A Recital by Mikhail Voskresensky, piano

Ludwig van Beethoven

Piano Sonata No. 25 in G major, op. 79

Toward the end of what scholars have named Beethoven’s middle period, Beethoven wrote this Sonata as a tribute to the commissioner Muzio Clementi, a famous author of sonatinas with a didactic spirit. The result is a galant, unpretentious work whose informal moniker of “sonatina” may have been Beethoven’s idea, or possibly his publisher’s. Still, it is not entirely inappropriate, particularly for the last two movements; the first is rather too difficult and elaborate to justify the term.

The first movement bears the heading Presto alla tedesca. The first word denotes the speed of the music, while the remainder of the phrase makes clear that Beethoven conceived this music in the style of the Teutscher, German or Austrian waltz-like dances. In the version that Beethoven uses here, the music alternates gently between light, convivial, and pastoral themes. Dancing to this particular music would make for highly aerobic exercise, but the eight-bar phrases of the movement fit the dance pattern even when Beethoven works them into a full-scale sonata form movement.

The middle movement is indeed suitable to a work published as a “sonatina”—a songful barcarolle in 9/8 time, wonderfully evocative of gloom and foreboding but easy enough for a young pianist to learn. The Sonata closes with a speedy rondo that employs a theme composed during Beethoven’s early years in Bonn, for the 1791 Ritterballet. The playful and virtuosic writing offers a good finger exercise for the energetic conclusion. — © Steven Ledbetter

Fryderyk Chopin

Piano Sonata No. 3 in B minor, op. 58

The defining relationship of Fryderyk Chopin’s adult life was his romance with the influential author Aurore Dupin, better known by her pen name, George Sand. After an abortive first meeting in Paris in 1837, the two were drawn together soon after by what Sand herself called her strong maternal instinct toward the expatriate composer. This attraction and eventual partnership came about despite his distaste for her artistic, Bohemian social circle and her impatience with his society friends. For nearly a decade afterward, the unlikely pair carried on a strange and singular kind of intimacy, and it was during one of his musically productive summers in Nohant, Sand’s country home in the south of France, that Chopin composed his Third Piano Sonata in 1844.

The first movement represents the best of the tradition of the Classical sonata, dressed here in Romantic garb. The first theme is decisive and dramatic, a stark statement worked out with all the architecture of motivic development, which is offset beautifully by the poignant, chromatic lyricism of the second theme. One can follow the shadows of the minor first theme and the major second theme, transformed in dense and intricate counterpoint, through the middle development section; the composer concludes the longest movement of this Sonata with a beautifully wrought restatement of just the second theme.

Chopin then ushers us through a blistering Scherzo with rapid figurations that tease and flee from the ear even as they wind their way around a repeating melodic form. A sudden halt leads into a legato that recalls the first movement’s block chords even as it gives rise to a beautiful new major melody. A quick reprise of the opening material ends the brief movement.

The following Largo is an exercise in slow and steady transformation. The movement opens with four measures in a stately march rhythm, and that rhythmic profile persists through the ensuing theme’s melody and accompaniment. The march step has a persistent lilt due to Chopin’s arrangement of the bass, which alternates between low, strong beats and high, weak beats. After that hypnotic oscillation, the theme closes with a march phrase that balances the opening, followed by a wash of musical waves characterized by an endlessly repeating triplet rhythm in the right hand. This long sequence is remarkable simply for its endurance; it lasts three times as long as the theme that preceded it, long enough to make us forget we ever heard that theme. When we eventually emerge from the episode, we are recalled to ourselves by a chord progression drawn from the march theme: the original march’s swaying bassline has now been smoothed into a waving accompaniment. This is a remarkable transformation, combining the original bass pitches with the long hypnotic sequence’s undulations so that we feel we have not quite shaken off the dream.

The final Presto non tanto makes short work of snapping us out of our reverie. A brash and towering block-chord cadence in minor sets the stage for the quiet statement of a whirring dynamo that promises to build quickly. The statement and restatement of the melodic idea is presented as a rondo: it only just starts to develop before diverting and giving way to blistering chromatic runs at both ends of the keyboard that are followed by yet another statement of the repeated theme. The driving imperative of the repeated form takes its course, and with a crashing final cadence the journey is at an end. — © Joseph Pfender

Wolfgang Amadè Mozart

Fantasy in C minor, K. 396

Maximilian Stadler (1748–1833), a priest, historian, and composer mostly of vocal music for the church, moved to Vienna in 1796, where he became a musical adviser to Mozart’s widow Constanze. As the first person to attempt to organize and catalogue Mozart’s manuscripts, Stadler had unique access to both finished and unfinished works. The C-minor Fantasia, K. 396, was of the latter category. Begun in 1782, the piece was originally intended for violin and piano, but Mozart completed only twenty-seven bars—almost all of them for piano alone—before dropping the project. The Fantasy with a complete second half is in Stadtler’s hand, leading to the natural assumption that he completed it it. It is not clear whether he might have had access to some of Mozart’s sketches for the second half, especially the stormy development, or whether he composed the rest himself.

The first half of the binary form—the portion that Mozart certainly composed—is an Adagio in gloomy C minor. Full of ornaments and syncopations, the form evokes the improvisatory exploration suggested by the title fantasia, which in French and German suggests imagination. The opening figures eventually give way to a sequence of low trills followed by ascending scales, a passage that effects a transition to the relative major of E-flat. Mozart’s half of the music ends here, in this key. The movement continues—perhaps now in Stadtler’s voice—with a developmental passage contrasting dramatic dialogues between treble and bass as an inner voice carries a perpetual motion Alberti bass. This gives way to a restatement of the opening material, again in C minor, that transitions this time to C major: with the addition of the second half, the Fantasia has resolved itself into a sonata form.

