Selected Sonatas                                                               Scarlatti

 

In 1729 Scarlatti followed his student, soon-to-become-queen Maria Barbara, to Seville, then Madrid, where he spent the rest of his life.  The main works of his Iberian years are the remarkable series of more than 600 keyboard sonatas.  They typically contain two repeated sections in which he explored the techniques of crossed hands, moving thirds and sixths, leaps in excess of an octave and broken chords moving in contrary motion.  At times the performer's arms must move parallel to the keyboard, with fingers walking like legs, in order to play the hands-crossed sections as written. Originally written for harpsichord, these sonatas are difficult to interpret on the modern piano; however, they afford abundant pleasure to the listener, and to the pianist considerable technical challenge — and great exercise.

 

Fantasia in c minor, K. 475                                                  Mozart

 

In 1785, the date of this work, Mozart was in the midst of composing a flurry of piano concertos (no fewer than 15 in four years).  He found time to compose several fantasias as well, but they were conceived as improvisatory works and many, no doubt, went unnoted.  This short, but highly organized, four movement work, in the words of Olin Downs, “seems to have escaped human thralldom; music of a charmed rhythmic life, songs that float with delicious grace and waywardness.”  It was published with the C minor sonata, K. 457, as Opus 11, but could surely have stood alone.

 

Secret and Glass Gardens                                                 Higdon

 

In less than a decade the American composer Jennifer Higdon has garnered an impressive number of awards, fellowships and Composer-in-Residencies. Her work has been widely recorded. It pushes boundaries, particularly in the unconventional use of conventional instruments—never as an end in itself; always with a purposeful expressive intent.  It is vividly one of a kind.  This richly imagined music has something to say and does so with eloquence. 

 

Valses nobles et sentimentales                                           Ravel

 

Ravel was a poseur, an artificer, a dandy and an intellectual.  He loved the arts and possessed the fastidious and avid sensibility of the the critic and the connoisseur.  His music reflects the man.  It’s unique for the dark and luminously glittery world it evokes, rendering the commonplace unique and the exotic believable.  In naming this set of waltzes, he gives a clue that he is being more ironic than affectionate — almost as if he’s saying “sweet and sour.”  The dances alternate between lively and quiet. At the finale the texture thins — the work seems rather to dissolve than merely end.

                                                                                                           

 

Estampes                                                                            Debussy

 

Debussy’s three descriptive pieces, Estampes inaugurated a series he continued in his two sets of Images — all evocative of the “visual” for the first time in his piano music.  He weaves, in these, a network of parallels between the sight and sound.  Some say they were “his elegant way of keeping tradition at bay.”  The first, Pagodes, creates a Chinese atmosphere using the Oriental pentatonic scale and a simulation of tolling bells. Of the second, inspired by a Spanish etching called Soiree dans Grenade, de Falla said it “conjures up the effect of images mirrored by moonlight on the limpid waters of the Alhambra’s pools.”  In the concluding Jardins sous la Pluie, the patter of rain is described in delicate arpeggios and the return of the sun through subtle modulation.

 

Three Nocturnes, Opus 9                                                   Chopin

 

In Chopin’s hands the nocturne became a form breathing serenity and nobility, suggestive of moonlight and a comforting darkness. “Although Chopin”, wrote Huneker, “seldom exuberantly cheerful, is in many of his nocturnes morbidly sad” he nevertheless ennobled the form giving it dramatic breadth, passion, even grandeur. These nocturnes are truly night pieces — some agitated, others like whisperings at dusk.  The most familiar of the ones we hear today, is the No. 2 in E-flat Major, which speaks of beauty at its purest.

 

Union                                                                               Gottschalk

 

Gottschalk is remembered as a virtuoso pianist and a prolific composer of popular works.  He was the first truly pan-American composer, living for extended periods in the US, South America and the Caribbean.  With playful inventiveness, he incorporated local influences and musical traditions from each locale into his works.

 

exquisite music - superbly performed