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

SUNDAY 3 NOV 2024

7 PM RAFFLES HOTEL-LE ROYAL

FINALE – A PIANO RECITAL

Lee Jae Phang, piano

BORIS LYATOSHYNSKY

Ukraine (1894-1968)

3 Preludes, Op.38

Year of composition 1942

1. Andante sostenuto
2. Lento tenebroso
3. Moderato con moto e sempre ben ritmico

Liatoshynsky demonstrated great musical talent from an early age. At age 14, he wrote a few musical pieces including a mazurka and waltz for piano, along with quartet for piano. He attended Nemyriv Gymnasium, and later the gymnasium in Zlatopol, where his father was the director.  Arriving in Kyiv from his native city of Zhytomyr in 1913, Lyatoshynsky enrolled in the Faculty of Law at the University of Kyiv, and graduated in 1918. The following year, he completed the composition class of Reinhold Glière at the Kyiv Conservatory (today the Petro Tchaikovsky National Music Academy of Ukraine.

He led the Ukrainian Society of Contemporary Music. During the period 1935-44 he, worked on arrangements of Ukrainian songs and organised the removal of Ukrainian manuscripts to safety. In 1944 he returned to Kyiv as artistic director of the Ukrainian Philharmonic and music consultant to the Radio Committee. He also resumed his teaching work at the Kyiv Conservatory. His early works were inspired by Glazunov, Scriabin and Tchaikovsky.

Later he developed a modern European style which integrated Ukrainian folk music. There was also a Polish influence on his music, because of the Polish side of his family. He wrote in a wide range of musical genres and succeeded in elevating Ukrainian symphonic music to the world level. Lyatoshynsky lived during an extremely difficult time for his nation, and his music reflects this. He was subjected to devastating criticism by Soviet censorship and accused of ‘formalism’.

 

MAX REGER

Germany (1873-1916)

Improvisations Op.18/1-4

Year of composition 1902

1. Allegretto con grazia
2. Andantino
3. Caprice – Allegro vivace
4. Andante semplice

Max Reger was a German romantic composer who stood at the crossroads between the deluge of Romanticism and the ensuing emergence of Modernism. On the one hand, representative composers of the Romantic era such as Mendelssohn, Schumann, Chopin, Brahms, and Liszt have shaped the stylistic tendencies of the 19th century; on the other hand, a new concept of sound pioneered by the French Impressionists coupled with the ground-breaking innovations of the Second Viennese School threatened to steer the development of music in a radically different direction.

Max Reger was born into this stylistically conflicting period, which inevitably left their marks in many of his compositions. His commendable output for the piano throughout his lifetime serves as the ideal  gateway for us to afford a glimpse into his creative world, which surprisingly, has produced relatively little research and scholarship in countries outside Germany. It is for this reason that Ihave endeavored to embark on a journey to survey his piano works to gain a better understanding of the man and his music. By 1901, despite opposition to his traditional methods, he had established himself in Munich as a composer, pianist, and teacher. In 1907 he became professor of composition at the Leipzig Conservatory and musical director at the University of Leipzig.

Reger must certainly be viewed as one of the most important figures who bridged the gap between the romantic and contemporary periods. In the meantime, the wealth of piano pieces he left behind will be waiting patiently for a renaissance—a moment when his works will be rediscovered and viewed for their true worth and value.

MYLOKA LYSENKO

Ukraine (1842-1912)

“Dumka-Shumka”  

Second Piano Rhapsody on Ukrainian Folk Themes, Op. 18
Year of composition 1877

Mykola Lysenko prolific life’s work laid the foundation for the further development and expansion of Ukrainian musical culture. He influenced a large group of Ukrainian composers, including Stetsenko, Stepovyi, Leontovych, Koshyts, and Liudkevych. A compilation of Lysenko’s works in 22 volumes was published in Kyiv in 1950–59.

Lysenko was a composer, ethnomusicologist, pianist, and conductor. He studied at the Kharkiv and Kyiv universities and, later, at the Leipzig Conservatory. In 1904, he founded his own School of Music and Drama in Kyiv. His larger works for piano include the Ukrainian Suite in Form of Ancient Dances, two rhapsodies (the second, Dumka-shumka is one of his most-known works), Heroic scherzo and Sonata in A minor. He also wrote dozens of smaller works such as nocturnes, polonaises, songs without words, and program pieces. Some of his piano works show the influence of Frédéric Chopin‘s style.

KAROL SZYMANOWSKY     

Poland/Ukraine (1882-1937)

9 Preludes, Op.1 

Year of composition 1899

Karol Szymanowski, born 1882 in Timoshovka (Ukraine) was the foremost Polish composer of the early 20th century. He began to compose and play the piano at an early age. In 1901 he went to Warsaw and studied harmony, counterpoint, and composition privately until 1904. Finding the musical life in Warsaw limiting, he went to Berlin, where he organized the Young Polish Composers’ Publishing Co. (1905–12) to publish new works by his countrymen.

The advent of World War I caused Szymanowski to return to his homeland. Isolated from the European musical community during the period from 1914 to 1917, he composed copiously and studied Islāmic culture and ancient Greek drama and philosophy. He softened his dynamic extremes, employed coloristic orchestration, and used polytonal and atonal material while retaining the expressive melodic style of his earlier works.

With the establishment of an independent Polish state in 1918, Szymanowski became deeply interested in the Polish folk idiom and tried to create a Polish national style, a task unattempted since Chopin. He also became more conservative, abandoning his atonal vocabulary.

Szymanowski traveled widely, promoting his works in London, Paris, and the United States In 1927 he settled in Warsaw to assume the directorship of the Warsaw Conservatory for five years with the aim of improving musical education in Poland.

For the most part, the 9 Preludes are lyrical miniatures, and despite the fact that they obviously owe a lot to Chopin, these pieces form a remarkably mature and coherent whole for a beginning composer. Relatively simple in texture and soft-spoken in sound, they disclose a rich chromaticism and a multi-layered texture.

FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN              

Poland (1810-1849)

Allegro de Concert, Op. 46 

Year of Composition 1832

Frédéric Chopin, the Polish French composer and pianist of the Romantic period, best known for his solo pieces for piano and his piano concerti. Although he wrote little but piano works, many of them brief, Chopin ranks as one of music’s greatest tone poets by reason of his superfine imagination and fastidious craftsmanship.    

Drawing tangibly on material for the first movement of a concerto sketched in Paris in 1832, and tentatively on ideas for a concerto for two pianos discussed by Chopin in Vienna a couple of years previously, the Allegro de Concert in A major was completed in May 1841.

Robert Schumann told his readers in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, ‘a fine middle melody is wanting, though the cantilena is rich in new and brilliant passages; but it floats past us too restlessly, and we feel the absence of a slow after-movement, an adagio – for the entire plan suggests a complete concerto in three movements. The idea of raising the pianoforte to the highest point of independence possible, and of rendering the orchestra unnecessary, is a favourite one with young composers, and it seems to have influenced Chopin in the publication of his allegro in this form; but this new attempt again proves the difficulty of the task, though it will by no means serve as a warning against future endeavours.’