Orion Weiss

Orion Weiss
With YooJin Jang and Ying QUartet Members

FRANZ LISZT
Les Jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este

ALBAN BERG
Piano Sonata, Op. 1

BOHUSLAV MARTINŮ
Piano Sonata, H. 350

ROBERT SCHUMANN
Piano Quintet in E-flat Major, Op. 44
YooJin Jang, Robin Scott, violin • Phillip Ying, viola • David Ying, cello • Orion Weiss, piano

program notes

FRANZ LISZT

Les Jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este (1877)

From the late 1860s until his death in 1886, Franz Liszt had what he described as a “vie trifurquée” (three-pronged life), split between Weimar, Budapest, and Rome. When he was in Italy, he generally stayed at the Villa d’Este, a sixteenth-century mansion on the outskirts of Rome that at the time belonged to Archbishop Gustav Hohenlohe. The villa is built on a steep hillside and famed for its multi-tiered garden, which is full of towering cypress trees and has a network of fountains that represented a major achievement in hydraulic engineering when it was built. Liszt was in the habit of commemorating cherished places with short compositions. In the 1850s, he had published two volumes titled Années de pèlerinage (Years of Pilgrimage), collections of solo piano works that had programmatic associations with specific memories from his travels. In 1877, he wrote three tributes to the gardens at the Villa d’Este and eventually published them as part of his third and final Année de pèlerinage (1883). Two were melancholy threnodies (laments) honoring the majesty of the cypress trees and one was a musical depiction of the fountains (Jeux d’eaux).

The bright, sweeping arpeggios that we hear throughout Liszt’s Jeux d’eaux might sound familiar from keyboard works inspired by this one. Maurice Ravel’s Jeux d’eau and Claude Debussy’s Reflets dans l’eau (Reflections in the Water) use such gestures to create a sense of the controlled chaos found in the spray of a fountain and of flecks of light dancing on pools. Unlike the tone paintings of these later impressionists, Liszt’s piece blends precise yet distant sonic images with notes of personal reflection. In moments when the arpeggios abate and a naked melodic line or a transition between two simple chords comes to the fore, we encounter the solitary, melancholic observer of the watery spectacle, who wanders through the gardens in spiritual contemplation.

ALBAN BERG

Piano Sonata, Op. 1 (1909)

For most of his youth, Alban Berg had little in the way of formal musical training. He received piano lessons from his governess, and when he was a teenager he composed a large body of songs to be performed at home. But he expected to have a career as a civil servant until he was encouraged by his siblings to apply for private musical study with Arnold Schoenberg in late 1904. According to a somewhat self-aggrandizing letter that Schoenberg later sent to his publisher, at the start of their tutelage he thought Berg was talented but that “his imagination apparently could not work on anything but lieder. Even [his] piano accompaniments were songlike. He was absolutely incapable of writing an instrumental movement or inventing an instrumental theme.” For several years, Schoenberg encouraged Berg to compose short instrumental pieces like minuets and variation sets, gradually working toward the creation of a piano sonata, an endeavor that would require a strong grasp of large-scale structure and the idiosyncrasies of the keyboard.

Berg was extremely eager to please his teacher (a dynamic that grew rather toxic after his formal studies ended in 1911) and in 1907–08, he abandoned at least five attempts at completing a sonata movement. His Op. 1 Piano Sonata was the culmination of these efforts, and it proved more than satisfactory to Schoenberg, who saw it as “a very beautiful and original piece.” In contrast to the multi-part sonatas of Ludwig van Beethoven, Robert Schumann, and Johannes Brahms, it is fashioned in a single, action-packed movement, almost like a condensed cousin of the through-composed Piano Sonata in B minor of Franz Liszt. Berg’s piece is ostensibly in the same key, though he draws heavily on the complex tonal language found in works like Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony (1906) as well as on the shimmering seventh chords and whole-tone scales of Claude Debussy and other French composers of the era. His newly acquired training in instrumental composition paid off — the sonata is quite idiomatic to the piano — yet Berg’s writing remains wonderfully songful; all of the themes in this piece exhibit a plaintive, vocal expressiveness that shines through the density of the harmonies.

BOHUSLAV MARTINŮ

Piano Sonata, H. 350 (1954)

Bohuslav Martinů wrote his only solo piano sonata in 1954 for the Austrian American pianist Rudolf Serkin, a colleague from the years he had recently spent living in New York. When he was close to finishing the piece, Martinů expressed insecurity about whether Serkin would like it and be able to use it: he confessed to a mutual friend, “it is really extremely difficult to add something good to his tremendous repertory of masterpieces” and insisted that the dedicatee be brutally honest about his interest in it. In the end, Serkin greatly admired and appreciated the piece, though he didn’t have time to learn it until 1957. He traveled to Switzerland to work on the sonata with Martinů ahead of its US premiere, which took place in New York in December of that year, and he regularly included the piece in concerts after, often pairing it with Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” Sonata.

In the first movement of the Sonata, which sounds like it is in a lilting 3/8 time, the measures are marked by dashed, rather than solid, bar lines. Martinů does this in part because he freely adds and subtracts beats for emphasis and contrast; but the notation also encourages the player to conceive of the movement as a single, long, improvised measure. The whirring Moderato has some passages with these provisional divisions and some with normal bar lines, as if the composer is clawing back a sense of clearly defined meter. The declamatory, marching finale is more strictly in time, without any dotted measure divisions. Martinů described to his early biographer Miloš Šafránek how one of his compositional goals in the 1950s was balancing “geometry” — that is to say, strict form — with a looser sense of structure. The composer felt he found the right mix in his Sixth Symphony, “Fantaisies symphoniques” (1951–53), a piece that doesn’t have a traditional form, “and yet something holds it together. I don’t know what, but it has a single line.” In this sonata, Martinů likewise manages to create a coherent throughline by gradually moving from fantasia-like writing to the strict geometry of a military march.

Program Notes by Nicky Swett

ROBERT SCHUMANN

Piano Quintet in E-flat Major, Op. 44 (1842)

Robert Schumann’s Piano Quintet was composed during his year of chamber music — a period of inspiration which had taken root while Clara was on an extended concert tour across Europe, leaving Robert alone in Leipzig. The year had begun with Robert’s set of three String Quartets, composed following a period of extended study of the Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven Quartets, and also included his Piano Quartet in E-Flat Major, Op. 47. To an extent, the Quartet and Quintet are companion compositions, written at nearly the same time, and sharing a common key signature.

With his Piano Quintet, Schumann gave rise to a new genre: perhaps inspired in part by his recent study and composition of string quartets, Schumann combined the string quartet with the piano, substituting a second violin in for the double bass of the Classical piano quintet instrumentation (as in Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet or Louise Farrenc’s Piano Quintets. The result was a versatile ensemble that sat somewhere between the traditionally private intimacy of chamber music and public dynamism of the symphony; the five musicians could alternatively maintain independent and contrapuntal musical lines, or the string quartet could act as a unit alongside (or against) the piano.

Naturally, Schumann dedicated the Quintet to his wife Clara, although due to illness it was Felix Mendelssohn who played the piano part, apparently on sight, at its premiere in December. Clara would later champion the work throughout her career, and she also became an advocate for the new genre, encouraging Brahms to rearrange his planned Sonata for Two Pianos into his Piano Quintet in F Minor, Op. 34.

Program Note by Peter Asimov