August 7

A Recital by Cliburn Competition Winner
Aristo Sham piano

Johann Sebastian Bach/Sergei Rachmaninoff

Selections from Partita No. 3 for Unaccompanied Violin in E major, BWV 1006

Like Liszt and many other keyboard giants, Rachmaninoff made a number of transcriptions for piano of well-known works in other genres. One reason for this was to offer something familiar to his audiences, who generally preferred to hear music they already knew to something unfamiliar. Another (and perhaps more important) reason was to create a showpiece of transcendent virtuosity, bringing within the compass of two hands on a keyboard a composition that originally called for a full orchestra or some other larger components. And finally, perhaps the transcriber simply liked someone else’s piece so much that he wanted to play it himself.

For the first eight years after Rachmaninoff settled in the United States, he did not write a single original composition. He still hoped to finish at least two major compositions that he had begun in Russia and brought with him, but for a time he could not find it in himself to work on them. This may be the reason for the substantial number of arrangements and transcriptions from these years.

Bach was himself a superb arranger of other men’s music as well as his own, and the number of composers who have arranged Bach’s music is innumerable. In March 1933 Rachmaninoff made a transcription of the Prélude from Bach’s Third Partita for unaccompanied violin, later adding the Gavotte and Gigue to make a short suite. In doing so he elaborated the single-line part, spelling out the implicit harmonies and incorporating the rich and complex textures so typical of his own music.

— © Harlow Robinson

J. S. Bach/Ferruccio Busoni

Chaconne from Partita No. 2 for Unaccompanied Violin in D minor, BWV 1004

Probably the most famous single work for unaccompanied violin is J. S. Bach’s D-minor Chaconne, the closing movement of his Second Partita, BWV 1004. A chaconne is a variation form involving a ground bass—a melody that keeps reiterating itself over and over—against which other musical ideas are projected in a plan of increasing tension and complexity. The chaconne became a favorite genre in the Baroque era. But when a composer writes a chaconne for an instrument like the solo violin, a great part of the challenge is getting the counterpoint to work. The violin is normally thought of as a melody instrument most suitable for playing a single line. But a chaconne requires at least two melodic lines: the repeating bass and the melody above it with its continually changing variations.

Bach’s solution is so ingenious technically and so rich musically that it became established as the locus classicus of such creations. He created a rich, complex texture through double-stopping (requiring the player to perform on two or more strings at a time); this involves elaborate work in the left hand while the right arm has to control the bow so that it sounds on several strings at once. If the result had merely been one of the greatest of all technical challenges to the violinist, the work would still be played by every advanced violinist in the world. But it is more than that—it is also a supremely original work of music, quite aside from the difficulty of performing it.

Bach’s Chaconne is a set of continuous linked variations. For the most part variations appear in pairs, with the second slightly elaborating the material of the first. Because the bass line must be repeated throughout the piece, there can be no real modulation, but Bach does provide important harmonic variety by offering a section in D major in the middle before returning to the minor mode at the end. Nowhere else in his solo string music did Bach surpass the imagination, contrapuntal inventiveness, and virtuosic demands of this piece.

Feruccio Busoni’s transcription of the Chaconne came while he was living in Boston in 1892. Busoni’s transcriptions were a way of absorbing Bach’s style in order to undertake more elaborate studies that would serve as a kind of commentary on his music. Of course Busoni’s transcriptions were also specifically made for concert performances as a way of bringing some of Bach’s works—less known then than today—to public notice.

— © Steven Ledbetter

Maurice Ravel

Gaspard de la nuit

Gaspard de la nuit is the title of a collection of poems in prose by Aloysius Bertrand (1807–1841), written in about 1830 and published posthumously in 1842. The texts are fevered, imagistic, and weird, conjuring up such quintessential Romantic subjects as castles towering over dark lakes, distant chimes, and dark nocturnal visions. During his student days, Ravel was fascinated by these poems after being introduced to them by his friend Ricardo Viñes. He reread them continually and eventually selected three for musical treatment.

When Durand published the three pieces, Ravel had all three poems included with the music, emphasizing how closely the piano music interprets the imagery. He composed the work between May and September 1908. The first performer was none other than the friend who had turned him on to the texts originally. Viñes’s performance, in January 1909, aroused wide acclaim for his extraordinary virtuosity (Ravel had intended to make the work more difficult than Balakirev’s Islamey, widely regarded at the time as the most challenging piano solo ever written).

The opening movement, Ondine, refers to the beautiful water sprite who lures unwary males with the promise that with marriage will come the title of King of the Lake. The scene is a castle balcony by a blue lake. Ravel opens with opalescent, shimmering water represented by a tremolo on a major triad with an added minor sixth. The melody heard soon after is the song of the undine in “a sad, tender voice,” which becomes the movement’s principal thematic material. The undine urges her love several times, finally building to a surging climax. This dies away to a single unharmonized melodic line that closely echoes the end of the poem: “and when I told her that I was in love with a mortal woman, she was sulky and vexed; she wept a few tears, burst out laughing, and vanished in showers that formed white trickles down my blue windowpanes.”

Bertrand’s epigraph for Le Gibet (The Gallows) was drawn from Goethe’s Faust: “What do I see moving around that the gallows?” The choice of this German text for a poem by a French poet in 1830 demonstrates the essentially romantic nature of Bertrand’s work, which offers a spooky poem attempting to identify the sound of a dark night around the gallows. Is the sound the wind? The sigh of the hanged? A cricket, or a fly, or a spider? No, it is the distant tolling of a bell near the walls of a city just out of sight, while “the carcass of a hanged man” still dangles from the cross-beam. Ravel’s score, marked “very slow, without speeding up or slowing down until the end,” is built entirely on the sound of a tolling B-flat. The sound is meant to mimic the macabre landscape that is marked eternally by the sound of the funeral bell. Bertrand anticipates the uncanny mood that we most often associate with Edgar Allen Poe, and Ravel captures that spirit in this brief, intense, and hushed movement.

