Emanuel Ax, February 28, 2024

horowitz piano series

Boris Berman, artistic director

Emanuel Ax

Wednesday, February 28, 2024 | 7:30 pm

Morse Recital Hall in Sprague Memorial Hall

José García-León, Dean

Program

Ludwig van Beethoven 1770–1827

Arnold Schoenberg 1874–1951

Beethoven

Piano Sonata No. 8 in C minor, Op. 13, “Pathétique”

I. Grave – Allegro di molto e con brio

II. Adagio cantabile

III. Rondo. Allegro

Three Pieces, Op. 11

I. Mässige

II. Mässige

III. Bewegte

Piano Sonata No. 2 in A major, Op. 2, No. 2

I. Allegro vivace

II. Largo appassionato

III. Scherzo. Allegretto

IV. Rondo. Grazioso

Schoenberg

Schoenberg

Beethoven

Drei Klavierstücke (1894)

I. Andantino

II. Andantino grazioso

III. Presto – Più lento – Tempo primo

Six Little Pieces, Op. 19

I. Leicht, zart

II. Langsam

III. Sehr langsame

IV. Rasch, aber leicht

V. Etwas rasch

VI. Sehr langsam

Piano Sonata No. 23 in F minor, Op. 57, “Appassionata”

I. Allegro assai

II. Andante con moto

III. Allegro ma non troppo – Presto

As a courtesy to others, please silence all devices. Photography and recording of any kind is strictly prohibited. Please do not leave the hall during musical selections. Thank you.

Artist Profile

Emanuel Ax, piano

Born to Polish parents in what is today Lviv, Ukraine, Emanuel Ax moved to Winnipeg, Canada, with his family when he was a young boy. Ax made his New York debut in the Young Concert Artists Series, and in 1974 won the first Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Competition in Tel Aviv. In 1975 he won the Michaels Award of Young Concert Artists, followed four years later by the Avery Fisher Prize.

The 2023–2024 season will focus on the world premiere of Anders Hillborg’s piano concerto, commissioned for Ax by the San Francisco Symphony and Esa-Pekka Salonen with subsequent performances in Stockhom and New York. A continuation of the Beethoven for 3 touring and recording project with partners Leonidas Kavakos and Yo-Yo Ma took them to the Midwest in January. In recital Ax can be heard on the East Coast in the spring, culminating at Carnegie Hall in April. An extensive European tour will include concerts in Holland, Italy, Germany, France, and the Czech Republic.

Ax has been a Sony Classical exclusive recording artist since 1987, and following the success of the Brahms trios with Kavakos and Ma, the trio launched an ambitious, multi-year project to record all the Beethoven trios and symphonies arranged for trio of which the first two discs have recently been released. He has received Grammy Awards for the second and third volumes of his cycle of Haydn’s piano sonatas. He has also made a series of Grammy-winning recordings with

cellist Yo-Yo Ma of the Beethoven and Brahms sonatas for cello and piano. In the 2004–2005 season Ax contributed to an International Emmy Award–winning BBC documentary commemorating the Holocaust that aired on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. In 2013, Ax’s recording Variations received the Echo Klassik Award for Solo Recording of the Year (19th Century Music/Piano).

Ax is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and holds honorary doctorates of music from Skidmore College, New England Conservatory of Music, Yale University, and Columbia University.

» emanuelax.com

Program Notes

Piano Sonata No. 8 in C minor, “Pathétique” beethoven

Patrick Campbell Jankowski

Something was different about this one…

At twenty-seven, Beethoven wrote what would come to be called the Grande sonate pathétique upon publication, setting it off with a dramatic, slow introduction. With its dotted figures vaguely reminiscent of a funeral march and its thunderous chords, this is not only an unexpected way to begin a sonata, but also holds great importance across the entire first movement. Instability prevails, with harmonies yearning for resolution and extreme rhythmic turbulence throughout the Allegro di molto; beyond all of this, we seem unable to shake off the

opening, and it returns again and again as either a memory, or a phantom. The tender, songful central movement is grounded by a primary theme that has become justifiably famous. The warm embrace of A-flat major is twice disturbed by episodes in minor modes, but returns home peacefully by the movement’s conclusion. The Prestissimo seems hardly to let up its outpouring of energy, oscillating between nervousness and… perhaps optimism? Although there is no translation that perfectly captures its meaning, pathétique at its heart conveys passion and emotion, and across the entire spectrum. Though often stormy, anxious, and unsettled, there are moments of peace and even, in the final movement, fleeting visions of calm. Few instrumental works so concisely capture the range of human emotion, and it’s no wonder that the “Pathétique” sonata remains among Beethoven’s most enduring.

