the thomas schultz summer piano seminar at stanford

The Thomas Schultz Summer Piano Seminar at Stanford

CAMPBELL RECITAL HALL TUESDAY, 17 AUGUST – SATURDAY, 21 AUGUST 2021

STANFORD UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT OF MUSIC

PROGRAM: THOMAS SCHULTZ, PIANO

TUESDAY, 17 AUGUST 11:30 PM

“Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme” J. S. Bach / Ferruccio Busonitranscribed for piano (1898) (1685–1750) / (1866–1924)

North American Ballads (1978–79) Frederic Rzewski i. Dreadful Memories (After Aunt Molly Jackson) (1938–2021) ii. Which Side Are You On? (After Florence Reese)

“Ich ruf’ zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ” Bach / Busonitranscribed for piano (1907–09)

North American Ballads Rzewski iii. Down By The Riverside iv. Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues

Three Album Leaves (1917–21) Busoni i. (1917, Zurich) ii. (1921, Rome) iii. (In the manner of a Chorale Prelude) (1921, Berlin)

Rain Study (1999) Hyo-shin Na (b. 1959)

Many thanks to the Elaine and Richard Fohr Foundation for their very generous support of the Piano Seminar.

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ABOUT THE ARTIST

Thomas schulTz has established an international reputation both as an interpreter of music from the Classical tradition — particularly Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, and Liszt — and as one of the leading exponents of the music of our time. Among his recent engagements are solo recitals in New York, San Francisco, Berlin, Paris, Ghent, Seoul, Taipei, and Kyoto, and at the Schoenberg Festival in Vienna, the Piano Spheres series in Los Angeles, Korea’s Tongyoung Festival,

Summer Piano Seminar at Stanford. He also has managed the production of the Hot Air Music Festival, an annual new music marathon in San Francisco that is free to the public.

Through the years, Sun has studied piano in the studios of Tien Hsieh, Lorna Peters, Thomas Schultz, Sharon Mann, and Alexander Kobrin. In the coming 2021–22 season, as a recently chosen finalist for the Berlin Prize for Young Artists, Sun will travel to the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg and the Musik- brauerei in Berlin, where he will discuss and perform a program featuring music of Hyo-shin Na, Frederic Rzewski, Janáček, and Schumann.

RogeR Xia, a freshman at Stanford University, graduated from Davis Senior High School and was a San Francisco Conservatory of Music pre-college scholarship student. He started piano lessons at five and violin lessons at seven, and continues his studies with Thomas Schultz and Owen Dalby, respectively. Roger has studied with Linda Beaulieu, Natsuki Fukasawa, and Richard Cionco (piano) and Dong Ho and William Barbini (violin). He was a National Young Arts Foundation winner (2018, 2020), and joined the National Youth Orchestra (NYO-USA 2019, 2020). Roger was the concertmaster of the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra (2017–20) and played as a piano soloist with the orchestra.

Aside from music, Roger enjoys Ping Pong, Kung-Fu, and skiing.

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the Festival of New American Music in Sacramento, and the April in Santa Cruz Festival. From 2004 to 2011, he gave a series of six recitals at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, playing repertoire ranging from major works by Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, and Chopin to rarely heard music by Schoenberg, Rzewski, Cage, and Na. He has also given recitals in New York at Bargemusic and the Goethe Institute. He has appeared as a soloist at the Other Minds Festival in San Francisco and in chamber music performances with the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the Da Camera Society of Houston, Robert Craft’s 20th Century Classics Ensemble, and the St. Lawrence String Quartet. In 2005, 2010, 2014, and 2017, he gave masterclasses on the piano music of the Second Viennese School at the Schoenberg Center in Vienna and in 2016 gave performances of the complete solo works of Schoenberg in Vienna, San Francisco, and Seoul and Taegu in Korea. In the summer of 2018, he began giving an annual series of masterclasses for young artists at Stanford University.

