CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Yefim Bronfman

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Monday, December 17th, 2007 at 8:00 PM

Yefim Bronfman, Piano

BEETHOVEN Sonata No. 13 in E-flat Major, Op. 27, No. 1, "quasi una fantasia"
SCHUMANN Fantasy in C Major, Op. 17

RAVEL Gaspard de la nuit
BALAKIREV Islamey

Encores:
SCHUMANN Romanze and Intermezzo from Faschingsschwank aus Wien, Op. 26
PROKOFIEV Precipitato from Piano Sonata No. 7

Perspectives: Yefim Bronfman

Sponsored by Smith Barney

Perspectives concerts are made possible, in part, by a generous grant from The Alice Tully Foundation.

Program Notes:

By Paul Griffiths

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Sonata No. 13 in E-flat Major, Op. 27, No. 1, “Quasi una fantasia”
Baptized December 17, 1770, in Bonn; died March 27, 1827, in Vienna.

Composed in 1800–01, the Sonata in E-flat Major, Op. 27, No. 1, received its first Carnegie Hall performance in Carnegie Lyceum (now Zankel Hall) on May 12, 1899, with Florence Traub, piano.

Intimate song, fugal elements, non-standard form: this piece has all the elements of Beethoven’s late style, and yet it comes from two decades earlier, when the composer was just at the threshold of what is usually designated his “middle period.” Recognizing the work’s unusualness, he called it a “sonata quasi una fantasia,” as he did its companion piece, Op. 27, No. 2, the so-called “Moonlight” Sonata. When he considered what he had written, evidently the fantasia model, continuous yet open to sudden diversions, seemed as close as the sonata. Op. 27 No. 1 plays without a break, through a sequence of movements that is thoroughly atypical and thoroughly satisfying.

Exceptionalness starts with the opening, which, in song strains, has more the character of a slow movement. Its first section has an A-B-A form, made of regular phrases, the “middle eight” introducing expressive slips into C major. Though the ensuing Allegro is decisively an interruption, it takes up the C-major tonality and is still in regular phrases, as if suggesting dance more than song. The song theme, repeated at the end, becomes a dialog between the hands.

Then comes a short scherzo in C minor, with a trio in A-flat, whose syncopations carry over into the repeat of the scherzo to add a lustrous ripple to its arpeggiations. The condensed adagio, restoring A flat, is again in ABA form, ending with a cadenza-style flourish that prepares for the final allegro, which brings back the E flat of the opening. Here at last is a movement in sonata form; one might almost think the work is finally beginning just as it is coming to an end. However, with the end of this end in sight and the coda readying itself for the final affirmation, the music stops on a dominant chord so that the principal part of the adagio can return, in E flat. The gesture’s rightness is so complete as to defy explanation.


ROBERT SCHUMANN Fantasy in C Major, Op. 17
Born June 8, 1810, in Zwickau, Saxony; died July 29, 1856, in Bonn.

Composed in 1836, the Fantasy in C Major received its Carnegie Hall premiere in Recital Hall (now Zankel Hall) on April 24, 1891, with Leopold Godowsky, piano.

In June 1836, at a time when Friedrich Wieck was doing everything he could to come between his daughter Clara and his pupil Robert Schumann, the latter drafted what he described as a fantasia and titled “Ruins,” quoting in it from the last song of Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte (To the Distant Beloved). By the end of the year he had made this the first movement of a “Sonata for Beethoven,” with further movements entitled “Trophies” and “Palms.” But he changed his mind more than once about the work’s nomenclature before settling, two years later, on Fantaisie, in French. Perhaps we should keep these equivocations in view. The work is on the brink of being a sonata; it is a sonata troubled by developments in harmony, rhythm, and pianism that are rendering the form obsolete.

Restlessness in the material—which opens in grand affirmation while declining to affirm its tonality with a C-major chord—provokes restlessness of form. The second subject, though gentler, is no less wandering, and the return of the main theme gives way to a new section in C minor, “Im Legendenton,” which lengthily considers what had been introduced as a transitional idea. A full recapitulation reinforces the sonata ideal, before the movement closes with a short adagio on the Beethoven quotation.

