Romantic Piano Favourites, Volume 5 Domenico Scarlatti (1685 - 1757): Sonata in E Major, K. 162 Luigi Boccherini (1743 - 1805) Minuet in A Major (tr. Balazs...
Romantic Piano Favourites, Volume 5
Domenico Scarlatti (1685 - 1757): Sonata
in E Major, K. 162
Luigi Boccherini (1743 - 1805) Minuet in
A Major (tr. Balazs Szokolay)
Franz Schubert (1797 - 1828) Marche
militaire in D Major, D. 733/1 (arr. Balazs Szokolay)
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 - 1827)
Bagatelle in A Minor, Opus 59 (Fuer Elise)
Robert Schumann (1810 - 1856) Album fuer
die Jugend, Opus 68; No.28 Erinnerung; No.12 Knecht Ruprecht
Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809 - 1847)
Venetian Boat Song, Opus 30 No.6 (from Songs without Words Book II)
Edvard Grieg (1843 - 1907) Wedding-day at
Troldhaugen, Opus 65 No.6 (from Lyric Pieces) Maurice Ravel (1875 -1937) Pavane
pour une infante defunte
Johann & Josef Strauss (1825 - 1899)
& 1827-1870) Pizzicato Polka (tr. Balazs Szokolay)
Francois-Joseph Gossec (1734 - 1829)
Gavotte 'Rosine' in D Major (tr. Theodore de Lajarte)
Franz Lehar (1870 - 1948) Vilja from The
Merry Widow (tr. Balazs Szololay)
Claude Debussy (1862- 1918) Arabesque in G
Major
Richard Strauss (1864 - 1949) Staendchen,
Opus 17 No.2 (tr. Walter Gieseking)
Fryderyk Chopin (1871 - 1849) Nocturne in E
Fiat Major, Opus 9 No.2
Leon Jessel (1871 - 1942) Parade of the
Tin Soldiers, Opus 123
Pyotr Il'ylch Tchalkovsky (1840 - 1893)
Romance in F Minor, Opus 5
Gustar Lange (1830 - 1889) Der klelne
Postillon (The Little Postillion)
The fifth volume of Romantic Piano Pieces
covers a relatively wide range of well known music, some of it popular rather
than Romantic in any strict sense. The age of the piano began in the nineteenth
century, although a form of pianoforte had been developed much earlier.
Technical changes, however, and changes in society, made the piano the
favourite instrument of a growing middle class. There was an enormous demand
for piano teachers and for piano music suitable for domestic performance by the
ambitious. Until recently, indeed, learning music, in England at least, has
been synonymous with learning the piano.
The present collection opens with a
charming, delicate and characteristic sonata by the Italian composer Domenico
Scarlatti, son of the distinguished Alessandro, composer of Neapolitan opera,
and himself, for much of his career, in the service of the Portuguese Maria
Barbara, Queen of Spain, for whom he wrote some 550 Esercizi, Exercises later
known as sonatas, short pieces of remarkable invention.
Boccherini's Minuet comes from a
set of ten Minuets published in 1788 by a composer who, in his time, rivalled
Haydn in popularity. Italian by birth, Boccherini, like Domenico Scarlatti, spent
much of his career in the service of the Spanish royal family. He came from a
family that won distinction in ballet as well as in music and was himself a
cello virtuoso, an accomplishment that led to a brief period of employment by
the cello-playing King of Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm II.
Franz Schubert's three Marches
militaires, written for piano duet, were probably composed during the
summer of 1818 for the composer's pupils, the daughters of Count Johann Karl
Esterhazy, a member of the noble family that Haydn had served for half a
century. The son of a Vienna schoolmaster, Schubert helped his father for a
time, but in the course of his short life never held any musical appointment,
employing his talent rather on music for a loyal circle of friends than for
grander musical occasions. The Count spent the summer at his estate at Zseliz,
in Hungary, and Schubert found his two pupils, Marie and Karoline, aged 15 and
12 respectively, congenial.
It seems to have been the French composer
François Couperin who, early in the eighteenth century, first made use of the
title Bagatelle. It was to prove a useful label for later composers,
writing genuine trifles or modestly deprecating their own work. Beethoven
composed and published three sets of Bagatelles. Fuer Elise, all too
well known from infant attempts to master its opening bars, was not published
until fifty years after the composer's death. It seems to have been written in
1810, and dedicated to Therese Malfatti, to whom Beethoven proposed in the same
year, with no success.
Robert Schuman, whose career as a pianist
had been cut short by a physical weakness in the fingers, as Beethoven's had
been by his deafness, excelled in the composition of short pieces, often of
literary inspiration. He wrote the 43 1ittle sketches that make up his Album
fuer die Jugend in 1848, when he and his wife, the pianist Clara Wieck were
living in Dresden. Married in 1840, after a law suit against Friedrich Wieck
was decided in Schumann's favour, the couple had by 1848 four children, two of
them old enough to make use of the present pieces, the first originally bearing
the title Erinnerung an Mendelssohn, a composer who had died a year
before, and the second the self-explanatory Sir Rupert.
