The Program
- In recent years, Vassily Primakov has been hailed as a pianist of world class importance. Gramophone wrote that “Primakov’s empathy with Chopin’s spirit could hardly be more complete,” and the American Record Guide stated: “Since Gilels, how many pianists have the right touch? In Chopin, no one currently playing sounds as good as this! This is a great Chopin pianist.” READ MORE…
Vassily Primakov, will perform piano masterpieces of S. Rachmaninoff, A. Glazunov and A. Arensky.
Featuring
Vassily Primakov, piano
Zoya Shereshkova, cello
Natalia Lavrova, piano
Description
Little known today, Anton Arensky was one of the brightest stars of the late 19th century Russian music scene. Born in 1861 to a pair of devoted amateur musicians under whose guidance he began his training, he entered Saint Petersburg’s conservatory in 1879, taking lessons from Rimsky-Korsakov. Upon the completion of his studies in 1882 Arensky became one of the youngest professors ever hired by the Moscow Conservatory.
Arensky’s years at Moscow were fruitful; between 1882 and his resignation from the Conservatory’s faculty in 1895 he completed most of his larger works (including the early Piano Concerto and both Symphonies). In 1891 his first opera, Son Na Volge (A Dream on the Volga) –which he had worked on intermittently since his student days—was successfully premiered in Moscow.
Asked to replace Balakirev as director of the imperial chapel in St. Petersburg, Arensky returned to his home city in 1895 where he remained for the rest of his life. By the mid-1890s Arensky’s career as a virtuoso pianist and a conductor was flourishing. In 1901 he resigned his position at the imperial chapel to pursue a fuller schedule of conducting and performing appearances. Death came prematurely in 1906 when Arensky, after decades of hard living and overindulgence, succumbed to tuberculosis. His influence as a teacher—to such future luminaries as Rachmaninoff, Gretchaninov and Scriabin—has earned him a place of distinction in the history of Russian music.
It must be noted that Arensky is one of the most influential figures in the promotion of two-piano music. In addition to his 4 Suites for two pianos he also composed two sets of pieces for piano duet, later arranging one of them, his Children’s Suite of eight canons, Op 65, also for two pianos. Nowadays piano-duo concerts occur quite frequently and are fully appreciated as part of the usual music-making environment. However, in Russia at the turn of the century this was hardly the case, despite the occasional foray into the piano-duo medium by Anton Rubenstein and a few others. Here is what Rosina Lhevinne remembered how novel performances on two pianos were in Russia when she recalled her own duo ensemble alongside her husband, the Great Russian pianist Josef Lhevinne:
“My entrance into the field of two-piano playing was quite by chance. In 1898, when Mr. Lhevinne and I were married, eight days after my graduation from the Imperial Conservatory, I firmly decided not to attempt a career of my own. César Cui, the composer-general who knew my work, did not approve of the decision, and one day paid us a visit. He appeared in his glorious uniform—gray coat lined with scarlet, white gloves and a sword. The purpose of his visit was to ask us to take part in a charity concert of which he was the chairman.
He requested we play a new suite by Anton Arensky, our harmony teacher. The next day after the concert, the newspapers gave as much space to the composition and the phenomenon of having two grand pianos on stage, as to our playing.”
Arensky’s two-piano Suites are models of the romantic duo-piano literature and clearly generated considerable interest at the time. It cannot be coincidence that Rachmaninoff’s first two-piano work, his Russian Rhapsody, was written while still a student of Arensky in Moscow or that his Fantasie, Op 5, for two pianos was completed only a year after Arensky’s Suite No 2; interestingly Rachmaninoff asked the German-born pianist and composer Paul Pabst, the dedicatee of Arensky’s Suite and Professor of Piano at the Moscow Conservatory, to première the piece with him. Like all the best examples of two-piano music, Arensky’s Suites make no compromises on the technical demands made of the performers.
Suite No. 2 op. 23 “Silhouettes” (1892)
Despite this work’s Romantic subtitle, Arensky seems to have taken some inspiration from the Baroque harpsichord suites; this is a series of mildly whimsical character pieces, each title given in French. Yet this could hardly be mistaken for Baroque music; the aesthetic is Arensky’s own.
The first movement, Le Savant (The Scholar) is a take-off on Baroque fugues. A slow, heavy and somewhat dark subject appears out in the bass, and then presented canonically. A second, lighter and busier theme takes over, but soon the intimidating initial theme clashes with it in a most “scholarly” style.
The Coquette is a delicate and irresistible salon waltz swirling through several light episodes, some of them carefree and some pensive. Polichinelle (The Buffoon) is a mercurial piece in which melody lines dance across dizzying accompaniments. It’s a comic and mildly grotesque scherzo.
Le Reveur (The Dreamer) is a comparatively serious slow movement, its emphasis on lyricism not precluding a passionate central climax, which quickly subsides into a Schumann-esque reverie. La Danseuse (The Dancer) is Spanish; the rhythm is a bolero, over which the melodic figurations grow increasingly complex and exhibitionistic, rather in the manner of Soler’s Fandango.
Suite No.4 op.62 (1901)
In his fourth suite for two pianos, Arensky abandons the salon style he’d favored in the first three and takes a fuller, late-Romantic concert approach similar to that of Rachmaninov’s suites for two pianos. Perhaps it’s significant in this respect that Arensky dedicated this work to Vera Siloti, the wife of pianist Alexander Siloti, who was Rachmaninov’s cousin.
As in the Rachmaninov suites, Arensky’s falls into four movements. The sonorous Prelude, officially in D flat, is highly chromatic and full of harmonic surprises. It is important to take a notice of Arensky’s sudden shift from key signatures like C major that dominates 1st, 2nd and 3rd Suites to a more complex tonalities.
The A flat Romance begins as a melancholic cantabile piece, but despite its swaying rhythm and the carefree nature of its theme, there’s something disquieting about some of the movement’s harmonic turns and the desperate busyness of some of its ornamental figures.
Le Reve (The Dream), the most extended single movement in Arensky’s suites, begins with light, arpeggiated figures, all accompaniments and no melody. Its atmosphere enchants the listener into a blissful calmness. Eventually a chordal sequence that initially served as an underlying harmonic structure for the arpeggios emerges in the treble as the true main melody. A second section arises, dark and rhapsodic –the dream is becoming reality when it builds into the most passionate and dramatic climax of all four Suites. This is followed then by a repeat of the first section.
The concluding movement, simply called Finale, revives the theme of the Romance, but now turns it into a dizzying waltz in the manner of Chopin, full of potentially disturbing undercurrents and not at all similar to the glittering, entertaining waltz at the center of Arensky’s first suite.
Event Details
Date:
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
7:30 PM
Tickets:
$37, $27, $17$37 general admission;
$27 seniors/students;
$17 children (12 and younger)
Buy Tickets:
Location:
The New England Conservatory's Williams Hall
30 Gainsborough St., Boston, MA
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