The second movement is a march, whose progress is perturbed by dotted rhythm. This, when it first arrives, in the fifth measure, is no more than swagger, but soon it takes over as driving force, often excitingly offbeat, creating an environment in which the underlying form—a march in heroic E-flat, with a middle section in A-flat—is enveloped in extensions and diversions.

Functions of both slow movement and finale are fulfilled by the last movement, which is in 12/8, and so maintains the whole work’s basic four-beat rhythm. Even more than in the earlier movements, the two hands produce extraordinary layered effects, often suggesting male and female voices in communion. Schumann’s original plan was to work the main theme of the first movement back into the ending, but he decided, justly, that the work is sufficiently integrated without such a signal, sufficiently powerful and resolute in its form. In paying homage to Beethoven, he had laid his claim to be that master’s heir.


MAURICE RAVEL Gaspard de la nuit
Born March 7, 1875, in Ciboure, Pyrénées Atlantiques, France; died December 28, 1937, in Paris.

Composed in 1908, Gaspard de la nuit was premiered by pianist Ricardo Viñes on January 9, 1909, during a Société National concert at the Salle Érard in Paris. The first complete Carnegie Hall performance of Gaspard de la nuit took place in Chamber Music Hall (now Weill Recital Hall) on April 15, 1962, with Selma Mednikov, piano. The first performance at Carnegie Hall of any portion of Gaspard took place on April 6, 1912, with Harold Bauer, who performed “Ondine.”

Ravel based Gaspard de la nuit (Casper of the Night) on the eponymous book of poetic fantasies by Aloysius Bertrand (1807–1841), a near contemporary of Schumann’s. At the time, he was working on his comic opera L’heure espagnole and finishing his Rapsodie espagnole for orchestra. The piano pieces would escape all this Spanish sunshine. In the first of them the subject is a young man looking out of his window by moonlight and hearing, in the rain outside and the ripples of a nearby lake, the voice of an ondine, or water nymph, calling him to join her in the deep. Her song is seductive; Ravel has it floating on watery wavelets and growing in intensity. But the young man rejects the aqueous advance, at which the ondine “lets fall some tears, bursts out laughing and vanishes in showers that stream white the length of my blue panes.” In the music, the water creature’s two aspects—lure and threat—draw apart. Her song at the end is naked; it is the song of her tears. Then it evaporates, leaving the ripples as the sound of her mocking laughter.

There follows a scene at a gallows, where the observer hears a bell ringing from a town below the horizon—an effect Ravel maintains in a constantly tolling B-flat. But just as Bertrand’s observer keeps hearing other things in the sound—the wind, the sighing of the hanged man, the buzz of insects (including a beetle “picking a bloody hair from his bald skull”), and even the red glow on the body in the sunset—so the music moves through its constant knell with other ideas. Harmonic progressions, at first dark and low, in keeping with the dismal scene, become heady, even glamorous, implying that the music’s concern is not directly with the poetic image but with the image-making—with the unswerving gaze that, before a prospect of death and decay, sees strangeness and beauty.

For the finale Ravel chose a poem whose narrator is subjected to sudden visits from a gnome, Scarbo—a character who jumps up in several of Bertrand’s fantasies. Here he is seen as a shape-shifter, now “rolling through the room like a spindle,” now “growing and growing from me to the moon, like the bell tower of a Gothic cathedral.” Ravel’s trickery is rather different. Growth becomes increasing magnificence, virtuosity, passion. The music works transformations on a three-note motif, which, ominous at first, becomes charged with splendor, as if the trickster dwarf could turn into a fairytale prince. From and around conspicuously gnome-like music come grand declarations and scintillating brilliance. Then it is all over. “His body would go blue, diaphanous as the wax of a candle ... and suddenly he had left.”


MILY BALAKIREV Islamey
Born January 2, 1837 (new style), in Nizhny-Novgorod; died May 29, 1910, in St. Petersburg.

Composed in 1869 and revised in 1902, Islamey was first performed in Moscow on December 12 of that year by Nikolai Rubinstein; it received its Carnegie Hall premiere on April 17, 1891, in Recital Hall (now Zankel Hall) with Arthur Friedheim.

