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Piano Music by Bach, Brahms,Liszt, Medtner and Schubert

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Live RecordingsViv McLean

Piano Music by Bach, Brahms, Liszt, Medtner and Schubert

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Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) 1 Prelude & Fugue in E flat minor BMV 853 8’13 Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) Two Rhapsodies Op. 79 2 i Agitato 9’13 3 ii Molto passionato, ma non troppo allegro 5’54 Franz Schubert (1797-1828) Sonata in B flat D 960 4 i Molto moderato 16’44 5 ii Andante sostenuto 9’18 6 iii Scherzo 3’33 7 iv Allegro ma non troppo 8’40 Nikolai Medtner (1880-1951) 8 Fairy Tale Op. 8 No. 2 5’45 Franz Liszt (1811-1886) 9 Transcendental Etude No. 4 “Mazeppa” 7’34 74’54

Viv McLeanpiano

Viv McLean Live Recordings

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Viv McLean won First Prize at the 2002 Maria Canals International Piano Competition in Barcelona and has performed in all the major venues in the UK, as well as throughout Europe, Japan, Australia and the USA. He has performed concertos with orchestras such as the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Philharmonia Orchestra, London Philharmonic Orchestra, English Chamber Orchestra, Halle Orchestra, BBC Concert Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra, Sinfonia Viva, Orchestra of the Swan and the Northern Chamber Orchestra under the baton of such conductors as Daniel Harding, Wayne Marshall, Christopher Warren-Green, Owain Arwell Hughes, Carl Davis and Marvin Hamlisch. Viv studied from an early age with Ruth Nye and, after attending Chetham’s School of Music, he went on to study at the Royal Academy of Music with Hamish Milne. At the Academy he held the Hodgson Fellowship and was made an Associate of the Royal Academy in 2005. He made his Wigmore Hall recital debut through winning the Friends of the Royal Academy Wigmore Award. Whilst studying at the Academy, he was the piano winner at the Royal Overseas-League Music Competition and was selected as one of three winners of the NFMS Young Artists Competition. An extremely active chamber musician, Viv had collaborated with musicians including Natalie Clein, Daniel Hope, Lawrence Power, David Le Page, Mary Bevan and Guy Johnston and plays regularly with groups such as the Adderbury Ensemble, the Leopold String Trio, Ensemble 360, the Ysaye Quartet, the Sacconi String Quartet and members of the Elias, Allegri and Tippett Quartets. Viv has appeared at festivals including the International Beethoven Festival in Bonn, the Festival des Saintes in France, Vinterfestspill i Bergstaden in Norway and the Cheltenham International Festival in the UK. He has previously recorded for labels such as Sony Classical Japan, Naxos, Nimbus, RPO Records and ICSM Records, and has also recorded for BBC Radio 3, Classic FM, Sky Arts as well as for radio in Germany, France, Australia, Norway and Poland.

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Viv McLean Live RecordingsJohann Sebastian Bach’s first book of 24 Preludes and Fugues dates from 1722, while he was Kapellmeister at Prince Leopold’s court at Cöthen. His years there proved particularly productive for instrumental music; after his move to Leipzig in 1723, church music dominated his time, though he composed another 24 Preludes and Fugues some 20 years after the first collection.

Each book of ‘The 48’ alternates major and minor pieces in every key along the chromatic scale. The idea was not without precedent but remained unusual; the unequal tuning of keyboard instruments had until then made some keys more congenial to the ear than others. The introduction of “equal temperament”, which made a wider range of keys possible, is the topic of tomes – but there is a further twist to this tale: according to his biographer Forkel, Bach was not strictly using “equal temperament”. He tuned his instruments himself with his own method which, frustratingly for everyone else, he kept strictly secret. Various theories have been advanced concerning what he wanted from a “well-tempered” instrument and how he indicated it; some even involve a set of loops he sketched on the title page.

