19 July 2021 7.30pm Wigmore Hall

Guildhall Wigmore Recital Prize Winner’s Recital

Élisabeth Pion piano

Guildhall School of Music & DramaFounded in 1880 by the City of London Corporation

Chairman of the Board of Governors Graham Packham

Principal Lynne Williams am

Vice-Principal and Director of Music Professor Jonathan Vaughan

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Guildhall Wigmore Recital PrizeWinner’s Recital

Élisabeth Pion piano

Mozart Piano Sonata in F major, K332Lili Boulanger Prélude in D flat majorLili Boulanger Trois morceaux pour pianoMessiaen Le baiser de l’enfant JésusRavel OndineBeethoven Piano Sonata in F minor, Op 57,

‘Appassionata’ (1804–5)

Monday 19 July 2021, 7.30pm Wigmore Hall

Would patrons please ensure that mobile phones are switched off. Please stifle coughing as much as possible and ensure that watch alarms and any other electronic devices which may become audible are switched off.

Guildhall Wigmore Recital Prize

The Guildhall Wigmore Recital Prize annually awards an exceptional Guildhall School musician with a Wigmore Hall recital.

This recital by Élisabeth Pion, who won last year’s Guildhall Wigmore Prize, was originally scheduled to take place in June 2020. Like so many other events, however, it was lost to the lockdown. Guildhall School is deeply grateful to John Gilhooly and Wigmore Hall for rescheduling this recital. We look forward to a wonderful concert tonight, and to many future concerts stemming from this collaboration between Guildhall School of Music & Drama and Wigmore Hall, which has been running since 2009 and which we look forward to extending long into a post-COVID future.

Winners:

2020 Élisabeth Pion piano

2019 Ema Nikolovska mezzo-soprano Dylan Perez piano

2018 Ming Xie piano

2017 Michael Petrov cello Erdem Misirlioglu piano

2016 Marina Koka piano

2015 Jean-Selim Abdelmoula piano

2014 Joshua Owen Mills tenor Rodrigo de Vera piano

2013 Martin Hassler baritone Marek Ruszczynski piano

2012 Mihkel Poll piano

2011 Alexandra Dariescu piano

2010 Jonathan Sell baritone Tomasz Lis piano

2009 Sasha Grynyuk piano

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) Piano Sonata in F major, K332 (1783)

1 Allegro 2 Adagio 3 Allegro assai

Clear, transparent, rooted in the real world rather than in literary-inspired (or even drug-induced) fantasy, Mozart’s piano music may appear straightforward in outline but it lacks nothing in terms of profundity. Unearthing this level of expression in music of such apparent simplicity is a lifetime’s work for a musician, bearing out the adage that Mozart’s piano music is too easy for amateurs and too difficult for professionals.

The F major sonata, K332 – the twelfth of Mozart’s 18 piano sonatas – is the last of three (beginning with K330) written in the summer of 1783, some think in Salzburg during his visit back home from Vienna to introduce his new wife, Constanze, to his father Leopold and sister Nannerl. This is the time both of his ‘Linz’ Symphony (No 35) and the birth of his first child, Raimund Leopold, who died in infancy.

The sonata’s first movement contains a wealth of contrasting ideas: an elegant pastoral opening theme (with a playful horn-call complement), a dramatic minor-key idea under a cloud of Sturm und Drang and an innocent, serenade-like second subject with a lightly strummed accompaniment. Along with elegance there is dynamism, underlined by a cross-rhythm device and outlined by sforzando accents that presage Beethoven.

The slow movement is a lyrical song of ravishing beauty – like an opera aria that in a stroke halts the narrative in order to home in on the innermost turmoil of a single character. The finale opens with an ebullient toccata to show off pristine fingerwork. Contrast comes in a more poignant minor-key tune, and there are comic touches too that evoke the world of opera buffa.

Lili Boulanger (1893–1918) Prélude in D flat major (1911)

This beautiful miniature was one of Lili Boulanger’s first compositions, written aged 17 in March 1911. For reasons unknown, Boulanger left no performance indications on the manuscript – devolving all choices of tempo, articulation, phrasing and mood to the performer.

