final round, concerto

Final Round, Concerto

SEVERANCE HALLAugust 6 and 7, 2021

THE CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA conducted by Jahja Ling

Presented by Piano Cleveland

PRESENTED BY 32 2021 CLEVELAND INTERNATIONAL PIANO COMPETITION / FINAL ROUND

PROGRAM – FRIDAY, AUGUST 6 PROGRAM – SATURDAY, AUGUST 7

OPENING REMARKS Yaron Kohlberg, President, Piano Cleveland Adam Gloege, Key Private Bank Executive, KeyBank

Byeol Kim

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893)Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor, Op. 23

-intermission-

Yedam Kim

Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873–1943)Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor, Op. 30

OPENING REMARKS Yaron Kohlberg, President, Piano Cleveland Eric Fiala, Head of Corporate Responsibility, KeyBank

Lovre Marušić

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827)Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major, Op. 58

-intermission-

Martín García García


-brief pause-

ANNOUNCEMENT OF WINNERS

Special PrizesMarissa Glynias Moore, Executive Director, Piano Cleveland

MedalistsYaron Kohlberg and Margarita Shevchenko, Jury Chairman

PRESENTED BY 54

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827)Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major, Op. 58

Performed by Lovre Marušić on Saturday, August 7

I. Allegro moderato II. Andante con moto III. Rondo: Vivace

It is difficult to overstate the influence that Ludwig van Beethoven—the man, his music, and his myth—has had on the later history of Western art music. Composers of the later nineteenth century invariably wrestled with their illustrious forebear, while musical society at large placed Beethoven on a pedestal as the archetypal Great Composer, a key reference point in Western music theory, aesthetics and philosophy. Beethoven’s biography, too, and in particular his irreversible hearing loss, was influential in generating the myth of the Suffering Artist who must triumph over adversity—an image that continues to shape the way we think about talent and artistry today, for good or for ill. It can be difficult, therefore, to put ourselves in the shoes of Vienna’s aristocracy and bourgeoisie c. 1800, when the Beethoven myth was not yet established: when Beethoven was still the young man from Bonn who had studied with Haydn; the tremendously exciting pianist whose improvisational gifts enchanted Viennese salon-goers; the composer of symphonies and sonatas that crackled with energy and rhythmic verve, quite unlike the artless grace of Mozart. Beethoven’s reputation was already formidable, but it had not yet calcified into the image of wild hair and a grim-set mouth we see in portraits of the composer later in life.

Beethoven’s fourth piano concerto dates from these early years of the nineteenth century. Scholars have tended to call this first decade of the 1800s Beethoven’s “middle” or “heroic” period, “heroism” being a quality of grandeur and epic scale that emerges in many of the composer’s works of the time, from the aptly named “Eroica” symphony to the famous Fifth Symphony, the “Appassionata” piano sonata to the Violin Concerto. Written in 1805–6, the Fourth Piano Concerto, Op. 58, was first performed in a private concert hosted by one of Beethoven’s noble patrons. But its public debut came in December of 1808, when it was performed at a gargantuan public concert held for the composer’s benefit, showcasing

PROGRAM NOTES (in alphabetical order)

his music alone—a mark of the esteem in which composer was already held. Even so, the concert would have sorely tested even the most devoted fan’s patience. Lasting over four hours in a freezing Theater an der Wien, the program included—among other items, and in addition to the Fourth Piano Concerto!—Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, his Sixth Symphony, and his Choral Fantasy. The performance was apparently not of a high standard, with the under-rehearsal of the orchestra taking much of the blame; it is not known whether Beethoven ultimately benefitted financially from the event. Perhaps unsurprisingly given the glut of music, the piano concerto did not attract specific notice, even though Beethoven himself was at the keyboard (it was the last time he would play the solo part in a concerto, on account of his hearing loss). It was left to later audiences to discover, and embrace, the Fourth Piano Concerto’s warmth, charm and striking originality.