Mendelssohn himself had encouraged
Schumann by arranging performances of his work in Leipzig with the Gewandhaus
Orchestra, which he directed. A man of diverse talents, sociable and broadly
educated, he retained an element of classicism in his work, an ability to use
again old forms, coupled with an economy of means, while nevertheless providing
music of contemporary Romantic appeal. The Venetian Boat Song included
here, not the only one he wrote, appeared in the second volume of his genre
pieces, Songs without Words, graceful vignettes calculated to bring a blush of
delight to the cheeks of any young person.
Wedding-day at Troldhaugen appears among one of the sets of Lyric Pieces that Grieg was to
write throughout his life, the first group appearing in 1867, and the group of
which the present piece forms a part thirty years later. It is typical in its
way of the colourful and illustrative writing of the Norwegian composer, the
leading nationalist composer of his time and country.
The French composer, Maurice Ravel,
claimed to have chosen the title of his Pavane pour une infante defunte
on grounds of euphony rather than for any other reason. Written for the piano
in 1899, the piece won immediate popularity in its original form, extended by
the later orchestral version made by the composer. 'Whether the nostalgic
music, based on an old dance form, mourns a Spanish princess or not, it has
about it a characteristic fin de siecle air of yearning for an unattainable and
ideal past, a quality Ravel shared with his teacher Gabriel Faure.
The world of Johann and Joseph Strauss
was a very different one. The former followed his father into the business of
providing light music for the Viennese public, in spite of his father's attempt
to provide all his sons with a more satisfactory career. The younger Johann
involved his younger brothers Joseph and Eduard with the activities of the
Strauss orchestra, which became identified with the very spirit of the city.
The Pizzicato Polka was a collaboration between two of the brothers.
François-Joseph Gossec enjoyed a
successful career in France before the Revolution, turning his attentions in
1790 to the Corps de Musique de la Garde Nationale and supplying the new
republic with music for public occasions and assuming a leading position in the
Conservatoire in 1795, a place that he retained until the dissolution of the
institution on the Bourbon restoration. He was not reinstated in the
establishment that took its place. The Gavotte 'Rosine', a popular
little piece, is taken from his 1786 opera of the same name.
The Merry Widow,
the most popular of operettas, was the work of Franz Lehar, a Hungarian-born
bandmaster, who made his career in Vienna. The work was first staged at the
Theater an der Wien in 1905 and deals with the marital complications involving
the widow herself and her lover and suitor.
Claude Debussy, a pianist of ability, if
never the virtuoso he had once hoped to become, was relatively late in
developing his own characteristically poetic piano style. The two Arabesques,
of which the G major is the second, are early works, written between 1888 and
1891, are well known, and were to become an established part of contemporary
domestic repertoire. Debussy's later piano music increases in complexity and in
its evocative content from about 1905, with the publication of the first set of
Images and the revision of the Suite Bergamasque.
Staendchen,
one of the best known of songs by Richard Strauss, was written in 1887, as the
composer was embarking on the remarkable series of tone-poems that formed the major
part of his output for the years immediately following. The Serenade is a
setting of words by Adolph Friedrich von Schack and becomes, in Walter
Gieseking's transcription, an evocatively brilliant piano solo.
The music of the Polish composer Fryderyk
Chopin is at the heart of the Romantic repertoire. Favouring delicacy of
nuance, coupled with a considerable technical facility in his own playing
rather than the bravura of contemporaries like Liszt, he was to extend the
range of piano music in his own way and in his own instantly recognizable
idiom, of which the E flat Nocturne, written at the time when he was
leaving his native country to settle in Paris, is a well known example.
Parade of the Tin Soldiers
must be one of the better known pieces by the German composer Leon Jessel, who
produced a number of similar short character pieces for an immediately
welcoming public, at the same time winning himself a contemporary reputation
with his operettas.
Tchaikovsky is not generally associated
with piano music, although he played the instrument and wrote for it throughout
his life, from 1854, when he composed a Valse, now lost, to the year of his
death, in which he published a set of eighteen short piano pieces. The
Romance in F minor belongs to 1868, at a time when the composer, having
graduated at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, was employed on the teaching
staff of the parallel institution in Moscow. It is dedicated to Desiree Artot,
a singer with whom the composer fancied himself in love.
The Little Postilion by
Lange is a brief and insubstantial piano piece based on the once-familiar sound
of the post-horn, source of galops designed for Viennese ball-rooms and
exhibitions of pianistic panache, such as the postscript to the present
release.
Balazs Szokolay
The Hungarian pianist Balazs Sozkolay was
born in Budapest 1961, the son of a mother who is a pianist and a father who is
a composer and professor at the Ferenc Liszt Academy. He started learning the
piano when he was five and in 1970 entered the preparatory class of the
Budapest Music Academy, where he completed his studies with Pal Kadosa and
Zoltan Kocsis in 1983. He later spent two years at the Academy of Music in
Munich, with a West German government scholarship.
Balazs Szokolay made an early
international appearance with Peter Nagy at the Salzburg Interforum in 1979,
and in 1983 substituted for Nikita Magaloff in Belgrade in a performance of the
Piano Concerto No.1 of Brahms. He is now a soloist with the Hungarian State
Orchestra and has given concerts in a number of countries abroad, including
Austria, Switzerland, France, Italy, Poland, the Soviet Union, Bulgaria and
Czechoslovakia. In September, 1987, he made his recital debut at the Royal
Festival Hall in London. He has won a number of important prizes at home and
abroad, including, most recently, in the 1987 Queen Elisabeth of the Belgians
Competition.