PROGRAM
Prelude in D-flat Major, Op. 28, No. 14
Teddy Kaplan
Prelude in A Major, Op. 28, No. 7
Zach Appel
Waltz in E Minor, B. 56 (Op. posth.)
Hailey Boss
Mazurka in Bb Major, Op. 7, No. 1
Ella Herrenbruck
Fantaisie-impromptu, Op. 66
Josiah Johnson
Ballade No. 1 in G Minor, Op. 23
Florence Lowry
Ballade No. 2 in F Major, Op. 38
Sarah Altman
Ballade No. 3 in A-flat Major, Op. 47
Zach Appel
Ballade No. 4 in F Minor, Op. 52
Jaden Espenshade
Nocturne in C-sharp Minor, Op. 27, No. 1
Hannah Jen
Nocturne in C-sharp Minor, Op. 27, No. 2
Etude, Op. 10, No. 7
Wesley Morgan
_______________________________________________
- Please make sure all cell phones and pagers are turned off during the recital.
- No flash photography during performance.
Frederic Chopin Biography
Biography and Musical Contributions of Frederic Chopin – adapted
from the Norton Anthology of Western Music.
Italicized text added by Sarah Altman.
Frederic Chopin (1810-1849) was the Romantic composer most
closely identified with the piano. His solo piano music, featured in tonight’s
recital, won him enormous popularity and has been central to the repertoire
ever since.
He was born near Warsaw to a French father and a Polish mother in a section of Poland that was then under Russian domination. His talent as a pianist, improviser, and composer showed early, and at age seven he published his first piece and played his first public concert, as a concerto soloist. After studies at the Warsaw Conservatory, he performed in Vienna and toured Germany and Italy. His pieces with a strong Polish character were especially successful, encouraging him to write more. The national flavor of his music and its brilliant virtuosity won him a strong following in Poland. Seeking an international reputation, he returned to Vienna, then to Germany in 1830. When he heard of the failed Polish revolt against Russia that November, he continued on to Paris, where he settled in 1831, never to see his homeland again.
Chopin soon met the leading musicians in Paris, including Rossini, Meyerbeer, Berlioz, and List, and entered the highest social circles. He became the most fashionable piano teacher for wealthy students. Their fees meant he could give up public performance and play only at private concerts and at salons hosted by the leading women of the city. In turn, the rarity of his appearances increased his cachet and allowed him to charge very high fees for lessons. He also earned considerable sums from publications. He never married, but had a tempestuous nine-year affair with the novelist Aurore Dudevant, known by her pseudonym George Sand. The 1848 revolutions in Paris disrupted his teaching and forced a grueling tour of England and Scotland. By then, he was ravaged by tuberculosis, and he
died in Paris in 1849.
Throughout his life, Chopin’s entire output consisted of about two hundred solo piano pieces, six works for piano and orchestra (composed for his concert appearances as a young virtuoso), some twenty songs, and four chamber works. The genres he cultivated range from the étude and prelude (designed for teaching), and types suitable for amateurs, such as dances and nocturnes, to longer and more challenging works for his own performances and for other advanced players, including ballades, scherzos, and sonatas.
Chopin's twenty-four preludes of Op. 28 (1836-39), like the preludes in J.S. Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, cover all the major and minor keys. They are brief mood pictures, less challenging than his études but like them in posing specific performance problems. They also illustrate the astounding inventiveness of his figuration. Such rich chromatic harmonies influenced many later composers, as did the varied textures of Chopin's piano writing.
Chopin's waltzes, mazurkas, and polonaises are all stylized dances, often composed for his students and dedicated to them when published. They are extremely idiomatic for piano in their figuration and fingerings. His waltzes evoke the ballrooms of Vienna, but his mazurkas and polonaises are suffused with the spirit of Poland. The mazurka was a Polish folk dance that by Chopin's time had become an urban ballroom dance popular among high society in Paris as well as in Poland. The Mazurka in B-flat Major, Op. 7, No. 1, (played tonight by Ella Herrenbruck) illustrates the genre: 6/8 meter with frequent accents on the second or third beat and often a dotted figure on the first beat; simple accompaniment; and four-measure phrases. The melody, which is instrumental rather than vocal in style, displays elements meant to suggest
the exoticism in Polish folk music, including trills, grace notes, large leaps, and smooth phrasings beginning on the last sixteenth of a beat to imitate folk bowing (on a fiddle). The tempo changes and breaths in the music imitate the longer time required for dancers to execute a turn or a lift than to take quick steps.
Chopin's ballades and scherzos are longer and more demanding than his other one-movement piano works. Chopin was one of the first (along with Clara Schumann) to use the name ballade for an instrumental piece. His ballades (all four of which are included on the program tonight!) capture the charm and fire of Polish narrative ballads, combining these qualities with constantly fresh turns in harmony and form. Each ballade tells a story…but Chopin allows the listener to determine what that story might
be. His scherzos are not joking or playful, as the name of the genre implies, but serious and passionate. Yet they are tricky and quirky, which the term also implies, particularly in their rhythm and thematic material.
A nocturne (French for "night-piece") is a short mood piece evoking night, usually with a beautiful, embellished melody above a sonorous accompaniment. Fascination with night is linked to other aspects of Romanticism, such as interest in dreams, emotions, and the irrational. Chopin's initial conception of the nocturne owed much to the nocturnes by Irish pianist-composer John Field (1782-1837), who invented the genre, and Polish pianist-composer Maria Szymanowska (1789-1831), both of whom toured widely and were active in St. Petersburg, the capital of Russia. All three composers also drew inspiration from the vocal nocturne for two or more voices with piano or harp accompaniment, so that the nocturne for piano was essentially a song without words.