The sound-world is not alien, though. The vast submerged bells of Debussy’s ‘La cathédrale engloutie’ (published the previous year in Book 1 of his Préludes) appear in the anchored bass chords; while the first four chords in the right hand, rising chromatically, suggest the upward resolution of the angst-ridden ‘Tristan’ chord at the opening of Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde. (Three years later, Boulanger would begin her song ‘Si tout ceci n’est pas qu’un pauvre rêve’ with a similar reference to Tristan.)

The glinting central passage, beginning with a rocking figure in the right hand, introduces some deft touches of rhythmic suppleness, leading to a climax of descending octaves (more bells!), returning us to the atmosphere of the opening.

Lili Boulanger (1893–1918) Trois morceaux pour piano (1914)

1 D’un vieux jardin (Of an Old Garden) 2 D’un jardin clair (Of a Bright Garden) 3 Cortège (Procession)

The music of Lili Boulanger has enjoyed a resurgence in recent years, prior to which her reputation was overshadowed by that of her elder sister Nadia. By contrast with Nadia – who enjoyed a celebrated 70-year career as teacher and mentor to countless many hundreds of composers and musicians, among them Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter, Daniel Barenboim and John Eliot Gardiner – Lili died of intestinal tuberculosis at the age of only 24, by which time her potential was abundantly clear but tragically unfulfilled.

These three pieces were written in 1914 in the months before the outbreak of the First World War while Lili was in residence at the Villa Medici in Rome, having become the first woman to win the Prix de Rome composition prize with her cantata Faust et Hélène.

D’un vieux jardin opens in a lightly nostalgic but relatively breezy vein before turning towards darker harmonies. The left hand then outlines a descending tread leading to a conclusion that suggests this ‘old garden’ has not yet yielded all its secrets.

Less complicated than its predecessor, as the ‘bright garden’ of its title might suggest, D’un jardin clair opens with a rising–falling figure that features throughout. This figure also shows more than a passing resemblance to the opening of Debussy’s piano Prélude ‘Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air’.

The lively Cortège, with its carefree, babbling accompaniment, was originally composed for violin and piano and later arranged for solo piano. Written in the manner of a light salon piece, it captures a playful, childlike spirit.

Olivier Messiaen (1908–92) Le baiser de l’enfant Jésus (from Vingt regards sur l’enfant Jésus) (1944)

Messiaen’s Vingt regards sur l’enfant Jesus is often translated as Twenty Gazes of the Child Jesus. It is in effect a cycle of 20 contemplations or reflections on aspects of the Nativity, calling to mind key figures – the Virgin Mary, angels, prophets, shepherds but also considering the Cross, the Heavens, and concepts such as the Word made flesh and the Omnipotent Word.

Messiaen’s works display a regular preoccupation with a range of themes and techniques – among them number symbolism, birdsong, irregular or non-Western rhythms, and the musical scales of his own devising (the so-called ‘modes of limited transposition’, which he described in The Technique of My Musical Language, published in 1944, the year he composed the Vingt regards). But towering above all these influences and inspirations was the composer’s deeply felt Catholic faith. For Messiaen, this was ‘the first aspect of my work, the noblest, and doubtless the most useful and valuable; perhaps the only one I won’t regret at the time of my death’.

Like many of Messiaen’s piano works, Vingt regards was written with the particular pianistic talents of Yvonne Loriod in mind. Loriod – who later became Messiaen’s wife – gave the first complete performance in March 1945 at the Salle Gaveau in Paris.

Four themes or leitmotifs recur throughout the cycle, working as a unifying device – the Theme of God, Theme of Mystical Love, Theme of the Star and the Cross, and the Theme of Joy.

‘Le baiser de l’enfant Jésus’ (The Kiss of the Child Jesus) is the 15th of the 20 contemplations, in which Messiaen recalls an engraving of the child Jesus embracing the young St Thérèse of Lisieux. Here the theme of God appears as a serene lullaby, later adorned by filigree, trilling decoration in the right hand. After a swirling cadenza passage the pace picks up and, later, constellations of chords build in intensity to the joyous ecstasy of the kiss itself, followed by a coda representing a ghostly ‘shadow of the kiss’, which ultimately finds rest in divine slumber.