Three Pieces

schoenberg

Patrick Campbell Jankowski

Arnold Shoenberg: methodical, learned, scholarly, brilliant. His mastery of musical construction and his revolutionary ideas about harmony and pitch sealed his legacy among the most impactful geniuses in the Western tradition, alongside J. S. Bach. Like Bach, his highly expressive musical language yields endless new discoveries upon repeated listens. Schoenberg’s early music was mostly Romantic, if progressive, in idiom and chromatic in vocabulary—not too far from what Richard Strauss and others had inherited from Wagner. By the time of his Op. 11, he was beginning to

abandon tonality as a central governing principle, focusing instead on shape, form, arc, and harmony for sonority’s sake. It’s almost as though Schoenberg was more concerned with aligning himself with what was happening in the visual arts (Picasso’s cubism, Kandinsky’s abstractions), than with music, and you can hear in these three works a concise distillation of pitch and duration into something simple and direct. Each of the pieces lasts only as long as they need to, despite containing so much range. Of his alignment with human feeling and direct perception, Schoenberg noted that “it is impossible for a person to have only one sensation at a time. One has thousands simultaneously… this illogicality which our senses demonstrate… presented by their interactions, set forth by some mounting rush of blood, by some reaction of the senses or the nerves, this I should like to have in my music.” In short, get out of your head and into your feelings, and let Schoenberg’s music sink in.

Piano Sonata No. 2 in A major beethoven

Patrick Campbell Jankowski

Beethoven dedicated this early piano sonata to Franz Joseph Haydn, his onetime teacher in the 1790s. Although the young composer developed a rebellious streak that endured for his entire life, there wasn’t much to be gained from any outward defiance of Haydn, who by this time was among the most highly regarded composers in Europe. You can certainly hear the influence of Haydn’s music in the clarity of form, the simplicity of musical gestures (take the opening’s knock-knocks,

Program Notes, cont.

for instance), and the efficient use of repetition, imitation, and recall. However, imbued into this music is a flair for the dramatic and unexpected, particularly with regard to dynamics. The development of the first movement explodes from the faintest whisper and then immediately modulates to another key, meandering harmonically before re-settling into the gentility of the opening theme. The middle movement is strange in its juxtaposition of legato chords—evocative of a choir in church—against the short plucking of bass notes. A bubbly scherzo leads to a closing rondo with a number of often humorous twists and turns, chromatic lines, and unexpected dynamic contrasts—something Haydn, as the dedicatee, must surely have appreciated.

Drei Klavierstücke (1894)

schoenberg

Patrick Campbell Jankowski

If you think you know what to expect of Arnold Schoenberg’s music, think again before hearing these three brief piano pieces. If you didn’t know better, you might assume they were written by Brahms, and there’s something to that. Schoenberg admired the composer immensely, and found him to be far more inventive and progressive than many would expect. This is music written by a twenty-year-old at the beginning of his self-exploration. The Austrian composer, pianist, and conductor Alexander Zemlinsky —an heir to Brahms’s tradition—would become Schoenberg’s composition teacher right around the time that he wrote these pieces, and it is fascinating to trace the through-line from this point to, for instance,

the three solo piano pieces of Op. 11. At first hearing, you may think they were written by entirely different people. Listen again, and you may begin to really notice that Schoenberg did not abandon traditional form as time went by, nor even the idea of motivic development… his language simply evolved.