Most concertos of the Classical period begin with an extended passage for the orchestra alone, that introduces musical material for the opening movement and prepares the way for the soloist’s entrance. Not so with Op. 58. The pianist must begin alone with a series of soft, simple chords—a nerve-wracking opening if ever there was one. Only once these have been answered in hushed tones by the strings does the expected orchestral introduction get underway, with a bustling repeated-note melody. The soloist’s first “real” entrance begins just as this passage is ending, taking over with pattern of alternating notes that speeds up into a trill (a shake between two adjacent notes); Beethoven exploits the trill in various forms throughout the whole concerto. Following convention for Classical concertos, the first movement is in a modified sonata form, and accordingly the pianist’s first extended solo (the exposition) takes us from the home key of the concerto, G major, to its close relative D major. Along the way, a new theme is introduced amid reprises of material from the orchestral introduction. The middle of the movement (the development) sees the musical material expanded and adapted, pushing through a thicket of dramatic minor-key moods before reaching a reprise of the very beginning—this time loud and triumphant, in big block chords. As the ideas from the first solo are reprised (this time without the change of key) in the recapitulation, Beethoven prepares the way for a moment of high drama in any Classical concerto: the cadenza. In Mozart’s heyday this was a space where the soloist was expected to improvise virtuosically; by the early 1800s composers were beginning to write their cadenzas out in full, and Beethoven uses the opportunity to meditate rhapsodically on the musical material of the concerto (and especially that all-important trill). The concerto ends serenely with closing material drawn from the orchestral introduction.

2021 CLEVELAND INTERNATIONAL PIANO COMPETITION / FINAL ROUND

PRESENTED BY 76

Marked Andante con moto—stately, but with movement—the middle movement is an unusual piece dwarfed by its neighbors, its sorrowful minor key a shock after the joyful first movement. The orchestra is silent except for the strings, which begin loudly in unison (each instrument playing the same melody in its home range); the stark, jerking rhythms have a Baroque flavor, in stark contrast with the understated chords accompanying the soloist’s melancholy first entrance. A forced dialogue emerges between the two forces: each time, the strings make an implacable pronouncement at full volume; each time, the soloist responds meekly, quietly, hurt. In the second half of the movement, a new development seems to take hold, with the soloist embarking on a singing musical line. But the melody gets stuck on a trill, no longer an elegant phrase-ending gesture but a panicked fluttering, while the left hand responds with alarm calls. The soloist cannot go further, and the movement ends swiftly; even the strings are quietly subdued in their final phrase.

In the final movement, Beethoven restores the upbeat mood—but not without one more surprise up his sleeve. The main theme is march-like, almost a fanfare, yet it begins quietly; and it seems to begin in the wrong place, the home key only established after a few questioning measures. Yet once it is played by the full orchestra a few pages later, it seems more natural as an emphatic closing gesture. As the finale progresses through a hybrid form known as sonata-rondo, the theme returns several times, framing contrasting episodes that introduce new ideas. The final part of the movement is crowned by a brief cadenza, which ends with a flurry of trills in both hands; the initial theme returns once last time to close the concerto with a bang.


Performed by Yedam Kim on Friday, August 6 and Martín García García on Saturday, August 7

I. Allegro ma non tanto II. Intermezzo: Allegro III. Finale: Alla breve

Sergei Rachmaninoff was the quintessential Russian composer-pianist, successful equally in both fields throughout his career. Born to an aristocratic family, the young Rachmaninoff was sent to live with renowned teacher Nikolai Zverev, who put him on a rigorous musical schedule through courses at the Moscow Conservatory. Rachmaninoff was discouraged from pursuing composing until after he completed his piano degree: nevertheless, upon graduation he was awarded the Great Gold Medal in composition, leading to a contract with the publisher Gutheil that helped jumpstart his compositional career. It was in this early stage that Rachmaninoff composed his first major hit: his Prelude for solo piano in C-sharp minor, a piece that became so popular that Rachmaninoff felt practically obliged to perform it as an encore after every concert. Beginning in the late 1890s, he took up the baton for the first time, and for the next several decades he would tour across Russia and Europe as a pianist and conductor. However, after the Russian revolutions of 1917, Rachmaninoff was forced to flee Russia, never to return. Opting to emigrate to the United States, where he felt there were greater opportunities, from 1918 onwards Rachmaninoff focused on his performance career over and above composition so that he could make enough money to support his family.

American audiences had received a foretaste of their incoming Russian émigré’s music just under a decade earlier, when Rachmaninoff had embarked on his first tour of the United States. One of the pieces programmed was a new work written specially for the tour, the composer’s Third Piano Concerto in D minor. When Rachmaninoff wrote the concerto, he and his family had been living for three years in Dresden—a place he found more conducive to composition than his homeland, where the political situation had been especially tense since the First Russian Revolution of 1905. The new work thus benefited significantly from the refinements in compositional style that the Dresden years facilitated, and is comparable to other major works of the period such as the Second Symphony. It was premiered at the end of November 1909 in New York City, with Walter Damrosch conducting the New York Philharmonic; at the second performance, the famed composer and conductor Gustav Mahler took the baton. Rachmaninoff himself preferred the Third Concerto to any of his other efforts in the genre, but it took longer for the work to find widespread acceptance than the immediately beloved Second Piano Concerto. Certainly, the Second Concerto wears its heart on its sleeve, whereas the Third has more reserve; the fearsome difficulty of the piano part may have been partly responsible, until famous pianists such as Vladimir Horowitz took up the concerto’s cause and introduced it to wider audiences.