The E flat minor Prelude and Fugue offers a sombre mood that befits its dark key, with six flats. The prelude is a sarabande that unfolds in an eloquent, tragic aria. The fugue that follows – originally noted in D sharp minor (identical on the keyboard to E flat minor) – is among the set’s most substantial, a meditative working out of a theme whose apparent simplicity proves profoundly deceptive.

Although Johannes Brahms had composed occasional miniatures and stand-alone piano pieces since his youth, he swiftly moved towards larger-scale works, first with three ambitious early sonatas, and thereafter some magnificent virtuoso variations. In 1878 he produced his 8 Klavierstücke, Op. 76; though their path to publication was somewhat bumpy, they were excellently received, ultimately pointing the way towards his late sets of piano pieces, composed about a decade later.

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The two Rhapsodies Op. 79 followed hot on Op. 76’s heels, and were written while the composer was on holiday in the Wörthersee resort of Portschach, Austria. Their dedicatee, Elisabeth von Herzogenberg, suggested they should be called ‘Rhapsodies’, instead of the intended ‘Klavierstücke’ – which might account for the somewhat unrhapsodic nature of these substantial, rugged and strictly wrought pieces. Von Herzogenberg, a close friend of the composer and herself a dedicated musician, was more than delighted with them, telling him: “The fact that the G minor is my favourite does not make me insensitive towards the intensely prickly beauty of the one in B minor.”

Nevertheless it was – as so often – Clara Schumann who was at the forefront of Brahms’s mind. The legendary pianist had been plagued by neuralgia in her arm during the mid 1870s. Brahms sent her the Rhapsodies, remarking that here “you can really run riot and test whether the course of treatment has actually had any effect”. Such are the demands of his piano writing and the rich, powerful tone it requires that one hopes all had been successful.

Franz Schubert’s late works have acquired an extraordinary mystique. This music – anguished, vital, personal, universal – is all the more poignant because with hindsight we know that the composer, only 31, was about to meet his untimely end.

At that age many musicians are struggling to establish themselves; Schubert was no exception. Yet his output already included more than 900 pieces, mostly of a quality and profundity unimaginable to others. In his last years he produced a flood of masterpieces – as if he, like his contemporary, the English poet John Keats, feared “that I may cease to be, before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain”. He had contracted syphilis in 1822 or 23, a then-incurable illness that sparked emotional suffering at least as acute as its horrific physical effects.

Nevertheless, early 1828 had seen an upswing in Schubert’s fortunes: two fine publishers were interested in him, so he may have been writing fast, at a splendid level, anticipating a breakthrough. He probably had no idea his time was quite

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as limited as it proved to be. The trilogy of “late” sonatas – the C minor D958, A major D959 and B flat major D960 – were completed alongside the String Quintet in C major that September.

On medical advice, he had moved to his brother Ferdinand’s apartment in the Viennese suburbs, for better air; here he lived and worked in a narrow little room above the street. Yet there was little indication that he anticipated his fast approaching end. On 27 September he played through all three sonatas for friends, a physically demanding exercise unlikely for someone at death’s door.

Even in his last letter, he asks Franz Schober to send him a James Fennimore Cooper novel, clearly expecting to read it. He died on 19 November 1828 – possibly of typhoid fever – leaving unpublished manuscripts galore.

In 1838 Robert Schumann visited Ferdinand Schubert to seek them out; his discoveries included the Symphony No.9. Ferdinand had sold the last three piano sonatas to the publisher Diabelli in 1829, but they were only printed a decade later, with a grateful dedication to Schumann.

The B flat major Sonata’s serene opening is interrupted with distant, threatening thunder: a soft bass trill, where the music pauses, as if about to vanish altogether. Further tension is created by the rhythmic contrast of duple-time quavers and triplets. The second subject hovers between major and minor; as the movement progresses, silences and changes of direction grow increasingly pronounced. The ‘first time’ section, introducing the exposition repeat, is the only time the bass trill is played fortissimo.

The andante sostenuto is a pitch-dark creation: a barcarolle-like melody in thirds, a forlorn, oar-dipping figure punctuating it beneath. A contrasting central section seems to raise the emotional stakes, but finally subsides into the first theme’s return. At last the music finds peace, closing in the major with an amen-like cadence.