His recitals are notable for programming that celebrates the continuing vitality of the piano repertoire, juxtaposing the old and the new. He has worked closely with such eminent composers as Cage, Feldman, Wolff, Rzewski, Earle Brown, Jonathan Harvey, Hyo-shin Na, and Elliott Carter (in performances of the Double Concerto at the Colorado Music Festival and at Alice Tully Hall in New York). Since 2002, Schultz has included in his recitals works written especially for him by Frederic Rzewski (The Babble, 2003), Christian Wolff (Touch, 2002; Long Piano, 2005), Hyo-shin Na (Rain Study, 1999; Walking, Walking, 2003; Sea Wind, 2010), Walter Zimmermann (AIMIDE, 2001–02), and Boudewijn Buckinx (The Floating World, 2004; Romancing the World, 2005). In 2012 — John Cage’s centennial year — Schultz was Artistic Director of the John Cage – 100 Years festival at Stanford University and played recitals dedicated to Cage’s solo piano music at the festival, at Crown Point Press gallery in San Francisco, and at Bargemusic in NYC.

Schultz’s recording of solo works by Cage was released in 2018 on the Mode label and his recording of Christian Wolff’s Long Piano in 2009 was released by New World Records. Additional solo CDs — a double CD of the Goldberg Variations of Bach and Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated!, a CD of works written for him by Buckinx and Wolff, a CD of the complete solo works of Schoenberg, and recordings of music by Beethoven, Schumann, Schubert, Liszt, Satie, and Busoni — are on the Wooden Fish label. His recordings of works by the Korean composer Hyo-shin Na on CDs from the New World, Seoul, and TopArt labels have received special recognition. Schultz’s recording of Stravinsky’s Concerto for Two Solo Pianos is on the MusicMasters label, and he can be heard in chamber works of Earle Brown on a Newport Classics recording.

Schultz’s musical studies were with John Perry, Leonard Stein, and Philip Lillestol. He has been a member of the piano faculty at Stanford University since 1994.

An ardent interpreter of contemporary music, Lina enjoys performing and premiering works by living composers. Her current dissertation project explores piano works by living composers.

Beginning in 2012, Lina taught piano students at the Peabody Preparatory School of the Johns Hopkins University and has also been a music theory tutor for undergraduate students at Peabody. Currently, she is a graduate teaching assistant at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Lina earned both the Bachelor of Music and Masters of Music in Piano Performance and Pedagogy from the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University as a pupil of Yong Hi Moon. She is currently a D.M.A. candidate in Piano Performance and Pedagogy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison under the tutelage of Jessica Johnson.

adRian liu studied with Inessa Litvin in San Diego and Thomas Schultz at Stanford. He made his orchestral debut with the San Diego Symphony in May 2012. In 2013, he made his solo recital debut at the La Jolla Athenæum. At the Aspen Music Festival in 2015, Adrian had a full scholarship from the Musical Merit Foundation and studied with Veda Kaplinsky.

At Stanford, Adrian performed solo recitals and in chamber recitals with the Stanford New Ensemble and the St. Lawrence String Quartet. With Tysen Dauer, Adrian presented three recitals of four-hand music focusing on American Minimalism. In 2017 and 2019, he won the Butler Prize in piano performance, and in 2020, he won the Blew-Culley-Lafolette Prize. From 2017 to 2019, Adrian was the keyboardist for the Stanford Symphony Orchestra. Adrian lives in Sacramento and works in the California Judicial Branch. He will begin a Doctoral degree in philosophy at Rutgers — New Brunswick in 2022.

With “probing seriousness” (Performing Arts Monterey Bay) and “a stunningly beautiful palette of colors” (Peninsula Reviews), pianist Kevin Lee Sun interprets music old and new. Born in Sacramento, California, Sun gave his first solo recital at age eight; at 17, he won second prize at the 2011 Virginia Waring International Piano Competition. Since then, Sun has been invited to perform a diverse repertoire around the world: works by Stravinsky, Hauer, and Eisler at the Arnold Schoenberg Center in Vienna; Janáček at the Banff Centre in Canada; Mozart and Schubert at Pianofest in the Hamptons; and Hyo-shin Na at Old First Concerts in San Francisco. He also has performed Bach and Beethoven concertos with the Bravo Bach! Festival Orchestra and the Stanford Symphony Orchestra.