Over a century ago, when he wrote it, Ravel intended Gaspard de la nuit to offer pianists a challenge to exceed those of Balakirev’s then notoriously difficult oriental fantasy Islamey, written around 40 years earlier. Gaspard’s three pieces (‘Ondine’, ‘Scarbo’ and ‘Le gibet’) were suggested by poems from Aloysius Bertrand’s fantastical collection of the same name. Ravel certainly succeeded in his task, but he also created another tour de force – a new realm of pianistic complexity that was required in order to conjure sound-worlds of dark suggestion, of the ephemeral and of the supernatural.

Ondine is the water-sprite who appears at a mortal’s window one night and attempts to entice him to her palace at the bottom of a lake, to marry one of her sister sprites. Upon being rejected, she briefly sheds a tear, then bursts into laughter and vanishes.

The moonlit rippling of the opening (a finger-twister from the start), introduces Ondine’s ghostly song, marked ‘very sweet and expressive’. Seamless and atmospheric as the effect may be, the pianist is constantly redistributing song and accompaniment between the hands amid a continuous stream of mental as well as physical gymnastics. And bear in mind this ‘accompaniment’ is a complex, gossamer-light figuration of Ravel’s unique ingenuity and invention.

An episode with a Spanish flavour perhaps reflects Ravel’s Basque roots on his mother’s side and a rising figure in the left hand, no more than a passing thought at first, drives the prolonged build-up to the piece’s climax. Among Ravel’s heart-stopping effects near the end are a glissando wave (marked ‘as quietly as possible’) that spills across the entire range of the keyboard, and the ghostly, lonely echo of Ondine’s song – in the most fragile single notes, completely unaccompanied – before she gives out a cackle and spirits herself away.

Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) Ondine (from Gaspard de la nuit) (1908)

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) Piano Sonata in F minor, Op 57, ‘Appassionata’ (1804–5)

1 Allegro assai 2 Andante con moto – 3 Allegro ma non troppo – Presto

One of the few Beethoven piano sonatas to be coloured throughout by a tragic tone, the ‘Appassionata’ (a nickname coined by an enterprising publisher 30 years after its first publication) was apparently the composer’s favourite piano sonata up until his ‘Hammerklavier’ of 1817–18. It is a work of extremes – of emotional intensity as well as of pitch and dynamic range (the last two enabled by the new, five-and-a-half octave French Érard piano that Beethoven received in 1803).

The stormy first movement opens with an austere, questioning theme in spare octaves. It is spiked through with a four-note figure – stabbing rather than knocking – prefiguring the famous opening notes of the Fifth Symphony three years later. This figure reaches its peak of violence at the end of the development section. The return to the opening material (the recapitulation) fails to offer the traditional relaxation following the explorations of the development section: when the first theme returns, it is underpinned by menacing triplets in the bass. Crashing chordal outbursts along with tremolo effects and other figurations create a sense of alarm, bordering on hysteria, before the movement’s conclusion.

The gentle, chordal theme of the second movement comes as welcome relief, spawning a set of four variations. The movement ends in eerie suspense on a diminished-seventh chord, which is violently seized upon at the opening of the demonic finale.

Accordung to the composer’s friend and pupil Ferdinand Ries, the tempestuous, rushing figure that opens and dominates the finale came to Beethoven during a walk in the woods. ‘The whole way,’ Ries reports, ‘he had been humming – or, at times howling – always up and down, though without singing specific notes.’ Its energy is apparently inexhaustible, but it is interrupted briefly after the recapitulation by a surprise interloper – a brief wild, crashing rustic dance – before the movement hurtles to its end.

Programme notes by Edward Bhesania © 2021

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Élisabeth Pion Piano

A curious and innovative artist, pianist Élisabeth Pion, born in 1996 in Quebec, Canada, is active as a soloist, chamber musician, and artistic collaborator both in Canada and internationally. Based in London, Élisabeth is currently studying on the Artist Diploma programme with Ronan O’Hora at Guildhall School of Music & Drama, where she is a full scholarship holder since 2018, supported by the Goldsmiths Scholarship and the James Gibb Award. She has previously worked in Canada with Francine Lacroix, Suzanne Goyette and André Laplante.

