Focus on Piano Literature:
Paris in the 1920s
presents
Jerome Lowenthal
piano
Saturday, June 7, 2008
8:00 pm
Recital Hall, School of Music
School of Music
U N C G
Program
Sonate pour piano (1924) Igor Stravinsky
Quarter note = 112 (1882-1971)
Adagietto
Quarter note = 112
Nocturne #13 in B minor, Op. 119 (1922) Gabriel Fauré
(1845-1924)
Aubade (1929) Francis Poulenc
Toccata (1899-1963)
Recitatif
Rondeau
Presto
Recitatif
Andante
Allegro feroce
Conclusion
Intermission
Saudades do Brasil (1920-21) Darius Milhaud
Copacabana (1892-1974)
Ipanema
Gavea
Le Tombeau de Couperin (1914-17) Maurice Ravel
Prelude (1875-1937)
Fugue
Forlane
Rigaudon
Menuet
Toccata
Program Notes
Those who seek a unifying esthetic thread in tonight’s recital will be challenged. Like any vibrant
time and place, Paris in the 1920s was a caldron of competing, sometimes contradictory ideas.
Gabriel Fauré came to maturity before Ravel was born and jolly well could have been Francis
Poulenc’s grandfather. Igor Stravinsky, a Russian exile who lived in Switzerland and France,
probably couldn’t have cared less that Darius Milhaud spent two years in Brazil. The warm
breeze from a beach at Copacabana that Milhaud captured musically probably blew right past
Stravinsky, whose cool Neo-classicism and veneration of Bach and Beethoven didn’t go further
south than Vienna.
Thankfully, this isn’t an esthetics class and we don’t have to do what scholar Elaine Brody did in
her comprehensive if slightly confounding book Paris: The Musical Kaleidoscope 1870-1925. We
can just sit back and enjoy each composition on its own terms, without wondering (or at least
providing a definitive answer to the question of) what one piece has to do with another. The
tapestry is rich, the evening is multihued.
Stravinsky: Sonate pour piano (1924)
Stravinsky’s Sonate pour piano, composed in France in 1924 but premiered in Donaueschingen,
Germany in 1925, starts out with a classical sonatina feel, including “modulations,” motivic
development, and even a recapitulation. There is a veritable perpetual motion of triplets, almost
like a student’s deliberate practice of some Alberti bass pattern. Everything is cool, rather
detached, as if to say, “Oh yes, civilization nearly came to a screeching halt a few years ago, who
knows what atrocities are happening in the Soviet Union now, never mind what is about to
happen in Germany…let’s just get back to ‘normal life,’ OK?” And, as if to avoid those nasty
things called “feelings” even further, Stravinsky dispenses with the traditional character marking
that precedes a sonata movement—e.g., allegro (which means happy -- too dangerous an
assertion for Igor to have made)—and provides instead just the mathematically correct
metronome marking, quarter note = 112.
Stravinsky does indulge affect in the second movement with the slightly misused term adagietto,
implying either a tempo faster than adagio or a work shorter
than a traditional slow movement. It is neither. Rather, Beethoven’s elaborately ornamented,
deeply felt piano-sonata slow movements are easily recalled here—the Adagio molto from op.
10, no. 1 or the Adagio grazioso from Op. 31, No. 1, for example. Deep feeling almost emerges.
But it is quickly dismissed in the blustery, fugal finale, again marked at 112 to the quarter. J.S.
Bach is the obvious source and let no one call either composer sentimental. The movement ends
with an E major triad: Alles erledigt? (Everything solved?) Such was the hope of those turbulent
times.
Fauré: Nocturne No. 13 in B Minor, Op. 119 (1921)
Fauré’s Nocturne No. 13 in B Minor, composed in 1921 but only premiered in 1923 just one
year before Fauré died, brings us back to the world of feeling. Compared to the other works on
tonight’s program, one might even call this nocturne “Romantic,” with chromatic harmonies typical
of the late nineteenth century. The work is essentially sad, evocative of Beethoven’s description
of the key B minor as “die schwarze Tonart” (the black tonality). Considering that it was penned
on New Year’s Eve, December 31st, 1921, is it too far a stretch to wonder if the composer, just a
few months shy of his 76th birthday, was reflecting on a life of might-have-beens? Of the world’s
shattered expectations? Rather than run from deep emotion, as Stravinsky seemed to do in the
Sonata, Fauré embraces his melancholy. Do these two works symbolize the great divide
between the nineteenth- and twentieth-century outlooks, the former unabashedly expressive of
mankind’s deepest emotions and the latter suspicious of or in need of contextualizing those
emotions?
Poulenc: Aubade (1929)
Poulenc’s started out as a piano concerto with chamber orchestra and dancers, making it difficult
for cataloguers to even classify the work: choreographed piano concerto? ballet? semi-staged
melodrama with elaborate music? Whatever the genre, Aubade follows in the footsteps of other
seminal, transgeneric compositions such as Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire (1912; for speaker and
seven instruments) and Stravinsky’s Histoire du soldat (1918; for 3 actors, female dancer, and six
instruments). Paris seems to have been particularly receptive to these extravagant, definition-defying
works. The work in the form heard tonight was transcribed for piano solo by the
composer.