As a proponent of living composers’ works, Sun has performed pieces by György Kurtág, Hyo-shin Na, Jeffrey Gao, Daniel De Togni, and many others as part of Stanford University’s New Music Ensemble, San Francisco Conservatory of Music’s Composition Department, and Thomas Schultz’s

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ABOUT THE COMPOSERS

In Korea, hyo-shin na has twice been awarded the Korean National Composers Prize for Western instrumental music and for Korean traditional instrumental music, and in the West, she has been commissioned by the Fromm Foundation at Harvard University, the Koussevitzky Foundation, the Zellerbach Family Foundation, the Argosy Foundation, the W & F Hewlett Foundation, the Elaine and Richard Fohr Foundation, InterMusic SF, the Other Minds Festival, and the Los Angeles International New Music Festival, among many others. Her music has been played worldwide by ensembles as varied as the Barton Workshop, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the Kronos Quartet, the San José Chamber Orchestra, the National Gugak Center Orchestra of Korea, the Del Sol String Quartet, the Ives Quartet, the Earplay Ensemble, New Music Works, the Pacific Chamber Orchestra, and the Korean Traditional Orchestra of the National Theatre, among many others. Numerous groups and individual musicians, such as New Music Works in the U.S., the Barton Workshop in Europe, and the Jeong Ga Ak Hoe Ensemble in Asia have presented portrait concerts devoted solely to her music.

Hyo-shin Na has written for Western instruments, traditional Korean instruments, and traditional Japanese instruments and has written music that combines Western and Asian instruments and their respective ways of being played. Her music for traditional Korean instruments is recognized by both composers and performers in Korea — particularly by the younger generation — as being uniquely innovative. Her writing for combinations of Western and Eastern instruments is unusual for its refusal to compromise the integrity of differing sounds and ideas; she prefers to let the instruments interact, coexist, and conflict in her music.

She is the author of the bilingual book Conversations with Kayageum Master Byung-ki Hwang (Pulbit Press, 2001). Her music has been recorded on the Fontec (Japan), Top Arts (Korea), Seoul (Korea), and New World Records (U.S.) labels and has been published in Korea and Australia. Since 2006, her music has been published exclusively by Lantro Music (Belgium). | www.hyo-shinna.com

American composer and pianist FRedeRic Rzewski studied composition with Roger Sessions and Milton Babbitt at Princeton, where he earned an M.F.A. in 1960 before moving to Europe to study with Dallapicola in Florence and Elliott Carter in Berlin. In 1961, he co-founded the influential Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV), a live electronic music ensemble with composers Alvin Curran and Richard Teitelbaum. From the 1960s on, Rzewski was active as a composer, pianist, and teacher at universities and conservatories in Europe and the United States. He died in June of 2021.

ABOUT THE SEMINAR PARTICIPANTS

leslie Jin is a rising sophomore studying Music and Product Design. She was the winner of the Patrick Butler Prize in the 2021 Department of Music Awards. Leslie was inducted into the 2019 MTAC Young Artist Guild. She has been a Young Performer at the Music@Menlo International Chamber Music Institute for four years, and she was a full-scholarship student at the 2016 Morningside Music Bridge in Beijing. As a recipient of the 2018 National Chopin Foundation Scholarship, she attended the 2019 Frost Chopin Academy as a scholar. Her suc-cesses at competitions include 1st prizes at the MTAC Solo Competition (Divi-sions II/III), American Fine Arts Festival, and U.S. Open Music Competition, including an Outstanding Gold Medalist Award. She is also a top-prize winner at the Pacific Musical Society Competition, the San José International Piano Competition, and others. She performed at Weill/Carnegie Hall and has been a participant in musical outreach since age nine.

david lee fell in love with music after immigrating to the U.S. at age ten from Taiwan. Two years later, he asked his parents for piano lessons. He studied pri-vately with Marion Zarzeczna through high school and followed with further studies with Thomas Schultz at Stanford University. After a hiatus, he studied for a period with Corey McVicar at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. He has been a finalist and prize-winner at the San Diego International Piano Competition for Outstanding Amateurs and the Washington International Piano Artists Competition. When not enjoying music, he works as a software engineer in the San Francisco Bay Area and actively keeps his twin four-year-olds from banging the piano. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in computer science from Stanford University and a Master’s degree in predictive analytics from North-western University.