Scarbo is a wily, mysterious goblin who appears in a bedchamber after dark, making strange, mocking noises. He disappears as suddenly as he came. Ravel uses this poem to develop a free-form movement that builds in intensity to a dramatic climax only moments before the end. The music vanishes almost as quickly as the goblin. — © Steven Ledbetter.

Ludwig van Beethoven

Piano Sonata No. 29 in B-flat major, op. 106, “Hammerklavier”

In the fall of 1817 Beethoven was making plans to travel to London, but the journey never took place due to his precarious health. As he wrote to his friend Nikolaus Zmeskall on August 21, 1817, “as for me, I often despair and should like to die. For I can see no end to all my infirmities. God have mercy on me. I consider myself as good as lost. . . . If the present state of affairs does not cease, next year I shall be not in London but probably in my grave.” The difficulties connected with the legal case over his guardianship of his nephew Carl, which culminated in a humiliating courtroom defeat in 1818 and Beethoven’s decision to resign as guardian the following March, also had a good deal to do with his depressed mood.

Though he did not produce many compositions at this time, the main work that he did finish was of an impressive magnitude: the B-flat Sonata, which has remained ever since one of the truly gigantic works of the piano repertory. Beethoven himself was pleased with it, though he rather underestimated its staying power: “There you have a sonata that will give pianists something to do, a work that will be played in fifty years’ time.”

He completed the piece in autumn 1818; Czerny played it in Beethoven’s presence in spring 1819. Artaria & Co. published it in Vienna, and the Wiener Zeitung reviewed the piece: “Now we shall put aside all the usual eulogies, which would be superfluous anyway for the admirers of Beethoven’s high artistic talent, thereby meeting the composer’s wishes at the same time; we note only in a few lines that this work, which excels above all other creations of this master not only through its most rich and grand fantasy but also in regard to artistic perfection and sustained style, will mark a new period in Beethoven’s pianoforte works”—an astonishing prediction for a work of such overwhelming difficulty.

Beethoven can have had no illusions that Opus 106 would be a financial success: there cannot have been many musicians in the world who were up to its demands. There are few enough even today, when Beethoven’s place in the concert repertory is unassailable. The nickname Hammerklavier is simply the German word for piano; Beethoven applied it to this Sonata because he was going through a phase of pro-Germanic cultural chauvinism. Still, it is easy enough for the average Anglophone listener to see the word “hammer” embedded in the German term and to think of physical labor. There is no question that the work is a challenge to any performer, but Beethoven’s writing calls for a singing quality as much as it does for rhythmic power and clarity.

The main theme, heard in the first two measures of the Allegro, contains a motif that recurs in the later movements of the Sonata as well—a melodic upward movement of a third, followed by the same interval downward. The first movement has a character almost of violence, requiring the soloist to declaim in a way that the piano had rarely, if ever, been called on to do before. Beethoven’s contemporaries saw in this heady defiance of convention a powerful new resource for pianism. At the same time the Sonata is full of songlike moments, even in the midst of some of the most powerful passages.

The Scherzo is based from the outset on the motive heard at the beginning of the Sonata. The simple old A-B-A pattern of the Scherzo–Trio combination is made more complex by the two different Trios, the first in 3/4 time, the second a quite different passage in 2/4 . The return to the Scherzo is somewhat recast and receives a Presto coda.

The Adagio sostenuto, arriving surprisingly in F-sharp minor, is one of the great slow movements in the entire repertory, an extended sonata form made to seem even more spacious and extended by its slow but sustained tempo.

The finale begins with a complex introduction, constantly changing tempo, character, and key. Eventually the introduction settles on the dominant of the home key. A trill seems to prepare the listener for a cadence leading to a new beginning. But after a few bars’ preparation, the trill turns out to itself be part of that new beginning, the statement of a gigantic and elaborate fugue that stands alongside the Grosse Fuge, Opus 130, as Beethoven’s grandest summation of the contrapuntal art.

— © Steven Ledbetter

Pianist Aristo Sham has dazzled audiences on five continents, recently winning the gold medal and audience award at the 2025 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. Aristo was featured in the documentary The World’s Greatest Musical Prodigies, and has performed for royalty and dignitaries including Prince Charles, the Queen of Belgium, and ex-President Hu of China. He has collaborated with orchestras such as Minnesota Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra under Sir Simon Rattle, Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra under Edo de Waart, English Chamber Orchestra under the late Sir Raymond Leppard, and Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne and Utah Symphony under Steven Jarvi. He recently recorded and hosted the complete Brahms piano solo music on RTHK4 Classical Radio in Hong Kong. Aristo first achieved international recognition when he won first prize in the Ettlingen International Piano Competition in Germany in 2006. He has also taken prizes at the Verbier Festival and at the Casagrande, Gina Bachauer, YCA Susan Wadsworth, Dublin, Clara Haskil, New York, Saint-Priest, and Viotti International Piano Competitions. In 2023 he won the Grand Prix at the Monte-Carlo Music Masters. Aristo holds a bachelor’s in economics from Harvard and a master’s in piano performance from New England Conservatory, as well as an artist diploma from The Juilliard School. His principal teachers have included Eleanor Wong, Robert McDonald, Orli Shaham, Colin Stone, Victor Rosenbaum, and Julia Mustonen-Dahlkvist, and he has been mentored by Gabriela Montero. In his free time, Aristo enjoys traveling, languages, gastronomy, and oenology.