Élisabeth was selected by Dame Imogen Cooper to take part in the Imogen Cooper Music Trust for 2021. In 2019, she was chosen to work with Christian Blackshaw during the Hellensmusic Festival. She has also played in many masterclasses, including for Till Fellner, Stephen Hough, Richard Goode, Paul Lewis and Robert Levin.

Élisabeth has been successful in many competitions: she has notably won the 1st prize of the Thousand Islands International Piano Competition, the ‘Prix Banque Nationale’ of the Prix d’Europe, the 1st prize of the Shean Piano Competition, the Silver Medal of the Musicians’ Company of London and the Guildhall Wigmore Recital Prize. Élisabeth was named in the CBC Palmares ‘30 Hot Canadian Classical Musicians under 30’, and was also selected as one of the ‘15 Rising Stars of 2018’ from the magazine La Scena Musicale. She made her BBC Radio 3 broadcast debut in 2019 in the BBC Total Immersion day celebrating Nadia and Lili Boulanger.

Her upcoming 2021 performances include her debut with the Orchestre symphonique de Laval and the Orchestre symphonique de Longueuil. She has previously been invited as a soloist with the Ensemble Sinfonia de Montréal, the Orchestre symphonique du Conservatoire de musique de Montréal, the Ensemble Volte and Arion Orchestre Baroque. Élisabeth is scheduled to make her debut in China in the near future.

Élisabeth is passionate about chamber music and is a member of the De Beauvoir Piano Trio. She has been active in performing on fortepiano, having worked with Maggie Cole, and has recently performed two Mozart concerti with Arion Orchestre Baroque in Montréal on a Broadwood piano dating from 1826, with conductor Mathieu Lussier. She is also fascinated by classical improvisation and has worked with Guildhall School’s Professor David Dolan in this area.

Élisabeth places great value on approaching music from a holistic perspective. Her deep interests in literature, writing and Tai Chi nurture her musical practice. She has had considerable experience of interdisciplinary collaboration with artists from different backgrounds: in 2015, with the Sanchez Brothers, photographers, for a project titled The Lesson; in 2016, with visual artist Patrick Bernatchez, as part of the exhibition Goldberg Experienced at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; and in 2018, with Le théâtre indépendant, as musical director of the Quartett Solo production (Heiner Müller). She is also the Co-Director of Unisson Festival in Canada, which centres on creating an immersive experience between a single listener and an individual musician.

Élisabeth is grateful for the support of the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths, the James Gibb Award, the Sylva Gelber Music Foundation, the Kathleen Trust, the Countess of Munster Musical Trust, Help Musicians UK, the Jeunesses Musicales du Canada and Talent Unlimited UK.

Forthcoming events

Thursday 22 July, online

Guildhall Chamber Music FestivalGuildhall’s summer Chamber Music Festival returns with highlights from three days of performances from some of the School’s most accomplished chamber groups and student–professor collaborations, featuring renowned performers from the chamber music faculty.

Offering the chance to enjoy much-loved chamber music repertoire, the festival will include a performance by the Consone Quartet – BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artists and Guildhall School’s current Hans Keller Chamber Fellows – plus masterclasses with members of the Endellion String Quartet.

Watch online for free at gsmd.ac.uk/summer_2021

Friday 24 September, 7.30pm, Barbican Hall

Guildhall Symphony Orchestra & ChorusTakuo Yuasa conductor Giselle Allen soprano Kitty Whately mezzo-soprano

Mahler Symphony No 2 in C minor, ‘Resurrection’

Guildhall School musicians begin the new academic year with a performance of Mahler’s epic Resurrection Symphony.

Gustav Mahler’s hugely powerful second symphony provides the perfect showcase for the combined forces of the Guildhall Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, reunited for the first time since the emergence of the pandemic. Following four movements exploring questions of life, death and eternity, the composer described his vision for the work’s extraordinary choral finale as

“A feeling of overwhelming love [which] fills us with blissful knowledge and illuminates our existence.”

Tickets: £10, £15 (£5 concessions), available from Barbican Box Office: 020 7638 8891 barbican.org.uk

Guildhall Short Courses

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Summer courses run until 6 August.

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