Award-winning pianist lina yoo min lee enjoys a versatile career as a soloist, chamber musician, and educator in countries as diverse as the United States, Spain, and her native Korea. Classically trained in piano from the age of five, she won her first competition when she was seven years old. She has appeared in venues such as Alice Tully Hall and Weill Recital Hall in New York City; Ceramic Palace Hall, Mozart Hall, and Win Art Hall in Korea; at the Conservatorio superior de música “Joaquín Rodrigo” in Spain; and in Boston, Baltimore, and Madison, Wisconsin. As a chamber musician, she has performed at the Walnut Hill School for the Arts, Bowdoin International Music festival, Aspen Music Festival, the Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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FeRRuccio Busoni, Italian composer and pianist, lived as a young man in Vienna and Graz, taught piano at the Music Institute in Helsinki, the Moscow Conservatory, and the New England Conservatory, eventually settling in Berlin. He spent the years of the First World War in Zurich and returned to Berlin in 1920, where he died in 1924.

Busoni’s first mature works were the Elegies for piano, written in 1907. The first Elegy is entitled “Nach der Wendung” (“After the Turning Point”). For piano, he subsequently wrote six Sonatinas, the Fantasia after J. S. Bach, the Fantasia Contrappuntistica (a large-scale fantasy on and completion of Bach’s The Art of Fugue), the Toccata, the three Album Leaves, the Prélude et étude en arpèges, and the Five Short Pieces for the Cultivation of Polyphonic Playing. He also wrote numerous transcriptions of organ works of Bach for solo piano (it is, ironically, through these transcriptions that he is most well-known). In addition to numerous chamber and orchestral works, he wrote a number of operas, among them Arlecchino and Doktor Faust.

Busoni was considered by many to be the greatest pianist of the early 20th century. Claudio Arrau, who heard Busoni play many times, said of him,

Unforgettable!... I remember an incomparable Liszt Sonata, an incomparable Hammerklavier. In Chopin, his Preludes were incredible. Not the usual Chopin, perfumed. But it was very beautiful. A little shocking, yes. But so exciting and new.

Artur Rubinstein described Busoni as, ...by far, the most interesting pianist alive... His temperament and his complete mastery were such that his performances of Liszt’s works were unsurpassed.

In his book Outline of a New Aesthetic of Music, Busoni proposed new scales (113 new “modes”) and divisions of the whole-tone into sixth-tones. In his later years, he established a well-known masterclass in Berlin for composers (one of them being the young Kurt Weill).

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The poem prefacing Bénédiction opens with the following lines:

Whence comes, O God, this peace which floods over me?Whence comes this faith with which my heart overflows?

I imagine surrendering myself to the mighty flow of the Mississippi River out to sea and becoming one with the Infinite. The work’s inner joy is radiant without any of the virtuosic or technical devices from Liszt’s early years. It mirrors the sentiment of the poem, which ends:

Scarcely have a few days brushed past my brow,And it seems that a century and a world have passed away,And that, separated from them by an immense abyss,A new man is reborn and begins again in me.

— David Lee

Like nearly every program note on Béla BaRTók’s Op. 18 Preludes, we are obliged to recount that the composer wrote the following to a friend:

In the cities that find themselves at the level of a Hungarian province, one mustn’t experiment with such works as my two violin sonatas, my piano études — with improvisation. These works only frighten the unprepared public.

While Bartók is perhaps best known for his arrangements and integration of folk music, the mid-career piano studies contain no such suggestions. There is instead a dense chromaticism, at times disguised by surprising intervals and arpeggiation.

László Somfai writes that the autograph draft suggests that the études were not carefully planned or constructed, but were rather “character pieces written by Bartók with inspired work at the piano.” The first étude is a perpetual-motion toccata, an Allegro Barbaro on steriods, with a chromatic melody broken by octaves creating incessant register changes that quickly disorient the ear. The second étude is a disquieted and flowingly arpeggiated elegy with hints of Debussy. The uneasy murmur of the second étude is broken by a recitative-like opening to the final étude, a bagatelle with influences of Schoenberg that quickly accelerates into a tarantella-like frenzy. — Adrian Liu

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PROGRAM:SEMINAR PARTICIPANTS CONCERT I

THURSDAY, 19 AUGUST 2:00 PM

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ROGER XIA

Sonata in A Major, D. 959 (1828) Franz Schubert i. Allegro (1797–1828) ii. Andantino iii. Scherzo. Allegro vivace / Trio. Un poco più lento iv. Rondo. Allegretto

INTERMISSON

II

ADRIAN LIU

24 Preludes, Op. 28 (1835–39) Frédéric Chopin xiii. Lento (1810–1849) xiv. Allegro xv. Sostenuto xvi. Presto con fuoco xvii. Allegretto xviii. Allegro molto xix. Vivace xx. Largo

I I I

KEVIN LEE SUN

Great Noise (2019) Hyo-shin Na (b. 1959)

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sixth variation is a summation of the motives and characters of the preceding five. There is also a plan of key relationships: beginning with D minor for the theme and variation 1, the keys of the variations follow the circle of fifths (A minor, E minor, etc.) until returning to D minor for variation 13. Another circle of fifths is employed for the last two sets of variations.