In Aubade’s eight movements, played attacca and lasting a total of around twenty minutes,
Poulenc tells the story of Diana who, “surrounded by her handmaidens, rebels against the divine
law which condemns her to eternal purity.” To ameliorate her lust, she grabs her bow and arrow
and goes out hunting in the forest (watch out, deer; take cover, metrosexuals). Whether or not
knowing the program helps listeners to follow the drama of this sprawling, detour-laden work in its
non-staged form remains an open question. On the other hand, the same question could be
asked of the semi-coherent, quasi Surrealist story of the staged version of Milhaud/Cocteau’s Le
boeuf sur le toit (composed 1919); just what does that enormous head on the policeman do to our
musical comprehension of Milhaud’s sambas? As I said earlier, just sit back and enjoy; don’t try
to figure everything out.
Milhaud: Saudades do Brasil (1920-21)
Speaking of Milhaud, the three Saudades do Brasil (composed 1920-21) are about as far away
as you can get—culturally, ideologically, esthetically, and any other -ally you can come up with—
from Stravinsky’s serious, Germanic tilt in the Sonata that opened the recital. One might wonder
if the two ever spoke. (Actually, they did on many occasions, and Stravinsky often called on
Madeleine Milhaud to perform the dramatic speaking part of his 1934 work, Perséphone.) The
Saudades sound like pure popular music from Brazil’s streets and cafes. OK, Milhaud
occasionally bitonalizes things (one hand in one key, one hand in another), but the chôros and
sambas are never too far away from their original sound. “Copacabana” exudes the warmth and
pace of an 85-degree beach. “Ipanema” steams up your windows—desire waiting to be
extinguished. (Milhaud put “nerveux” as the character marking.) “Gavea” might inspire a conga
line—but please watch where you put your hands…and please don’t block the exits.
Ravel: Le Tombeau de Couperin (1914-17)
All hilarity ceases with Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin. True, one translation could read “At
the tomb of Couperin,” a somber image, although a better translation would probably refer to
tombeau in its meaning as a type of lute music of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France.
The mood is definitely serious, made even more so by the realization that Ravel dedicated each
movement to a French fallen soldier of World War I. Ravel himself was an ambulance driver in
that defining event, suffering wounds in service to his country.
The Couperin in question here is François Couperin (1668-1733), the French Baroque composer
and keyboardist. Ravel pays homage to him and the French Baroque suite, by fashioning each
movement in the character of the traditional prelude, fugue, forlane, rigaudon, menuet, and
toccata (although Ravel’s Toccata incorporates the one-note repetition made famous in
Prokofiev’s Toccata, a clear nod to the twentieth century). Thus, the work was also an act of
patriotism and, artistically, an attempt to reclaim and venerate a uniquely French musical
language. Ravel is even passionate about performance practice in the clavecin age, indicating at
the bottom of the Prélude that all the ornaments should be played on the beat, in accordance with
seventeenth-century tradition.
Despite moments of glee (Rigaudon) and innocence (Menuet), most of the work expresses faint
melancholy (Prélude) or oppression (note the “sigh” figures in the Fugue). Even a traditionally
swingy dance like the forlane is made ambiguous and sad in Ravel’s chromatic, dissonance-filled
Forlane. And the E major tonality Ravel reaches at the end of the Toccata, whose opening key
was E minor, doesn’t sound as much triumphant as defiant. Le tombeau de Couperin is clearly
the most serious work on tonight’s program, from any perspective. It is also the earliest, written
during World War I, before hedonism and escape became such dominant forces in the artistic life
of Paris. Marguerite Long premiered it in a program of the Société Musicale Indépendante at the
Salle Gaveau in Paris on April 11, 1919—a work and performance that resonated throughout
Parisian musical circles, a heavy capstone to France as wounded country, and a virtual dividing
line for subsequent esthetics.
John Salmon
Performer
JEROME LOWENTHAL, born in 1932, continues to
fascinate audiences, who find in his playing a youthful
intensity and an eloquence born of life-experience. He
is a virtuoso of the fingers and the emotions.
Mr. Lowenthal studied in his native Philadelphia with
Olga Samaroff-Stokowski, in New York with William
Kapell and Edward Steuermann, and in Paris with
Alfred Cortot, meanwhile traveling annually to Los
Angeles for coachings with Artur Rubinstein. After
winning prizes in three international competitions
(Bolzano, Darmstadt, and Brussels), he moved to
Jerusalem where, for three years, he played, taught
and lectured.
Returning to America, he made his debut with the New
York Philharmonic playing Bartok's Concerto no. 2 in
1963. Since then, he has performed more-or-less
everywhere, from the Aleutians to Zagreb. Conductors
with whom he has appeared as soloist include
Barenboim, Ozawa, Tilson Thomas, Temirkanov, and
Slatkin, as well as such giants of the past as Leonard
Bernstein, Eugene Ormandy, Pierre Monteux and Leopold Stokowski. He has played sonatas
with Itzhak Perlman, piano duos with Ronit Amir (his late wife), Carmel Lowenthal (his daughter),
and Ursula Oppens, as well as quintets with the Lark, Avalon and Shanghai Quartets. He has
recently recorded the Beethoven Fourth Concerto with cadenzas by eleven different composers.
His other recordings include concerti by Tchaikovsky and Liszt, solo works by Sinding and Bartok,
and chamber music by Arensky and Taneyev.
Teaching, too, is an important part of Mr. Lowenthal’s musical life. For seventeen years at the
Juilliard School and for thirty-eight summers at the Music Academy of the West, he has worked
with an extraordinary number of gifted pianists, whom he encourages to understand the music
they play in a wide aesthetic and cultural perspective and to project it with the freedom which that
perspective allows.
School of Music
U N C G