Ravel is said to have written Gaspard de la nuit with the aim of creating something even more difficult than Balakirev’s Islamey. This we may now judge. Balakirev, for his part, seems to have been determined to out-Liszt Liszt, who responded by taking Islamey into his repertory and teaching it to his students. The piece is one of the great prototypes of musical orientalism, predating, for example, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sheherazade and Borodin’s Prince Igor. Balakirev wrote it in September 1869, following a visit to the northern Caucasus, where a lengthy war of Russian occupation had ended only five years earlier. “I made the acquaintance of a Circassian prince,” he wrote, “who frequently came to me and played folk tunes on his instrument, which was something like a violin. One of them, called ‘Islamey,’ a dance-tune, pleased me extraordinarily and . . . I began to arrange it for the piano.” He needed a more lyrical theme for the middle section, and this he obtained from an Armenian actor working in Moscow, who sang him a love song of the Crimean Tatars. But the piece ends with the Circassian prince’s fiddle, and the piano on speed.

Copyright © 2007 by The Carnegie Hall Corporation

Paul Griffiths is the author of numerous books on music, including
The New Penguin Dictionary of Music and, most recently,
A Concise History of Western Music (Cambridge University Press).

Yefim Bronfman, Piano
Yefim Bronfman is widely regarded as one of the most talented virtuoso pianists performing today. His commanding technique and exceptional lyrical gifts have won him consistent critical acclaim and enthusiastic audiences worldwide, whether for his solo recitals, his prestigious orchestral engagements, or his rapidly growing catalogue of recordings.

As a Perspectives artist at Carnegie Hall for the 2007–08 season, Mr. Bronfman will partner with some of the world’s greatest orchestras and conductors including the Vienna Philharmonic with Valery Gergiev, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra with Mariss Jansons, the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra with James Levine, and Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. Within the scope of the seven concerts he has curated, he will play repertoire ranging from solo piano, chamber, and orchestral by composers from Mozart to Prokofiev and Berg to Dalbavie. The fall begins with a tour of Japan with the Kirov Orchestra conducted by Valery Gergiev and a solo recital tour beginning during the visit to Japan, traversing the US to culminate in Carnegie Hall, and continuing in Vienna, Paris, and Berlin in the spring. With orchestra, he will appear with the Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco, New Jersey, and Toronto symphony orchestras and will conclude the season with the west coast premiere of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Piano Concerto with Salonen conducting to be recorded live for later CD release.

For the opening Gala of the New York Philharmonic in September 2006, Mr. Bronfman partnered with Emanuel Ax in Mozart’s Concerto for Two Pianos conducted by Lorin Maazel with live national television coverage. In winter 2007, he gave the world premiere of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Piano Concerto, written for him and commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, and participated in the Israel Philharmonic’s 70th birthday celebrations in concerts conducted by Zubin Mehta and Valery Gergiev. Other highlights of Mr. Bronfman’s 2006–07 season include appearances with the Boston, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Philadelphia, and National symphony orchestras; Los Angeles and Vienna philharmonics; Orchestre de Paris and Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra; widely acclaimed performances at the Salzburg Easter Festival with the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Sir Simon Rattle; and a European tour with mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kozena.

Highlights of Mr. Bronfman’s 2005–06 season include a tour of Japan with the Bayerischer Rundfunk Orchestra and Mariss Jansons, a recital tour and recording for EMI with flutist Emmanuel Pahud, a tour of Germany with the Tönhalle Orchestra and David Zinman coinciding with the release of their complete Beethoven concerto discs, and concerts in the Far East with partners Gil Shaham and Truls Mørk. He made solo appearances with the St. Petersburg Philharmonic and Yuri Temirkanov for the Opening Night of Carnegie Hall, with the Russian National Orchestra under Vladimir Jurowski at Lincoln Center, and at the White Nights Festival in St. Petersburg with the Kirov Orchestra and Valery Gergiev.