Through the course of the hour-long work, Rzewski included quotations of the Italian revolutionary song “Bandiera Rossa” and of Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler’s anti-fascist song “Solidaritätslied” — as he states, “in reference to the Italian people who in the ’70s opened their doors to so many refugees from Chilean fascism” and as “a reminder that parallels to present threats existed in the past and that it is important to learn from them.” As a whole, the work represents Rzewski’s immense consciousness of “the active relationship between music and the rest of the world.” — Kevin Lee Sun

“Down by the Riverside” is a classic African-American spiritual that dates back to the pre-American-Civil War abolitionist movement. It has a rich history of being an anti-war song, and numerous singers and gospel choirs have performed and recorded their own interpretations of this song. “Down By the Riverside” was frequently sung as a protest to the Vietnam War during the 1960s and 70s. Rzewski composed his “Down By the Riverside” on the 3rd and 4th of February, 1979, four years after the end of the Vietnam War. Rzewski was known for his incorporation of socio-political messages into his compositions, and his version of “Down by the Riverside” is a powerful example of his artistic protest.

Through my study of this piece, I learned about the power of genre-fusion, especially in contemporary Classical music. There is a significant amount of influence from folk music, especially due to Rzewski’s friendship with folk musician Pete Seeger during Rzewski’s time in New York City. Seeger recommended that Rzewski take inspiration from Bach and compose music based on songs that are popularly known. Rzewski’s most famous composition, The People United Will Never Be Defeated!, was based on this general principle. Rzewski was also known for his prowess in improvisation, and many of his improvisatory elements are present in his version of “Down by the Riverside.”

Rzewski unfortunately passed away on June 26, 2021. He has been instrumental in the defining of modern classical music, especially in the blending of music and politics. — Leslie Jin

Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude (“The Blessing of God in Solitude”) is the third piece in the cycle Harmonies poétiques et religieuses (“Poetic and Religious Harmonies”), S.173, composed at Woronińce in 1847 and published in 1853. The pieces are inspired by the poetry of Alphonse de Lamartine, as was Liszt’s symphonic poem Les Préludes.

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PROGRAM NOTES FOR CONCERT I

FRanz schuBeRT’s Piano Sonata, D. 959 in A Major is the second of his last three piano sonatas and was written during the last few months of his life. It was mostly unrecognized in the 19th century, like his other piano sonatas, and was not published until ten years after his death. The piece has clear similarities in structure to the piano sonatas of Beethoven, whom Schubert had much respect for, by cycling through specific motives and themes within each movement. The piece also contains elements of Schubert’s unique mature and individual style, including chromatic neighboring keys and plagal harmonies. According to Alfred Brendel, Schubert’s last three sonatas are more interdependent than the sonatas in Beethoven’s trilogy (Op. 109, 110, and 111), and Brendel, comparing the A Major Sonata to the “thesis” of Schubert’s C minor Sonata, described it as “an antithesis of positive, luminous activity”.

In the first movement, Allegro, Schubert takes advantage of long dominant preparations between exposition and development, development and recapitulation, that rest on the unresolved scale degree before finally resolving and entering the new section. The second movement, Andantino, goes into a very unique and strange musical shape after introducing the sighing main theme. The Rondo’s opening main theme comes from the slow movement (also a Rondo) of Schubert’s Sonata D. 537, written in 1817. However, the passages in between the recurring themes differ quite drastically: D. 537’s passages are much more compact than the parallel passages in D. 959. Also, D. 537 only has two recurrences of the theme, while D. 959 has three, making it substantially longer in duration. When comparing the two codas, D. 537 has a complete return of the theme and ends in a short and sweet 14 measures. In D. 959, the theme resurfaces in fragments, where Schubert is teasing the listener, and the coda takes up 94 measures to end the masterful work. — Roger Xia