Six Little Pieces

schoenberg

Michael Noble

The first five pieces of Schoenberg’s Sechs kleine Klavierstücke (Six Little Piano Pieces), Op. 19, were written in a single day— February 19, 1911—while the concluding piece was written on June 17, shortly after the death of Gustav Mahler. Indeed, it is a “well circulated claim that Schoenberg conceived Op. 19, No. 6 as a tombeau to Mahler,” according to the Canadian musicologist Henry Klumpenhouwer. During this period, Schoenberg was also in the midst of orchestrating his massive cantata, Gurre-Lieder. The brevity and atonal language of Op. 19 could not be more different from the expansive romanticism exhibited in Gurre-Lieder.

Schoenberg remarked of Op. 19: “Consider what moderation is required to express oneself so briefly. You can stretch every glance out to a poem, every sigh into a novel. But to express a novel in a single gesture, a joy in a breath—such concentration can only be present in proportion to the absence of self-pity.” This work calls into question the entire nature of musical form, and pianist Glenn Gould even suggested that the Six Little Piano Pieces reflect Schoenberg’s own uncertainty as a composer at this time.

However, as opposed to the self-pity that Schoenberg may have felt while composing a monumental work such as Gurre-Lieder, Op. 19 provided Schoenberg a chance to assert his confidence in the form of the piano miniature.

Piano Sonata No. 23 in F minor, “Appassionata”

beethoven

Patrick Campbell Jankowski

Written in the midst of what has come to be called Beethoven’s “Heroic” period, this sonata, later published as “Appassionata,” is a perfect example of the composer’s breaking away from tradition in every respect. Alongside the Waldstein and Moonlight from the same period, this sonata challenges what a work for solo piano can be. That includes the very instruments themselves, as there’s plenty of evidence to show that Beethoven wished the pianos of his time could achieve greater extremes and amass a heftier sound. If only he could hear the Appassionata today. While emotionally charged, the entire sonata and the first movement in particular is an exercise in compositional economy. The whisper-soft opening in the piano’s low range stretches upward as an arpeggio and then settles into a trill. He repeats it again in a new harmony, just a half-step higher. Then, only the trill remains. Beethoven distills his theme into its simplest components: the arpeggio, the trill, the drum taps not unlike the “fate” motive from his Fifth Symphony. Much of the actual melodic content is fairly simple, which allows the dynamics—those unexpected extremes— to shine. Although he pushes the piano to the upper limits of volume, the movement

ends even softer than it began: ppp. The middle movement is mostly quiet and noble, and Beethoven marks the opening dynamic piano e dolce, “soft and sweet.” A simple, hymnal theme unfolds and is followed by four variations. The surprises of the first movement are replaced with a form quite literally based on stability and consistency: no matter what, the outlines of that theme are always there. The finale—also in sonata form, imparting not only a symmetry to the work’s construction but also a “weightiness” to the latter part—tears by at breakneck speed. The reputation that this sonata has for being tempestuous in nature is perhaps grounded mostly in this finale. Perpetual motion ensues with little pause for breath, and as if that weren’t enough, Beethoven adds a Presto thrust at the end—one final burst of unbridled energy.

About the Horowitz Piano Series

The Horowitz Recital Series was established in 2000 to honor the artistry of the great Ukrainian-American pianist Vladimir Horowitz (1903–1989), who chose to leave his papers to Yale upon his death in 1989. Today, Yale honors his legacy through the Horowitz Piano Series, which brings many of the world’s great keyboard artists to Yale and presents the distinguished pianists of the Yale faculty.

Emanuel Ax, Yefim Bronfman, and Radu Lupu are among the guest pianists who have performed at Yale. The series also presents pianists who are less known in the United States, such as Paul Lewis, Pierre Réach, and Mikhaïl Rudy.

charles ives circle

$750 and up

Melody Lai Ouyang

paul hindemith circle

$500–$749

Dr. Lorraine Siggins

horatio parker circle

$250–$499

Mr. & Mrs. Douglas J. Crowley

Jim Scala

samuel simons sanford circle

$125–$249

Anonymous

Henry & Joan Binder

Richard Sonder & Susan Monserud

gustave j. stoeckel circle

$50–$124

Karen Kelleher Bacon

Laura Berry & Bernard Hulin

Eduardo Groisman

Susan Holahan

Jon Resnik

List as of February 14, 2024

yale

Sprague