PRESENTED BY 98

The Third Concerto begins without fanfare: Rachmaninoff takes just two measures to set up a rustling accompaniment in the strings, and then the soloist enters with the main theme of the first movement. This long melody, which the composer claimed “wrote itself,” is a classic of his style. The first statement is disarmingly simple, the soloist singing sweetly in bare octaves; only once the tune fully unfurls does the piano part unleash its virtuosity, with a tumbling toccata-like accompaniment to a full restatement of the opening theme (heard in the strings). The piano then leads a transition from the first theme to a contrasting second theme, as expected in the sonata form structuring the movement: the solo part here, as in the concerto as a whole, is highly contrapuntal in nature, with each of the pianist’s hands tackling multiple independent musical lines at once. Fanfare-like outbursts in the orchestra announce the second theme, which is then taken up in a more wistful tone by the soloist alone and subjected to increasingly intense variation. The development section begins with a brief recall of the opening theme, but quickly branches off into new material. It builds inexorably to a climactic passage dominated by block chords in both hands, trumpet calls sounding the alarm; then fades, slowly, into the first movement’s cadenza. We might expect this solo section to prepare the way for the recapitulation, the full reprise of both the themes heard earlier in the movement; and the cadenza’s stunning rendition of the first theme seems to suggest this as well. But then, as distant echoes in the woodwinds lead to the second theme—again played by the soloist alone, with added virtuosity—we realize that the cadenza is the recapitulation. With this stroke of structural brilliance complete, all Rachmaninoff can do is repeat the opening theme, complete and unaltered; the briefest of codas rounds the movement off.

The second movement begins with a troubled orchestral introduction, drifting uneasily between major and minor keys. A stormy entrance flourish from the soloist promises to continue in this vein, but instead settles into a major key, a radiant D-flat major (just a half-step below the home key of the concerto, an unusual relationship Rachmaninoff would reprise twenty years later in his Variations on a Theme of Corelli). The music from the very opening, once so uncertain, is played lyrically, like a nocturne: we realize this movement is a theme-and-variations of sorts. Variations of the theme come and go, ultimately leading to an impassioned climax (massive block chords are employed one more)—and then, unexpectedly, a fast episode erupts in a waltz-like three-to-a-bar, with rapid figuration in the right hand. Finally, an orchestral reprise of the introduction is modified to lead seamlessly into the Finale.

This final movement is idiosyncratic in structure. In the beginning, it seems to be in sonata form: the jagged and agitated opening theme leads to a more passionate second theme. But the entire middle part of the movement is taken up with a prolonged, self-contained episode that alternates fast, brilliant writing (almost like a symphonic scherzo) with lyrical evocations of themes from the preceding two movements. In the remainder of the movement, the reprise of the finale’s first theme is overtaken by a galloping, syncopated pattern in the solo part that grows into the triumphant final pages of the concerto. Landing at last in D major—the home key’s sunny relative—the dramatic block chords in the solo part adorn a broadly Romantic melody cast in soaring strings, for a stirring finish.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893)Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor, Op. 23

Performed by Byeol Kim on Friday, August 6

I. Allegro non troppo e molto maestoso – Allegro con spirito II. Andantino semplice – Prestissimo – Tempo I III. Allegro con fuoco – Molto meno mosso – Allegro vivo

More than any other figure, the composer who gave Imperial Russia its musical voice in the final decades of the nineteenth century was one Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky—the bard of a glittering society soon to be overcome by history. Indeed, for the musicologist Richard Taruskin, Tchaikovsky’s unique position—directly patronized by the Tsar, fêted by the aristocracy, and thus shielded from the musical marketplaces that were shaping the lives of composers elsewhere—made him “the last of the court composers,” or better still “the last great eighteenth-century composer.” Born to middle-class parents, Tchaikovsky’s musical gifts were recognized early, but Russia did not yet have institutions of professional musical instruction along the lines of the Conservatoire in Paris; as a result he was trained in jurisprudence, and might have embarked on a career as a civil servant had the Saint Petersburg Conservatory not opened for business in the early 1860s. Tchaikovsky was one of its first graduates, having been taught composition by the renowned pianist Anton Rubinstein; barely a decade later, he had already conquered the musical scene in Moscow.



