CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Mitsuko Uchida

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Friday, May 9th, 2008 at 8:00 PM

Mitsuko Uchida, Piano

SCHUBERT Sonata in C Minor, D. 958
GYÖRGY KURTÁG "Antiphone in F-Sharp Major" from Játékok, Book II
BACH Contrapunctus No. 1, BWV 1080 from The Art of Fugue
GYÖRGY KURTÁG "Tumble-Bunny" from Játékok, Book III
GYÖRGY KURTÁG "Portrait 3" from Játékok, Book III
GYÖRGY KURTÁG "Dirge 2" from Játékok, Book III
GYÖRGY KURTÁG "Hommage à Christian Wolff (Half-Asleep)" from Játékok, Book III
BACH Sarabande from French Suite No. 5 in G Major, BWV 816
GYÖRGY KURTÁG "Play with Infinity" from Játékok, Book III
SCHUMANN Symphonic Etudes, Op. 13

Encore:
SCHUBERT Impromptu in G-flat Major, D.899, No. 3

Carnegie Hall salutes Japan Society on the occasion of its Centennial.

Program Notes:

by Paul Griffiths

FRANZ SCHUBERT Piano Sonata in C Minor, D. 958
Born January 31, 1797, in Vienna; died there November 19, 1828.

Composed in 1828, Schubert’s Piano Sonata in C Minor received its Carnegie Hall premiere on February 24, 1939, with Artur Schnabel, piano

The Sonata in C Minor was the first and shortest of the three sonatas Schubert composed in the last year of his life—the year he outlived Beethoven, of whom he must have been thinking here. Not only is the sonata in one of Beethoven’s favorite keys; it also draws from that key something of Beethovenian drama and even begins with a reference to the opening of Beethoven’s 32 Variations in the same key. At the same time, of course, there are the harmonic slips into areas of touching intimacy where Schubert is on his own.

There are several such slips in the first movement, whose stormy opening is contrasted with lyrical music in a major key. Extended in the manner of a set of variations, this songful second subject cannot quite forget what came before it, and the exposition ends with a beautiful union of the movement’s two main ideas. The development seems to be seeking for new ways to balance these—or to escape from them, for it ends with running chromatic scales. What follows, inevitably, is not escape but return, in a full reprise of the exposition, after which a substantial coda returns to the material of the development.

The slow movement offers a different balance between song and storm, in an ABABA form. Song, in the A sections, turns in other directions at the ends of strains. Storm is chromatic, relentless, and marked by sudden dynamic changes.

Restlessness continues into the third movement, as do sudden stops. The first part of the minuet has the ground falling from under our feet; the second goes a long way round to restore that ground. The trio recalls the key of the slow movement, but in a darker tone.

The driving rhythm of the tarantella sends the work home, in a big sonata-form finale resembling the hell-bent gallop that ends the composer’s “Death and the Maiden” Quartet. As before in this sonata, there are luminous moves from minor to major, and exploratory forays through different harmonic colors. There are also moments, again, when dynamism is interrupted, or put into the background, while the music moves into song. The urgency, however, is always there, ready to take over again, and the compass needle remains pointed firmly at the home key.


GYÖRGY KURTÁG Antiphone in F-sharp, from Játékok, Book II, No. 34
Born February 19, 1926, in Lugoj, Romania.

Composed in 1975–79, Kurtág’s Antiphone in F-sharp received its Carnegie Hall premiere in Zankel Hall on May 10, 2007, with Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano.

By his mid-40s Kurtág had just nine works to his name. To the problems of being in Hungary, where he had little encouragement (his friend Ligeti had fled to the West in 1956), were added his finely tuned artistic scruples, which obliged him to think long and abandon much. A request in 1973 to write some children’s piano pieces was a liberation: allowing himself to be playful, Kurtág found he could produce music no less intense and sure. He quickly fulfilled the original commission and has never stopped. By now there are hundreds of these játékok (“games”), and more for other instruments. The dimensions are still small, but the pedagogical intention has been outstripped. Many of the pieces are memorials; many more are homages—to friends, and to composers of the past. Often—as in the case of Antiphone in F-sharp—these miniature compositions are games indeed, played with contrapuntal rules, rhythmic structures, or allusions to other music. Always the expressive force is strong, for a joke, too, can be poignant.


JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH Contrapunctus I, from The Art of Fugue, BWV 1080
Born March 21, 1685, in Eisenach, Germany; died July 28, 1750, in Leipzig, Germany.

Composed around 1742, Contrapunctus No. 1 from The Art of Fugue received its Carnegie Hall premiere on March 16, 1931, with the Juilliard Graduate School String Orchestra conducted by Albert Stoessel (in an orchestration by Wolfgang Graeser).

Ms. Uchida here follows Kurtág’s own practice, when playing selections from his Játékok with his wife, Márta, of punctuating the pieces with contemplations drawn from Bach. The Art of Fugue is one of the great, culminating projects to which Bach devoted his last years: an unprecedented and unrivalled triumph of contrapuntal art taking the form of 14 fugues (for which Bach used the antique term “contrapunctus”) and four canons, all based on the same D-minor subject. As Joseph Kerman points out in his recent book on Bach’s fugues, the achievement of an elementally simple fugue in Contrapunctus I—no countersubjects, no variations, nothing but the pristine theme each time—is itself a feat of creative virtuosity.


GYÖRGY KURTÁG From Játékok, Book III: No. 16, “Tumble-Bunny”; No. 38, “Portrait 3”; No. 30, “Dirge 2”; and No. 39, “Hommage à Christian Wolff (Half-Asleep)”
Composed in 1975–79, “Tumble-Bunny” and “Dirge 2” received their Carnegie Hall premieres in Zankel Hall on May 13, 2005, as part of a joint performance by pianists Leif Ove Andsnes and Håvard Gimse. “Portrait 3” and “Hommage à Christian Wolff (Half-Asleep)” receive their Carnegie Hall premieres in tonight’s performance.

“Tumble-Bunny” is, characteristically, a moment of playfulness that turns into a question. “Portrait 3” is dedicated to the Hungarian pianist Valeria Szervánszky, niece of the composer Kurtág honored in his string quartet Officium breve, and “Dirge 2” carries a weight of grief and anger on its narrow shoulders. In a delicate homage to Christian Wolff, Kurtág makes use of a principle of improvisation from the US composer’s Brurdocks of 1970–71.


JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH Sarabande from French Suite No. 5 in G Major, BWV 816
Composed around 1722, the Sarabande from Bach’s French Suite No. 5 received its Carnegie Hall premiere in an anonymous orchestration on February 17, 1923, with the New York Symphony Orchestra conducted by Rene Pollain, conductor, and with Virginie Mauret, dancer.

Bach probably wrote his French Suites (not so called by him) as practice and instruction material for his eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann, born in 1710. They stand, therefore, among his játékok, marbling playfulness and profundity. As in all Bach’s suites, the slow, triple-time sarabande is the center of gravity.


GYÖRGY KURTÁG “Play with Infinity,” from Játékok, Book III, No. 2
Composed in 1975–79, “Play with Infinity” received its Carnegie Hall premiere in Zankel Hall on May 10, 2007, with Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano.

A postscript—as if infinity could be found between the limits of the piano keyboard (and perhaps it can).


ROBERT SCHUMANN Études symphoniques, Op. 13
Born June 8, 1810, in Zwickau, Germany; died July 29, 1856, in Endenich, near Bonn.

Composed in 1834–35 and published in 1837 (with subsequent printings and revisions), Schumann’s Études symphoniques received its Carnegie Hall premiere on April 24, 1897, with Teresa Carreño, piano.

Schumann often had second thoughts about his larger works; in this case he had third thoughts as well, and then Brahms had fourth thoughts for him. The project began in 1834–35, when Schumann wrote 12 pieces based on a theme by Baron von Fricken, the guardian of his fiancée Ernestine von Fricken. In his mind, surely, was the example of Beethoven’s “Diabelli” Variations, a work then only 12 years old and one that used an unremarkable theme as entry ticket to a whole range of extraordinary worlds.

For his new endeavor Schumann considered various titles: “Variations pathétiques,” “Fantaisies et final sur un thème de Baron de Fricken,” and “Etuden im Orchester-Charakter von Eusebius und Florestan,” this last referring to two personae he saw within himself, dreamy and dashing. But when he came to publish the work, in 1837, he called it Études symphoniques, and dropped five numbers, adding six new ones.