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The high-spirited scherzo banishes the sombre mood, though the trio section involves unsettling, accented off-beats. The final bars seem to echo the rhetorical questions and silences of the first movement.

A sustained octave opens the rondo finale – a favourite trick of Schubert’s. The music is powered by minor/major ambiguity, the theme hovering around one before resolving onto the other. A contrasting melody eventually appears over flowing accompaniment. Finally, the coda is uncharacteristically fast and loud – as if Schubert is trying just a little too hard to end on a positive note.

Nikolai Medtner was born in Moscow in 1880, a younger contemporary of Rachmaninov and Scriabin. The sensitive but trenchant musician was long overshadowed by those two towering composer-pianists; all the more so after the Russian Revolution of 1917 induced Rachmaninov to flee to the west, where his performing career soon reached the stratospheres. Rachmaninov nevertheless held Medtner in high esteem and remained a great friend to him; he organised Medtner’s first concert tour to the US and Canada in 1924.

Medtner, however, found himself at odds with both the commercial needs of western performances and the prevailing direction of contemporary music. He made no secret of his dislikes, among them Stravinsky, Schoenberg and modernism in general. He and his wife eventually settled in Golders Green, north London in 1936, where the composer lived a quiet life, writing music and teaching. He died there in 1951.

Medtner produced a large number of pieces under the unusual title Skazi. ‘Fairy Tales’ is a bit of a misnomer: across the course of his career, these works were inspired by many different sources, including Pushkin and Shakespeare. The two pieces Op. 8 are the first, dating from 1904 – and while there is no particular indication of what sparked Op. 8 No. 2, it is one of Medtner’s masterpieces, written when he was all of 25. An intense, driven and highly demanding piece in sonata form, it is comparable to Rachmaninov in its turbulent and complex piano writing, and to Scriabin in the extremity of its expression marks (“pleading”, “suffocated”, “threatening”, etc) - but with a language, in particular rhythmic, that is all Medtner’s own.

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As a teenage prodigy Franz Liszt conceived the Bach-inspired idea of 48 studies running twice through all the musical keys. He published the initial 12 Etudes in 1826, but they were fated for greater things when, established as virtuoso superstar, he rewrote them 11 years later. Schumann declared the second version “studies in storm and dread, for at the most ten or 12 players in the world”.

Finally, in 1852, five years after retiring from performance to settle in Weimar and devote himself to composition, Liszt reworked the studies yet again, adding programmatic titles. Now the Etudes reach a new level of poetic expression through the vivid sonic pictures and atmospheres they create. The term “Transcendental” nevertheless remains appropriate: the performer must reach beyond the physical demands to convey these pieces as pure music.

No. 4, ‘Mazeppa’, is loosely based on the story of a page in the 17th-century Polish court whose punishment for an affair with a married woman involved being tied behind a horse so severely whipped that it ran for three days, dragging the unfortunate young man with it. The poor horse did not survive, but incredibly Mazeppa did: rescued by Cossacks, he eventually became a Ukrainian prince. Liszt includes a quote from Victor Hugo: “Il tombe enfin!...et se relève roi” – finally he falls…and rises again as king.

© 2020 Jessica Duchen

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Dedicated to the memory of Hamish Milne.

Produced by Ernest Scott.Mastered by Andy Forsyth and Mark Stone.

Recorded November 2000 at ACT City Hamamatsu Concert Hall, Japan (1, 8-9)and May 2008 at Wigmore Hall, London, UK (2-7).

Publishers: Henle (1-7); Dover (8); Peters (9).

Booklet notes © 2020 Jessica Duchen. Cover: Photograph of Viv McLean © 2019 Sebastian Rice-Edwards.

Inside front cover: Photograph of Viv McLean © 2006 Florian Willnauer.Reverse inlay: Photograph of Viv McLean © 2018 David Le Page.

Design: Red Engine Design.

Printed in the E.U.

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