— © Steven Ledbetter and Erin Pratt

Pyotr Il’yich Tchaikovsky

from Les saisons, op. 37b

It is commonly held that Tchaikovsky was not especially talented as a pianist, and that even though he studied piano in his youth, he had essentially given it up long before becoming a composer. He certainly showed no special inclination toward the instrument at the time. But some of Tchaikovsky’s contemporaries reported that later in his life, he continued to play the piano with confidence and style when among friends and fellow composers. He wrote over a hundred works for solo piano, most of them charming miniatures for students and amateurs, but some of them more challenging and rewarding even for accomplished pianists. Certainly, the way Tchaikovsky wrote for the piano in his First Piano Concerto (just heard on yesterday’s Festival Orchestra concert) amply demonstrated that he understood the dramatic potential of the piano, even if he was not a virtuoso himself.

Soon after the premiere of the First Piano Concerto, Tchaikovsky was commissioned by a St. Petersburg music magazine to write a set of short character pieces, one for each month of the year. The editor, Nikolai Bernard, even suggested subtitles for each of the months, which Tchaikovsky accepted without question. After composing “January” and “February” in late 1875, and completing the next few pieces sporadically after that, he worked on the remainder in April and May of 1876 after completing the orchestration for Swan Lake. “October: Autumn Song” depicts a garden already in decay. A pervasive element of melancholy—a sense of loss at the close of a season of richness—informs the main theme. “November: Troika” is perhaps the most technically advanced piece of the set. Its imitation of bells and the light prancing of the central section can refer to both primary meanings of the Russian word troika: a three-person folk dance or a team of three horses pulling a carriage or sleigh. The simplicity of the melody allows for a variety of accompanimental patterns that provide the pianist with opportunities to demonstrate delicate, rapid passagework. — © Luke Howard

Edvard Grieg

Piano Sonata in E minor, Opus 7

he period from December 1864 to October 1865 was crucial for the young Edvard Grieg’s development. He had spent the previous years at the Leipzig Conservatory with a pedantic piano teacher whom he left as soon as possible. Later he studied with E. F. Wenzel, who inspired him with the works of Schumann. During his last year in Leipzig, he studied composition with Carl Reinecke, who assigned him to write a string quartet and an overture, though he had virtually no experience of large-scale instrumental works. After an attack of pleurisy in 1860 which contributed to his frail health in later years, he graduated in 1862, having two groups of pieces in genres that were to become typical for him: four piano pieces dedicated to Wenzel, and four songs with German texts, published as Opuses 1 and 2.

During a first visit to Copenhagen in May 1863 he was kindly received by Niels Gade, a leading Scandinavian composer who had been associated with both Mendelssohn and Schumann. But Gade was disappointed at Grieg’s lack of large compositions. A second Copenhagen visit starting in December 1864 marked the beginning of what Grieg later called “a happy time of triumph and accomplishment.” The ten months he spent in Copenhagen on this occasion saw the composition of four significant works: Melodies of the Heart (Opus 5), Humoresques (Opus 6), this Piano Sonata in E minor (Opus 7), and the First Violin Sonata in F (Opus 8). He composed both sonatas quickly (the piano sonata in just eleven days), and showed them to Gade, who was so enthusiastic that Grieg dedicated the piano sonata to him.

The E-minor Sonata is cast in four substantial movements dominated by the aggressive bravura of youth with contrasting lyrical passages that already foreshadow Grieg’s growing interest in Norwegian folk song. The opening Allegro moderato theme outlines the E-minor triad and continues with extensive dotted-note passages that recall Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A minor and prefigure Grieg’s own Concerto in the same key. The second theme is in the characteristic rhythm of the halling, a Norwegian dance. The second movement is quite freely constructed, with several passages suggesting folk song. The third movement is a minuet in an A–B–A form that alternates the minuet rhythmic pattern with a particularly expressive E-major middle section. The finale is again energetic, but reveals telltale traces of a student following academic forms. But Grieg’s taste in piano composition was more attuned to the miniature expression of the dozens of Lyrical Pieces he was later to write; he never returned to the medium of the piano sonata after this early work. — © Steven Ledbetter

Mikhail Voskresensky’s performing career includes hundreds of recitals and appearances with prestigious orchestras. He has performed with more than 150 conductors, including Franz Konwitschny, Yevgeny Svetlanov, Kurt Mazur, Kirill Kondrashin, Charles Dutoit, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, John Pritchard, and David Hayes. The most memorable moment of Mr. Voskresensky’s artistic life was taking lessons with Dmitri Shostakovich on his Second Piano Concerto before giving its European premiere at the Prague Spring Festival, a performance recorded on the Supraphon label. He distinguished himself with complete performances of Chopin’s piano pieces and Beethoven’s piano sonatas, as well as complete live recordings of Mozart’s piano concertos and a complete recording of Scriabin’s piano sonatas. Mr. Voskresensky graduated from Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Conservatory, where he studied under Lev Oborin. He has won pirzes at four international competitions, including a bronze medal from the very first Van Cliburn Competition. He has earned accolades like the title of National Artist of Russia, Japan’s Order of the Rising Sun, and Poland’s Gloria Artis Medal for Merit to Culture. His teaching is in demand in the world’s major conservatories and universities. His students have won 120 top prizes at major international competitions. Born in Berdiansk, Ukraine, Mr. Voskresensky protested the unjust war begun by Russia in 2022 and left the country. Upon arriving in the U.S., he continued his artistic career as a soloist and teacher. Currently Professor Voskresensky is an artist-in-residence at The Juilliard School in New York