What is symphonic in the music—or orchestral, as one of the earlier titles had it—is not so much the sound as the size: the sense of the piano, and the pianist, dealing out the kind of power, energy, and thrust one might associate with a symphony. For the second edition, of 1852, Schumann changed the title to Études en forme de variations and eliminated the two studies that are not strictly variations on the Fricken theme. Brahms restored them and also published, as an appendix, the five studies Schumann had abandoned in 1837. Many pianists today include these, but Ms. Uchida prefers Schumann’s 1837 version.

The theme is something between a funeral chorale and a sentimental song. Its first variation puts forward a lively counter-subject, while its second is grandly melodious. One might associate these two with Eusebius and Florestan respectively, though the two characters—passive and active, sensitive and buoyant—are mingled in everything Schumann wrote. With a turn to the relative major, the third study has a warm melody against the theme’s harmonic background. Now alternating between minor and major keys, the sequence continues with a march in brisk chords (Étude IV), a scherzo (Étude V), an emphatic syncopated number (Étude VI), and a movement of boisterous energy (Étude VII).

A grand Andante (Étude VIII) goes with an ornamented stateliness that might suggest a Bach prelude. This is followed by a piece light as the wind, blowing on into the next variation, after which there is a slow movement (Étude XI). The finale exuberantly quotes a march from the opera that Schumann’s contemporary Marschner based on Scott’s Ivanhoe. That is one British connection; another is that Schumann dedicated the 1837 edition to his young colleague William Sterndale Bennett, who had visited the Schumanns and Mendelssohn from London.

Copyright © 2008 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).

Mitsuko Uchida, Piano
Mitsuko Uchida is a performer who brings a deep insight into the music she plays through her own search for truth and beauty. She is renowned for her interpretations of Mozart and Schubert, both in the concert hall and on CD, and she has also illuminated the music of Berg, Schoenberg, Webern, and Boulez for a new generation of listeners; her recording of the Schoenberg Piano Concerto with Pierre Boulez and The Cleveland Orchestra won four awards, including the Gramophone Award for Best Concerto. Over the last two years she has been giving performances of Beethoven’s last three piano sonatas, as well as Opp. 101 and 106, “Hammerklavier.” Her recording of the Op. 109, 110, and 111 sonatas for Decca received outstanding critical acclaim.

Mitsuko Uchida performs throughout the world with many different partners. Some highlights have been her artist-in-residency at The Cleveland Orchestra, where she directed all the Mozart concertos from the keyboard over a number of seasons. She has also been the focus of Carnegie Hall’s Perspectives concerts entitled Mitsuko Uchida: Vienna Revisited. She was recently featured in the Concertgebouw’s Carte Blanche series, where she collaborated with Ian Bostridge, the Hagen Quartet, Chamber Orchestra of Europe, and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, and also directed from the piano a performance of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire. These concerts were also the focus of series at the Philharmonie in Cologne and the Barbican in London. In January 2006 Mitsuko Uchida took part in the Mozart birthday celebrations in Salzburg with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Riccardo Muti, as well as performing with the Hagen Quartet and appearing in recital. She recently took part in the series of Signature concerts marking the reopening of London’s Royal Festival Hall after its refurbishment when she performed Mozart with Sir Charles Mackerras and the Philharmonia Orchestra, and she gave two recitals at the Salzburg Festival featuring Beethoven’s last five piano sonatas.

Mitsuko Uchida’s engagements this season include recitals in Vienna, Amsterdam, London, and New York. She performs with the London Symphony and Boston Symphony orchestras with Sir Colin Davis; with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Ensemble Intercontemporain with Pierre Boulez; and with The Cleveland Orchestra led by Franz Welser-Möst. She also play-directs Mozart concertos from the keyboard with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. Next season, she will be artist-in-residence with the Berliner Philharmoniker.

Mitsuko Uchida records exclusively for Decca, and her recordings include the complete Mozart piano sonatas and piano concertos; the complete Schubert piano sonatas; Debussy’s Etudes; the five Beethoven piano concertos with Kurt Sanderling; a CD of Mozart sonatas for violin and piano with Mark Steinberg; Die schöne Müllerin with Ian Bostridge for EMI; and Schubert’s final three piano sonatas.

In April 2008 the BBC Music Magazine awarded its Disc of the Year and Instrumental Award to Mitsuko Uchida.

Mitsuko Uchida has demonstrated a long-standing commitment to aiding the development of young musicians and is a trustee of the Borletti-Buitoni Trust. She is also Co-director, with Richard Goode, of the Marlboro Music Festival.