Robert Schumann said of FRédéRic chopin’s 24 Preludes that they were “sketches, beginnings of études, or, so to speak, ruins — individual eagle wings of all disorder and wild confusions.” Schumann’s criticism may be unduly harsh, but he is correct that Chopin’s preludes are nearer expositions of ideas than complete developments. Let us be more generous and observe that the preludes form a masterpiece of miniatures: each prelude being a concise study of a certain technique or concept, with the brevity of the pieces allowing Chopin to avoid the repetition that sometimes bogs down his longer works. The preludes span each key, proceeding in a circle of fifths with relative major and minor keys paired. Chopin was surely inspired by J.S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier — two sets of preludes and fugues for keyboard in all 24 keys — but Chopin’s decision to omit fugues allows his set to be more compact and driving than Bach’s searching and expansive volumes.

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PROGRAM NOTES FOR CONCERT III

While it is true that hyo-shin na has written much music for traditional Korean instruments, traditional Korean music has not been her primary source for inspiration. Rather, she is stimulated by literature, visual arts, nature, and elements of everyday life.

Both Small Noise and Great Noise include materials from an earlier work (Koto, Piano II, 2016), and reflect Na’s interest in the paintings of Agnes Martin. As in Martin’s paintings, Na here uses relatively “ordinary” materials (scales, unaccompanied melodies) and, particularly in Small Noise, avoids chords and “harmonies”. This avoidance of harmonies can be found in many sections of her earlier works for piano such as Variations (1990) and in the first half of Rain Study (1999). In addition, in Small Noise, there is an almost complete lack of grace notes. This causes the rhythms to be simpler and more straight-forward, in contrast to certain sections of Great Noise, where an abundance of grace notes creates a more complex, irregular rhythm, much as in the earlier Rain Study. Great Noise also includes passages of thicker textures that one might hear as “harmonies”, albeit very dissonant ones.

Na wrote Great Noise after reading Kafka’s similarly-titled short story. — Lina Lee

“¡El pueblo unido, jamás será vencido!” (“The people united will never be defeated!”) is a popular Chilean chant for social change. In 1973, three months before the democratically elected Salvador Allende was deposed by a military coup aided by the United States CIA, the composer Sergio Ortega was walking through the plaza and heard the chant shouted by a street singer. “I sat down at my piano and thought about the experience in the plaza and the events at large. When I reproduced the chant of the people in my head, the chant that could not be restrained, the entire melody exploded from me: I saw it complete and played it in its entirety at once. The text unfurled itself quickly and fell like falling rocks upon the melody.” As the chant inspired Ortega, so Ortega’s song inspired FRedeRic Rzewski: “I first heard Sergio Ortega’s song at a concert given by the Chilean group Inti-Illimani at Hunter College in the fall of 1974, which Ursula [Oppens] and I both attended. We walked out onto the street singing the melody, and it never left us from that time on.”

For the 200th anniversary of American independence, Frederic Rzewski had been commissioned by the Kennedy Center to write a piano work for Ursula Oppens that would serve as a companion to Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations. With Ortega’s melody in mind, and with the Diabelli Variations and Bach’s Goldberg Variations as influences (“I did my final exam at Princeton University about the Goldberg Variations. The formal similarities are obvious, even if there are 33 [sic] instead of 36 variations”), Rzewski’s 36 variations on Ortega’s theme were written in 1975 as a result. There are six sets of six variations, and each set’s

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It is unclear whether the Preludes, written over the span of four years, were intended to be performed as a set — Chopin himself never played more than four at a time. Regardless of intent, however, the work exhibits a compelling flow and balance: the continuous set of eight I’ve chosen, all from the second half, exhibit such a flow particularly well and visit an array of stylistic genres, from a barcarolle to a funeral march to a scherzo and a miniature étude. — Adrian Liu

hyo-shin na’s Great Noise takes its name from Franz Kafka’s prose piece published in 1911. “I sit in my room, the headquarter of noise of the entire apartment” begins Kafka’s description of a family scene involving his father, sisters, and governess. The event is entirely mundane, but through Kafka’s heightened sensitivity and darting attention, it becomes an engrossing experience for the reader. When Na read the piece, she “began to imagine a piano piece that didn’t directly follow Kafka’s story, but evoked the variety, suddenness, and unpredictability of Kafka’s writing.”

