FIRST EDITION 2024 1-3 NOV 2024
LEIPZIG - PRAGUE - BUDAPEST - KYIV
A MUSIC CELEBRATION FEATURING THE UKRAINIAN MUSICAL HERITAGE
FIRST EDITION 2024 1-3 NOV 2024
LEIPZIG - PRAGUE - BUDAPEST - KYIV
A MUSIC CELEBRATION FEATURING THE UKRAINIAN MUSICAL HERITAGE
6pm Tune up for the concert !
A Pre-Concert Talk given by Christoph Stadtler
will enrich the concert experience with insights
into the music, background information on the works,
and the lives of the composers.
Free admission
SATURDAY 2 NOV 2024
7PM RAFFLES HOTEL-LE ROYAL
SONG RECITAL
LiYing Chiang-soprano, Issei Sakano-piano
STANYSLAV LYUDKEVYCH
Ukraine (1879 –1979)
Songs (in Ukrainian language)
Year of composing ~ 1902-1906
- Za Bajrakom bajrak (A Betrayal)
- Oj, verbo, verbo (What The Willow Saw)
- Koval’ (The Blacksmith)’
- Odna pisnja holosnen’kaI (‘ll Sing Joy To The World )
- Pidu vid vas (Must Leave)
- Ja j ne zhaluju (A Contented End)
Stanyslav Ludkevych, born in Lviv was a composer, musicologist, folklorist, and pedagogue; member of the Shevchenko Scientific Society since 1935. He was taught piano as a child by his mother, and continued to study in Lviv and in Vienna (composition, instrumentation and musicology where he obtained a PH D in 1907. Liudkevych began composing choral works while still a gymnasium student. Inspired by Taras Shevchenko’s poem of the same name, is considered one of the most eminent works in Ukrainian music of that time.
He was appointed director of the Lysenko Higher Institute of Music, and in 1919 he became an inspector of its branches and a lecturer in music theory. From 1939 he taught at the Lviv Conservatory and then held the Chair of Composition until his retirement in 1972. His complete art songs were published in Canada in 2016 by the Ukrainian Art Song Project.
Liudkevych and Kodaly
The connections of the creative activity of the outstanding Hungarian musician Zoltan Kodály with the Ukrainian musical culture can be studied both in genetic and in typological aspects. In the first case, attention is focused on the impact that Kodály has had on Ukrainian composers and folklorists, on the impact of the Kodály musical and pedagogical system on the mass musical education in Ukraine. In the second – the attention of the researcher is concentrated on possible parallels in the development of national musical cultures, elucidation of their coinciding and differing features. Most clearly such parallels, coincidences and differences are revealed in the comparison.
As folklorists, both Kodály and Lyudkevich became pioneers (each in their national culture) in deciphering folk songs from phonographic rollers. Lyudkevich spent 4 years of his life from 1902 to 1906 – deciphering phonographic records made in 1900–1902 by a member of the Shevchenko Scientific Society,ethnographer and linguist Joseph Rozdolsky.
For four years, Lyudkevich deciphered 1526 folk songs recorded by Rozdolsky, edited them and published them in two volumes. All the songs in this compendium are grouped according to the genre principle, and in the middle of individual genre groups – according to rhythm, as a common element of the musical and poetic structure of the song. Folklore activity is the foundation of compositional creativity Kodály and Lyudkevich.
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ZOLTAN KODALY
Hungary (1882-1977)
’Tavasz’ (in Hungarian language)
No 4 from Megkesett Melodiak Op. 6 *1912-1916
(7 Songs with piano acompainment)
Zoltán Kodály was a prominent composer and authority on Hungarian folk music. He was also important as an educator not only of composers but also of teachers, and, through his students, he contributed heavily to the spread of music education in Hungary. He was a chorister in his youth at Nagyszombat, Austria-Hungary (now Trnava, Slovakia), where he wrote his first compositions. In 1902 he studied composition in Budapest. He toured his country in his first quest for folk-song sources in the year before his graduation from Budapest University with a thesis (1906) on the structure of Hungarian folk song. After studying for a short time in Paris with the composer-organist Charles Widor, he became a teacher of theory and composition at the Budapest Academy of Music.
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FRANZ LISZT
Hungary (1811-1886)
Lieder (in German language)
Year of composition 1860-1870
- Wieder mőcht ich dir begegnen (Libretto Peter Cornelius)
- Mignon’s Lied (Libretto J.W. von Goethe)
- Die Loreley (Libretto Heinrich Heine)
- Es was ein Konig in Thule (Libretto J.W. von Goethe)
- O lieb, so lang du lieben kannst (Libretto Ferd. Freiligrath)
As a composer, pianist, teacher, conductor and author, Franz Liszt is one of the foremost proponents of the Romantic tradition in Western art music, exerted a formative influence on the course of musical expression in the nineteenth century and beyond.
Liszt’s life and career nearly paralleled that of the unfolding of the Romantic era itself. Born at the height of Beethoven’s career, in music’s Classical era, Liszt died in 1886 at the dawn of an era that witnessed the emergence of musical styles such as impressionism and serialism – styles that he had helped to codify. Supplanted by the leaner textures and more chromatic language of the twentieth century, Liszt’s work and reputation were marginalized until history once again cast its attention, in the mid-twentieth century, to Western art music’s nineteenth century Romantic repertoire. The passing of years has furnished sufficient clarity of perspective to allow an objective reevaluation of the extent of Liszt’s immense contributions to, and influence upon the development of music of his time.
Although the name Franz Liszt is associated mainly with keyboard and symphonic compositions, in the writing of Lieder one finds some of his most progressive and finely wrought expressions. Within song’s intimate setting, Liszt was able to convey musical thoughts and gestures often found to be problematic in his larger works: here he was not always the public figure leading the New German School and devoting himself to the “Music of the Future,” champion of often unpopular compatriots, such as Richard Wagner. The Lieder were a compositional testing ground, not unlike the way in which Beethoven treated his piano sonatas as harmonic and formal experiments for other genres. More tellingly, in Lieder, Liszt found it possible to convey the very complex soul of the devoted but absent father, impatient lover, often tortured and unhappy but generous man of the world, and, finally, resigned mystic.