Chopin wrote twenty-seven études in all. Because études are intended to develop technique, each one as a rule addresses a specific skill and develops a single figure. Opus 10, No. 7 (played tonight by Wesley Morgan) features constant rapid repeated notes with the first and second finger, while simultaneously playing a jumpy melody in the top three fingers of the right hand over a chromatic, leaping legato line in the left hand. This requires the pianist to keep his hands and wrists loose.
The distinctive characteristics of Chopin's music stem from his life and public performance blended with elegant lyricism for the parlor, and originality in melody, harmony, and pianism encouraged equally by the values of the salon and by competition in the marketplace. His works were shaped by the demand for amateur compositions yet spoke to connoisseurs as well, giving his music broad and enduring appeal. His pieces are as gratifying to play as they are to hear. His greatest achievement was to liberate the piano from imitations of choral or ensemble textures and make it sound the way only a piano could sound, producing a whole new repertory of idiomatic sounds and figurations.
Chopin soon met the leading musicians in Paris, including Rossini, Meyerbeer, Berlioz, and List, and entered the highest social circles. He became the most fashionable piano teacher for wealthy students. Their fees meant he could give up public performance and play only at private concerts and at salons hosted by the leading women of the city. In turn, the rarity of his appearances increased his cachet and allowed him to charge very high fees for lessons. He also earned considerable sums from publications. He never married, but had a tempestuous nine-year affair with the novelist Aurore Dudevant, known by her pseudonym George Sand. The 1848 revolutions in Paris disrupted his teaching and forced a grueling tour of England and Scotland. By then, he was ravaged by tuberculosis, and he
died in Paris in 1849.
Throughout his life, Chopin’s entire output consisted of about two hundred solo piano pieces, six works for piano and orchestra (composed for his concert appearances as a young virtuoso), some twenty songs, and four chamber works. The genres he cultivated range from the étude and prelude (designed for teaching), and types suitable for amateurs, such as dances and nocturnes, to longer and more challenging works for his own performances and for other advanced players, including ballades, scherzos, and sonatas.
Chopin's twenty-four preludes of Op. 28 (1836-39), like the preludes in J.S. Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, cover all the major and minor keys. They are brief mood pictures, less challenging than his études but like them in posing specific performance problems. They also illustrate the astounding inventiveness of his figuration. Such rich chromatic harmonies influenced many later composers, as did the varied textures of Chopin's piano writing.
Chopin's waltzes, mazurkas, and polonaises are all stylized dances, often composed for his students and dedicated to them when published. They are extremely idiomatic for piano in their figuration and fingerings. His waltzes evoke the ballrooms of Vienna, but his mazurkas and polonaises are suffused with the spirit of Poland. The mazurka was a Polish folk dance that by Chopin's time had become an urban ballroom dance popular among high society in Paris as well as in Poland. The Mazurka in B-flat Major, Op. 7, No. 1, (played tonight by Ella Herrenbruck) illustrates the genre: 6/8 meter with frequent accents on the second or third beat and often a dotted figure on the first beat; simple accompaniment; and four-measure phrases. The melody, which is instrumental rather than vocal in style, displays elements meant to suggest
the exoticism in Polish folk music, including trills, grace notes, large leaps, and smooth phrasings beginning on the last sixteenth of a beat to imitate folk bowing (on a fiddle). The tempo changes and breaths in the music imitate the longer time required for dancers to execute a turn or a lift than to take quick steps.
Chopin's ballades and scherzos are longer and more demanding than his other one-movement piano works. Chopin was one of the first (along with Clara Schumann) to use the name ballade for an instrumental piece. His ballades (all four of which are included on the program tonight!) capture the charm and fire of Polish narrative ballads, combining these qualities with constantly fresh turns in harmony and form. Each ballade tells a story…but Chopin allows the listener to determine what that story might
be. His scherzos are not joking or playful, as the name of the genre implies, but serious and passionate. Yet they are tricky and quirky, which the term also implies, particularly in their rhythm and thematic material.
A nocturne (French for "night-piece") is a short mood piece evoking night, usually with a beautiful, embellished melody above a sonorous accompaniment. Fascination with night is linked to other aspects of Romanticism, such as interest in dreams, emotions, and the irrational. Chopin's initial conception of the nocturne owed much to the nocturnes by Irish pianist-composer John Field (1782-1837), who invented the genre, and Polish pianist-composer Maria Szymanowska (1789-1831), both of whom toured widely and were active in St. Petersburg, the capital of Russia. All three composers also drew inspiration from the vocal nocturne for two or more voices with piano or harp accompaniment, so that the nocturne for piano was essentially a song without words.
Chopin wrote twenty-seven études in all. Because études are intended to develop technique, each one as a rule addresses a specific skill and develops a single figure. Opus 10, No. 7 (played tonight by Wesley Morgan) features constant rapid repeated notes with the first and second finger, while simultaneously playing a jumpy melody in the top three fingers of the right hand over a chromatic, leaping legato line in the left hand. This requires the pianist to keep his hands and wrists loose.
The distinctive characteristics of Chopin's music stem from his life and public performance blended with elegant lyricism for the parlor, and originality in melody, harmony, and pianism encouraged equally by the values of the salon and by competition in the marketplace. His works were shaped by the demand for amateur compositions yet spoke to connoisseurs as well, giving his music broad and enduring appeal. His pieces are as gratifying to play as they are to hear. His greatest achievement was to liberate the piano from imitations of choral or ensemble textures and make it sound the way only a piano could sound, producing a whole new repertory of idiomatic sounds and figurations.