Other recent highlights include a duo recital tour of the US with pianist Emanuel Ax, a performance with the Kirov Orchestra and Valery Gergiev at Carnegie Hall, and concerts with the Vienna Philharmonic and Valery Gergiev in Japan and with Sir Charles Mackerras in Salzburg and Amsterdam. During the 2004–05 season, Mr. Bronfman served as Pianist in Residence with the Berliner Philharmoniker performing multiple orchestral and chamber music concerts with the orchestra’s members throughout the season. He recently completed recordings of all the Beethoven piano concertos as well as the Triple Concerto together with violinist Gil Shaham, cellist Truls Mørk, and the Tönhalle Orchestra Zürich under David Zinman for the Arte Nova/BMG label.

Mr. Bronfman appears regularly with such celebrated ensembles as the Berliner Philharmoniker, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic, the Dresden Staatskapelle, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, London’s Philharmonia, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic, the Orchestre de Paris, and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. He has worked with an equally illustrious group of conductors, including Daniel Barenboim, Herbert Blomstedt, Christoph von Dohnányi, Charles Dutoit, Christoph Eschenbach, Valery Gergiev, Mariss Jansons, Lorin Maazel, Kurt Masur, Zubin Mehta, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Yuri Temirkanov, Franz Welser-Möst, and David Zinman. Summer engagements have regularly taken him to the Aspen, Bad Kissingen, Blossom, Hollywood Bowl, Lucerne, Mann Music Center, Mostly Mozart, Ravinia, Salzburg, Saratoga, Tanglewood, and Verbier festivals.

Mr. Bronfman has also given numerous solo recitals in the leading halls of North America, Europe, and the Far East, including acclaimed debuts at Carnegie Hall in 1989 and Avery Fisher Hall in 1993. In 1991 he gave a series of joint recitals with Isaac Stern in Russia, marking Mr. Bronfman’s first public performances there since his emigration to Israel at age 15. That same year he was awarded the prestigious Avery Fisher Prize, one of the highest honors given to American instrumentalists.

An exclusive Sony BMG recording artist, Mr. Bronfman has won widespread praise for his solo, chamber, and orchestral recordings. He won a Grammy Award in 1997 for his recording of the three Bartók piano concertos with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. His discography also includes the complete Prokofiev piano sonatas; all five of the Prokofiev piano concertos, nominated for both Grammy and Gramophone awards; Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concertos Nos. 2 and 3; recital albums featuring Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and Stravinsky’s Three Scenes from Petrouchka, and Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons paired with Balakirev’s Islamey; and the Tchaikovsky and Arensky Piano Trios with Cho-Liang Lin and Gary Hoffman.

His recordings with Isaac Stern include the Brahms violin sonatas from their aforementioned Russian tour, a cycle of the Mozart violin sonatas, and the Bartók violin sonatas. Coinciding with the release of the Fantasia 2000 soundtrack, Mr. Bronfman was featured on his own Shostakovich album, performing the two piano concertos with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting and the Piano Quintet. In 2002, Sony Classical released his two-piano recital (with Emanuel Ax) of works by Rachmaninoff, which was followed in March 2005 by their second recording of works by Brahms.

A devoted chamber music performer, Mr. Bronfman has collaborated with the Emerson, Cleveland, Guarneri, and Juilliard quartets, as well as the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. He has also played chamber music with Yo-Yo Ma, Joshua Bell, Lynn Harrell, Shlomo Mintz, Jean-Pierre Rampal, Pinchas Zukerman, and many other artists.

Yefim Bronfman immigrated to Israel with his family in 1973, and made his international debut two years later with Zubin Mehta and the Montreal Symphony. He made his New York Philharmonic debut in May l978, his Washington recital debut in March l98l at the Kennedy Center, and his New York recital debut in January 1982 at the 92nd Street Y.

Mr. Bronfman was born in Tashkent, in the Soviet Union, on April 10, 1958. In Israel he studied with pianist Arie Vardi, head of the Rubin Academy of Music at Tel Aviv University. In the United States, he studied at The Juilliard School, Marlboro, and the Curtis Institute, and with Rudolf Firkušný, Leon Fleisher, and Rudolf Serkin.

Yefim Bronfman became an American citizen in July 1989.