PRESENTED BY 1110

PROGRAM NOTES


The First Piano Concerto, Op. 23, was a product of these Moscow years, and was composed between late 1874 and early 1875. Over his career Tchaikovsky often worried about writing music idiomatically for the solo instrument in his concertos, and as a result he frequently asked virtuoso players for their opinions of his music. But in the case of the First Concerto, this strategy backfired: Tchaikovsky was stung by criticism he received from Nikolay Rubinstein (Anton’s younger brother), whom he had wanted to perform at the premiere. Disregarding Rubinstein’s critiques, he approached the renowned conductor and pianist Hans von Bülow to premiere the new concerto. Bülow accepted, but because he was about to embark on a tour of the United States, the concerto had its premiere in Boston in October 1875; it was a stunning success with the American public, who demanded an encore of the finale (critics were less impressed). The Russian premiere took place a month later in Saint Petersburg, and Rubinstein—who had substantially revised his opinions in the interim—conducted the first Moscow performance a month after that. Yet Tchaikovsky was clearly not entirely satisfied with the work, because he revised it twice over the following decades, again soliciting professional opinions from famous pianists of the day. The final revision of 1888 is the one most often heard today, and in this form Op. 23 remains one of the most popular nineteenth-century concertos in the repertoire.

Despite its home key being B-flat minor, the First Piano Concerto begins with an extended introduction based around an impassioned melody in the related key of D-flat major; in another unusual twist, the melody in question is never heard again afterwards. Soaring violins take the tune first, accompanied by enormous block chords in the piano; then the soloist renders the melody in those same block chords. A cadenza (a passage for the soloist to show off their virtuosity without the orchestra) intervenes, and amid the lightning-quick arpeggios (broken chords) it seems as though the true home key of the concerto might be around the corner. But it is a feint, for the passionate melody erupts once more in all its glory. The main theme of the first movement proper, when it arrives, is the polar opposite of what we have just heard: quick and fleet, its skipping rhythm is based on a Ukrainian folk tune. It is contrasted, as per the sonata form structure the movement follows, with a more lyrical melody—whose progress, however, is broken by a cataclysmic eruption in the solo part that concludes, brutally and emphatically, in a minor key. The orchestra takes over in a lyrical mode once more, but its theme is used as the basis for an increasingly frenzied variations that culminate in a second cadenza-like passage for the soloist alone. When the first section of the movement is reprised (the recapitulation) the first-theme material is heavily abridged; the lyrical second theme receives considerably more attention, including in the third and final cadenza—the most dazzlingly difficult of the three—which anchors the end of the work much as the lyrical introduction anchors the beginning.

At over twenty minutes in length, the first movement of the concerto dwarfs the slow movement that follows. Given the technical fireworks of that first movement, the tender simplicity with which the Andantino opens comes as something of a relief. A solo flute sounds over pizzicato (plucked) strings, then the soloist over muted bowed strings; we are reminded that Tchaikovsky was a skilled opera composer. Delicate staccato (detached) articulation in the accompaniment pattern drives the lyrical solo lines onwards, until a dramatic tempo change intervenes: the very fast section that follows is akin to a scherzo in a symphony, with quicksilver scales in the keyboard and light punctuating chords in the orchestra. The lyrical theme reasserts itself once more, briefly, before the end.

The finale is in rondo form, though in its arrangement of keys it is clearly in dialogue with sonata form. Its main theme is again based on an external source, another Ukrainian folk song; abridged fragments of the theme recur throughout the movement, framing contrasting episodes. At the beginning of the movement, its sharp dance rhythms are articulated cleanly, both of the soloist’s hands playing the same material in unison—until another song-like theme intervenes. First heard in the high violins, the second theme will be the basis of the final apotheosis of the movement, which emerges after a protracted build-up over a pedal note (a long note held in one part, usually the bass, over which other musical activity continues). This preparatory passage for orchestra alone is underpinned by a lengthy drum roll, which eventually erupts, giving way to a final cadenza-like flourish for the soloist: then the second theme is stated grandly, triumphantly, with the piano’s block chords recalling the introduction to the first movement.

Program notes by Marco Ladd, Ph.D. with support from Marissa Glynias Moore, Ph.D.

VOTE FOR YOUR FAVORITE FINALIST TO WIN THE AUDIENCE PRIZE!

Scan the QR code above with your phone to vote! The winner will be announced after the performances on Saturday, August 7.

pianocleveland.org

final round, concerto

Documents