Notes by Philip Carlsen
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Mikhail Pletnev
Tchaikovsky’s two-act ballet The Nutcracker received its first staged production in St. Petersburg in December 1892. Nine months earlier, he conducted a preview with a suite of eight scenes drawn from the ballet, and it was immediately greeted with accolades—this is the version of the ballet that most people probably know best. But there is another more recent Nutcracker suite, a showpiece of piano virtuosity, that has superseded the original in the hearts of contemporary pianists. This other suite first showed up at the 1978 International Tchaikovsky competition. It was created and performed by the great Mikhail Pletnev as one of his competition pieces, and it ultimately helped him secure the Gold Medal. Although the Nutcracker suites of Tchaikovsky and Pletnev share four numbers—March, Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, Russian Dance (Trepak), and Chinese Dance—Pletnev did not include Tchaikovsky’s other choices and instead filled out his suite with the Tarantella, Journey Through the Snow, and Pas de Deux.
As the longest piece in the set, and with its profound challenges for the player, the Pas de Deux is the perfect, high-
impact closer for Pletnev. It is instructive to compare a passage from that movement with Tchaikovsky’s piano and full orchestra versions. Think about the countless hours the dancers spend in rehearsal as they learn the choreography for an evening-length ballet. No orchestra yet. Typically, the musical accompaniment is supplied by a rehearsal pianist playing from a transcription of the full orchestra score. By necessity, the piano score (which is, in fact, called a reduction) must leave things out. In the orchestra version, the climax of the Pas de Deux has practically every instrument from double basses to piccolo playing quadruple forte, with trumpets wailing on the tune. How to reduce it for piano? Tchaikovsky’s solution is simple and effective: give the trumpet tune to the right hand thumb, reinforce it with three-note chords on each beat, have the left hand play thick, four-note bass chords with a rapid rocking motion (tremolo), and hold the damper pedal down. Perfect for dance rehearsal. Not so compelling for a piano recital. This is where Pletnev comes in. Somehow, in this spot, he manages to give the illusion of a full orchestra with its many colors, employing chords played by all fingers and rapid scales up and down the full keyboard, reaching as many as 133 notes in a single measure. In the hands of a great player, the effect is exhilarating. Pletnev’s final, surprising touch, is to end the suite softly.
Franz Schubert and Frédéric Chopin
The juxtaposition of Schubert and Chopin on this concert prompts reflections on similarities in their life stories. They were two of the towering giants of early Romantic music, tragic in their early deaths—Schubert at 31 and Chopin at 39—but heroic in the astonishing amount of timeless music they created. Although inhabiting different musical worlds—Vienna for Schubert; Warsaw and Paris for Chopin—they shared a predilection for expressive harmonic turns in their music, as well as a deep veneration for Mozart. The piano was their workbench. Writing music likely involved a great deal of improvisation, a kind of musical free-association as they sat at the keyboard exploring and developing new ideas. Material made up on the spot might eventually find its way onto the page, but these composers strove to maintain a quality of spontaneity even as they revised the music and crafted it into its final form. Schubert’s use of the title “Impromptu” announces his intention to convey that sense of physical and emotional immediacy. His two impromptus on this concert come from a set of four, published after his death as Op. 142. No. 3, in B-flat major, is a set of variations in a moderate tempo. No. 4, in F minor, marked Allegro
scherzando, is mercurial in its shifting moods, playing a handful of contrasting ideas against one another, at several points hesitating, or interrupting the forward motion, as if deciding where to go next.
Chopin’s friend Romuald Hube, describing a brief period when they lodged together, recalled that he was “always practicing on the piano, usually reworking phrases, and sometimes improvising.” Picture him at work, hands exploring the keys, perhaps searching out sparks of inspiration for his new set of etudes. He settles on a simple premise: the right hand plays rapid arpeggios up and down the keyboard while the left hand presents a stentorian, slow-moving, bass tune in octaves. He improvises with that, gives the tune direction, enlivens it with subtle variety in the rhythm, makes it softer in a few places, and crafts a harmonic progression with dramatic interactions of dissonance and consonance. A piece begins to take shape, reaching its final form as the etude in C major, the first in the set. Another spark of inspiration—that the right hand be restricted to the black keys—results in the Etude No. 5 in G-flat major. In analogous ways, the other etudes of Op. 10 are each inventions on a specific technical problem. The final etude, in C minor, dubbed “The Revolutionary” after Chopin’s death, was, in Alan Walker’s words, “composed against the turbulent political background of the Warsaw Uprising and its collapse … Whether or not it was Chopin’s direct response to the fall of Warsaw in September 1831, that legend is now so deeply woven into the fabric of the piece that it cannot be separated from it.”
Unlike Schubert, the composer of over 600 Lieder, Chopin did not write much for voice. And yet, song permeates his music. The Nocturnes, in particular, with their dreamy, reflective melodies over guitar-like accompaniment, are decidedly vocal in expression. Chopin, of course, was renowned for his uncanny ability to make the piano sing. One hears it in the opening tune of the Nocturne in B major, Op. 9, No. 3. Notice how it is embellished each time it’s restated, with subtly altered rhythm or blossoming flourishes. Chopin adds a brief, agitated contrasting section in the middle of the piece, then returns to the dreaminess to close. The Ballade No. 1 in G minor, like the Etudes and the Op. 9 nocturnes, comes from the early 1830s, a period in Chopin’s life when he often felt homesick, self-exiled from Poland and the oppression it was suffering under the Tsar. The Ballade seems to give voice to those feelings, a mix of nostalgia and loneliness. It starts tentatively. A melody slowly ascends from the bass then takes a turn in on itself. There is no clear sense yet of what key we’re in. When the first two chords arrive, their identity is complicated with a strange dissonant note. Finally, the first theme begins. Its six notes fall naturally under the hand, as if it had always been there, waiting for Chopin to discover it. As the great piano pedagogue Heinrich Neuhaus put it, Chopin viewed the piano as “a familiar, friendly being ready to meet you if you treat it lovingly and freely, and yearning for the closeness of the human hand as the flower yearns for the approach of the bee, ready to yield all its pollen.”
Chopin wrote his Variations on “La ci darem la mano” when he was only 17 (in the same year, 1827, as Schubert’s Impromptus). The celebrated theme, of course, comes from Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni—a tune of great beauty in the service of Giovanni’s treachery as he uses his wiles and false promises to seduce the servant girl Zerlina. Chopin structured the piece as an introduction, theme, and five variations, with a grand finale that transforms Mozart’s tune into Poland’s
national dance, the polonaise. Separating the variations are brief interludes that would have originally been played by an accompanying orchestra. This was the score that caused Robert Schumann to famously proclaim that the next great composer had arrived: “Hats off, gentlemen, a genius!”
Sophia Liu performs Sunday, April 12 2PM at Hannaford Hall on the USM Campus in Portland.