

The performance is by the Czech instrumentalist Radek Baborák, accompanied by the RTVE Orchestra, under the baton of the Russian-born French conductor Jean Jacques Kantorow.

Anton Rubinstein, Piano Concerto No 4

The pianist who succeeded Liszt in the line of greatness was called Anton Grigorievich Rubinstein, a Russian bear with enormous hands who, with his luxuriant hair and broad forehead in the Beethoven style, dazzled the audience, especially the ladies, in the second half of the 19th century. At sixteen he had played for Liszt but the Hungarian master did not take him as a pupil. Perhaps their personalities clashed. Liszt is said to have dismissed him with good advice: "A talented man should reach his goal by his own efforts, without any help". No other brilliant pupil is known to have been rejected by the master.

Anton Rubinstein (1829 - 1894)

His career

Born in 1829 in a village northwest of Odessa, he made his debut at the age of nine. Soon his teacher took him to Paris where he dazzled as a child prodigy. But he was not the only one. As he would later recount in his autobiography, child prodigies were all the rage throughout Europe in the 1840s.

Later it was Berlin, then Vienna. In 1872-73 he made a professionally and financially successful tour of the United States. Ten years earlier he had participated in the founding of the St. Petersburg Conservatory, of which he was the first director (his younger brother, Nikolai, another piano virtuoso, founded the Moscow Conservatory in 1866).

The Legacy

At the end of his life, his enormous repertoire was weakened, but he still continued with his famous "historical recitals", in which during seven recitals he covered the entire history of Western music. Like every professional pianist of the 19th century, he was also a prolific composer. His legacy is extensive, although much of it has been forgotten. There are twenty operas, six symphonies, chamber music, and innumerable pieces for solo piano. Of his five concertos for piano and orchestra, only one survives, the Concerto in D minor, still hailed today, and an integral part of the standard repertoire, at least in Russia.

Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 4 in D minor, opus 70

Perhaps a masterpiece of the 19th-century repertoire, it was composed in 1864 and published two years later, together with an arrangement for two pianos. And it is not difficult to understand the success it enjoyed in its time (what is hard to understand is that it has lost it). His writing is colorful and at times dazzling. Of great melodic and harmonic appeal, it also displays a highly imaginative orchestration. 

Movements

The three typical ones of the period (although they were not so typical anymore - apart from the fact that the first movement is "somewhat moderate", and not overtly fast):

00:00  Moderato assai

11:31  Andante

22:18  Allegro

The rendition is by pianist Age Juurikas, from Estonia, accompanied by the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by the Estonian maestro Neeme Järvi.

Beethoven, Symphony No. 1 in C major

Beethoven composed his first symphony at the age of 30, an age at which Mozart had composed most (around 33) of his 41 symphonies. Schubert himself, too, died at the age of 31, leaving a very respectable collection of nine symphonies. What sets the distances apart is that what the Bonn master was about to accomplish in the genre was monumental. In the First Symphony (also in the second) his writing will still be marked by the classical aesthetics of the end of the century, but with it comes a new air that will hatch four years later with the Third Symphony, called Eroica. From then on, there will be no parallel.

But there is no need to dramatize it either. It has often been insisted on the particular beginning of the Symphony in C major -giving it the character of revolutionary boldness, or premonition-, because it opens in a key other than the tonic. Indeed, the introductory adagio begins in F instead of C major (more precisely, the work opens with a seventh of C that immediately resolves in F). But this being a characteristic of Haydn's late works, we believe that the purpose of its application by Beethoven responds more to a sort of homage to the master, to his master, whom he revered, rather than to any other revolutionary motive.

Symphony No. 1 in C major, op 21

The work was composed in Vienna, between 1799-1800, and premiered at the Burgtheater on April 2, 1800. Beethoven had already written his first two piano concertos and a couple of cantatas, but the master is known more as a virtuoso pianist than as a composer. This, his first symphony, is the work that will point the way toward the composition of the great purely orchestral works.
And he does it in the midst of pain. The pain that arises when he learns that his growing deafness may not be cured. This is what he tells in a letter to his friend Karl Amenda in June 1800, two months after the premiere:

"...You must know that one of my most precious faculties, that of hearing, is become very defective; even while you were still with me I felt indications of this, though I said nothing; but it is now much worse. Whether I shall ever be cured remains yet to be seen; it is supposed to proceed from the state of my digestive organs, but I am almost entirely recovered in that respect. [...] I hope indeed that my hearing may improve, but I scarcely think so, for attacks of this kind are the most incurable of all. [...] I beg you will keep the fact of my deafness a profound secret, and not confide it to any human being. Write to me frequently; your letters, however short, console and cheer me; so I shall soon hope to hear from you."

Movements:
00        Adagio molto. Allegro con brio
10:33  Andante cantabile con moto.
17:07  Menuetto - Allegro molto e vivace
20:33  Finale - Adagio, allegro molto e vivace

The performance is by the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra conducted by Daniel Barenboim, from the Royal Albert Hall in London (BBC - Proms 2012).

Schoenberg, Three Piano pieces, Op 11

Over the course of a little more than twenty years, Arnold Schoenberg, creator of dodecaphonism, composed five sets of pieces for solo piano. These reflect his evolution from an initial break with the harmonic and melodic canons dominating for 300 years, through a return to a kind of neoclassicism, to finally openly address the most rigorous atonality in his last works for piano. Three Piano Pieces from Opus 11 is the first work of his piano production, composed in 1909 and premiered in Vienna the following year.

Schoenberg, musician, and painter

The period leading up to his creation was an embarrassing and unhappy one for the composer. As is well known, Arnold Schoenberg was also a painter (and an outstanding one at that), a vocation that ran almost parallel to that of a musician. In those years he met the Austrian painter Richard Gerstl, whom he took into his home to receive painting lessons from him. It was not a good idea. Gerstl and Mathilde, Arnold's wife, fell in love. Mathilde fled with her painter but returned soon after. Arnold caught his breath, but Gerstl could not stand the pain and killed himself.

The novel twist

Arnold Schoenberg (1874 - 1951)
Portrait by Richard Gerstl (1883 - 1908)

Mathilde returned in October 1908. In February of the following year, Schoenberg began the composition of the Three Pieces. And for the first time in music history, each sound or interval here showed a singular and independent value, free from the hierarchies of tonal discourse. Despite the novel twist, for Schoenberg, it was only the appropriate, obligatory path in the natural evolution of musical language. And so he pointed out in November 1909:

"I am striving to reach a goal that seems to be clear and I already feel the opposition that I will have to overcome.... It is not lack of inventiveness or technical ability, or ignorance of the demands of contemporary aesthetics that has led me to this.... [simply] I am following an inner compulsion that is stronger than education, stronger than my artistic training..."

Going a little further, it is said that Arnold looked forward to a time when grocers' boys would whistle serial music in their rounds. But, sadly for him, this never occurred.

Three Piano Pieces Opus 11 

00       No 1  Mässige (moderato)

03:20  No 2  Mässige (moderato)

09:47  No 3  Bewegte (movido)

The performance, brilliant, is by the Chinese pianist Di Wu.