Na’s conception of Great Noise occurred while she was composing another solo piano piece, Small Noise, that was based on the piano part of her 2016 work Koto, Piano II. These two earlier works were composed with “relatively ordinary” ma-terials — unharmonized melodies and simple fragments of scales — as Na took inspiration from Agnes Martin’s paintings. These materials made their way into Great Noise as well, but Great Noise as a whole is unpredictable: sections of the “ordinary” are juxtaposed suddenly and strikingly with sections of rhythmic and contrapuntal complexity. Many of these relatively complex sections feature Na’s unique use of grace notes as integral parts of the music rather than for embellishment. Implemented in a variety of compositional textures, her grace notes add unpredictable contours to the rhythm and layers of polyphony on top of longer, held notes.

Great Noise was commissioned by InterMusic SF and the Elaine and Richard Fohr Foundation and was premiered in 2019 by Thomas Schultz. — Kevin Lee Sun

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Variation 15 (Flexible, like an improvisation) Variation 16 (Same tempo as preceding, with fluctuations; much pedal) Variation 17 (L.H. strictly; R.H. roughly as in space) Variation 18

INTERMISSON

II I

LESLIE J IN

North American Ballads (1978–79) Frederic Rzewski iii. Down By The Riverside (1938–2021)

IV

DAVID LEE

Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude (1853) Franz Liszt (1811–1886)

V

ADRIAN LIU

Studies, Op. 18 Béla Bartók i. Allegro molto (1881–1945) ii. Andante sostenuto iii. Rubato

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PROGRAM:SEMINAR PARTICIPANTS CONCERT II

FRIDAY, 20 AUGUST 2:00 PM

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LESLIE J IN

Sonata in B♭, D. 960 (1828) Franz Schubert i. Molto moderato (1797–1828) ii. Andante sostenuto iii. Allegro vivace con delicatezza / Trio iv. Allegro, ma non troppo

INTERMISSION

I I

LINA LEE

Sonata in A♭, Op. 110 (1821) Ludwig van Beethoven i. Moderato cantabile molto espressivo (1770–1827) ii. Allegro molto iii. Adagio ma non troppo iv. Fuga. Allegro ma non troppo / L’istesso tempo di Arioso / L’istesso tempo della Fuga poi a poi di nuovo vivente

I I I

ROGER XIA

Suite for Piano, Op. 25 (1921–23) Arnold Schönberg i. Präludium (1874–1951) ii. Gavotte iii. Musette iv. Intermezzo v. Menuett / Trio vi. Gigue

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The pared down piano writing is a drastic departure from the extravagance of Vingt regards and still removed from the later birdsong-infused works. In that sense, it is a work that requires more work from the listener and the performer. For my part, I am amazed at Messiaen’s ability to make a work so dense in cerebral compositional techniques on paper (or iPad screen) still sound interesting and beautiful. — David Lee

PROGRAM:SEMINAR PARTICIPANTS CONCERT III

SATURDAY, 21 AUGUST 2:00 PM

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LINA LEE

Small Noise (2018) Hyo-shin NaGreat Noise (2019) (b. 1959)

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KEVIN LEE SUN

The People United Will Never Be Defeated! (1975) Frederic Rzewski Thema (1938–2021) Variation 1 (Weaving: delicate but firm) Variation 2 (With firmness) Variation 3 (Slightly slower, with expressive nuances Variation 4 (Marcato) Variation 5 (Dreamlike, frozen) Variation 6 (Same tempo as beginning) Variation 7 (Tempo I — lightly, impatiently) Variation 8 (With agility; not too much pedal; crisp) Variation 9 (Evenly) Variation 10 (Comodo, recklessly) Variation 11 (Tempo I — like fragments of an absent melody — in strict time) Variation 12 Variation 13 Variation 14 (A bit faster, optimistically)

(continued)

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IV

DAVID LEE

Cantéyodjayâ (1948) Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992)

PROGRAM NOTES FOR CONCERT II

FRanz schuBeRT’s B♭ Major Sonata was the last piano sonata that he wrote before his passing in 1828, but it was not published until ten years after his death. Schubert’s writing style in this sonata is sonically spacious. The full sonata is around 40 minutes long, similar to the length of Beethoven’s legendary Hammerklavier sonata in the same key. In Schubert’s sonata, the first movement alone is 15 captivatingly beautiful minutes long.

My biggest challenge in working on this piece was adjusting to Schubert’s compositional approach, as I did not want it to sound too similar to his shorter-form pieces, or too Beethoven-esque. I tried to find the happy medium between overplaying and playing too passively, but I realized that there is already so much information within the score that allows the music to speak on its own. Practicing restraint and letting Schubert’s writing express itself allows his final sonata to shine as a compositional masterpiece. — Leslie Jin

BeeThoven’s last five Sonatas (Opp. 101, 106, 109, 110, and 111) were written during a time when he was experiencing a general decline in his health, particularly the loss of his hearing. It’s remarkable that, at this particular moment in his life, he moved, in these piano sonatas, away from many aspects of traditional Classical period forms and gave each new sonata its own unique shape and structure. This can be seen most clearly in his writing of fugues in these pieces. In Op. 101, the fugue in the last movement is relatively short; in Op. 106, the entire last movement is a long, complex fugue. One of the variations in the last movement of Op. 109 (theme and variations) is a short fugue, and in Op. 111, the short development section of the first movement is a compact fugue. Op. 110 has two fugues, both relatively long, and each is preceded by a mournful arioso. The second fugue has a subject that is the inversion of the subject from the first fugue.

The Scherzo second movement of Op. 110 quotes two popular songs of the time (“Our cat has had kittens” and “I’m a slob, you’re a slob”). For me, the most interesting challenge is in playing the transition from this humorous movement to the very serious Arioso that introduces the first fugue. This is an entire page basically without barlines, with frequent changes of tempo and fleeting, unstable harmonies. — Lina Lee

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Arnold Schoenberg’s Suite for Piano, Op. 25, was composed between 1921 and 1923 and is the first of his works to incorporate the 12-tone row in all six movements. Schoenberg’s Five Pieces, Op. 23, only uses a 12-tone row in the last movement, a waltz, and his Serenade, Op. 24, uses one row in its Sonnet. The Suite for Piano resembles the form and style of a Baroque suite and has six movements: Präludium, Gavotte, Musette, Intermezzo, Menuett and Trio, and Gigue.

In the Präludium, Schoenberg introduces the row used for the suite and starts to play around with inversion and transpositions. There are many instances of playing with time as Schoenberg alternates slight pauses and frantic accelerating. The Gavotte is slightly more straightforward and is in cut time, giving it a more jolly and quirky manner. It goes straight into the Musette, where Schoenberg introduces the Bach motif (BACH) and its retrograde (HCAB) into the middle voices. The ending of the Musette is followed by a repeat of the Gavotte. The Intermezzo treads forward with a slightly slower tempo than the other movements. It starts with a duplet 16th-note phrase that acts like a pulse throughout the movement. Schoenberg then wrote a Menuett that conveys both the dancelike qualities of the Menuett style and the atonal lyricism of his music. This movement is in contrast to a jagged trio, with sforzandos on off-beats that give the listener a sense of unease. Schoenberg fini 0es the suite with a vibrant Gigue that charges forward with short hesitations and finally blasts across the finish line.

This piece was a unique challenge for me, as this was the most atonal music I have ever studied. While getting the notes down initially felt very abstract and random, eventually it began to make more sense and feel more natural. I developed a better understanding of the many possibilities that 12-tone music has to offer and of its creative, unexpected trajectories that distinguish it from traditional Classical music. — Roger Xia

olivieR messiaen’s Cantéyodjayâ was written in 1949 in the company of an excellent Steinway using the few free morning hours Messiaen had before his teaching classes at Tanglewood. It is a pivotal work bookended by two monumental piano cycles that define Messiaen’s piano output: the Vingt regards sur l’enfant-Jésus (1944) and the Catalogue d’oiseaux (1956–58). It employs many compositional techniques and thematic materials Messiaen had developed up to that point. Garett Healey, a Messiaen scholar, notes in his article, “Messiaen’s Cantéyodjayâ: A ‘Missing’ Link,” that just 53 bars out of the total 347 bear no apparent connection to his previous works. “Total serialism” also appears for the first time in Messiaen’s music.

The form of the work’s single movement exhibits aspects of sonata-form and rondo, but progresses by superimposition and repetition rather than conventional development. The work’s compositional bases are the Hindu rhythms often found in Messiaen’s work. The opening element of the work is named Cantéyodjayâ (a Carnatic name) in the score. This opening figuration recurs often, interspersed with other material.