MP3 Beethoven Rachmaninov - CLASSICAL: Piano solo

She takes on two of the great composers of the Romantic era: Beethoven and Rachmaninov. Music full of big emotions and beautiful melodies.

26 MP3 Songs
CLASSICAL: Piano solo, CLASSICAL: Beethoven



Details:
about the artist

Katherine Chi became the first woman, and the first Canadian, to win CalgaryâsHonens International Piano Competition, which she did in 2000. A gifted young performer whom The Boston Globe asserted was âon a line headed straight up,â Ms Chi went from The Curtis Institute to the New England Conservatory, where she performed her graduation recital in 1997. It was clear that she belonged on the international stage when, two years before her Honens win, she was a prize winner at the Busoni International Piano Competition. Katherine Chi is widely hailed wherever she performs. Her programming is eclectic, âHer program was a humdinger, bristling with challenge,â a review in The Globe and Mail said. âChiâs playing left virtuosity in the dust,â said the Ottawa Citizen. A New York performance which included the music on this recording drew the following words from The New York Times: âMs Chi displayed a keen musical intelligence and a powerful arsenal of technique.â She has made solo appearances in numerous other cities including Boston, Detroit, San Diego, Hamburg, Montreal and Toronto, and has performed with orchestras in Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver and the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa.

liner notes

At first observation, those who do not speak German might feel that the âHammerklavierâ Sonata
is well-named. Its scope, its power, its range of expression seem to merit the imposing sounding epithet. But thatâs certainly not what Beethoven had in mind. It was rare indeed for Beethoven to attach extra names to his works â that was mostly done by poetic well wishers who coined such phrases as âMoonlight,â âPathétiqueâ or âSpringâ well after these pieces had been written. In fact, Beethoven called his 29th piano sonata Grosse Sonate für das Hammer-Klavier for a very practical reason â thatâs what the type of piano he wrote it for was called. Different, bigger, sturdier than the fortepiano, the Hammerklavier suited Beethovenâs constant search for instruments that could embrace the full emotional range he wanted to express. This is the longest of his solo piano sonatas â its slow movement alone is longer than some of his early sonatas in their entirety. It is also the most difficult to play, and Beethoven knew it. Telling his publishers that this was a work to keep pianists busy even 50 years on, Beethoven seemed to be taking this work out of the hands of amateur players who made up the principal market for his pieces, and confining it to pianists at least as skilled as he was. Until the 20th century, in fact, it was players such as Liszt and Mendelssohn who were among the few to play it. The period in which Beethoven wrote the work (1817-18) was one of transition for him. His deafness was nearing totality, and as the outside world retreated from his ears, Beethoven retreated as well. His passion and torment needed its vent in music, almost as therapy for the composer, and so he cared less and less about the demands he placed on anyone who might play his works and more about how that music could become his real way of communicating with his fellow human beings. Throughout the sonata is a fascinating âstruggleâ between the workâs home key of B-flat Major and B minor â a key Beethoven himself referred to as âblack.â In the opening movement, for example, there is genius in how Beethoven manipulates the keys, principally by means of falling thirds, so that when B-flat is re-established at the start of the recapitulation, it then falls away to G-flat; Beethoven pounces on G-flatâs equivalent of F-sharp to usher in a passage in his âblack keyâ of B minor. It is all assiduously mapped out, but it still comes at us as stark and foreboding. Thus, a movement which began with a fanfare of assertion climaxes in a dark eddy. The scherzo, when compared to the scope of the other movements, seems almost ridiculously brief, and it is in fact a parody of elements from the first movement. Once again, the home key of B-flat is constantly undermined with phrases that seem to wind up on B once again until, with an unprecedented series of resolute double octaves, we end up back on B-flat. The monumental slow movement was called by one Beethoven scholar â a mausoleum of collective suffering,â though the anguish â which Beethoven indicated to be played with great passion and sentiment â seems very personal indeed. Pianist and writer David Dubal has deemed this movement nothing less than âthe longest and most sublime in the history of instrumental art.â Its opening is played una corda (with the left pedal held down). This contrasts with the brighter sound as the second subject releases the muted section to an elaborately detailed melody. For all its reflectiveness, however, the music of this movement glows with an inner strength. Even in the midst of his suffering, Beethoven the Artist was resolute and sure. We know by the introduction of the finale that great things are afoot â while beginning quietly, almost mysteriously, with brief interruptions recalling other aspects of the sonata, what follows is unexpected even today, and must have been startling at the time. The Allegro risoluto is an elaborate fugue, one of great imagination and facility. There is even a return to B minor in a retrograde variation of the fugue material. A respite to the insistent nature of much of the music is a tender passage in D, the âeye of the stormâ as it were. The sonata ends with a rumbustious strength befitting the popularized name it has adopted. You would think if any composer might have added nicknames to his own pieces, it might have been Sergei Rachmaninov. While a 20th century composer chronologically, Rachmaninov was unapologetically a romantic in his idiom, inheriting from his predecessor Tchaikovsky a strong sense of melody and a willingness to stay within traditional frameworks. While his countrymen Prokofiev and Scriabin were pushing limits with their music, Rachmaninov frustrated critics and the musical intelligentsia with easily assimilated melodies and harmonic language. Critics may have spoken harshly of what he did, but the public did not, neither during his lifetime, nor since. While Scriabin â a friend and fellow student for a time â has seen his music discussed more than played, much of Rachmaninovâs music has held its place in the popular repertoire from the outset. Yet even his most famous works â some of which have had their melodies adapted into pop songs â are ânickname-free,â known simply as the Second Piano Concerto, Symphony No. 2, the C-sharp minor Prelude, the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, and the Variations on a Theme of Corelli. The latter work, composed in 1931, was the last solo piano work the composer wrote. He premiered it in Canada, at a recital in Montréal in October of that year. The late New York Times critic Harold C. Schoenberg once described Rachmaninov as âdour, serious, taciturn,â yet with the success of his Corelli Variations at least, Rachmaninov showed a surprisingly self-effacing sense of humour. The piece in its entirety won great acclaim from its debut, but Rachmaninov wrote his friend and fellow composer Nicolai Medtner that subsequent performances on his recital tour were âguided by the coughing of the audience,â suggesting that if it seemed to him that the audience was responding restlessly to this or that variation, he would skip it and move on. The actual Corelli âthemeâ used as the basis for the 20 variations (plus an interlude and coda) is not a Corelli theme at all. Corelli had used it, in a violin sonata, but he had borrowed it himself, from an old Iberian folksong, called La Folìa. This is especially worth noting as one listens to the variations â while hardly a card-carrying nationalist composer in the order of Borodin or Mussorgsky, Rachmaninov was certainly Russian; the blend of his harmonic sensibilities with the fragrant air of the Iberian theme sets many of the variations in a fascinating light. All the variations are short, from less than half a minute to scarcely more than a minute each, so the work is best heard in its cleverly conceived unified whole, one in which the main theme is treated to an increasingly rhythmically and harmonically varied series.
The âCorelliâ theme is presented with quiet dignity, and the first few variations are allied closely to the melody, though as early as the second variation the harmony has become bolder, while the third manipulates the rhythms more freely. By the fifth variation, time signatures have become important (the darting and whirling Vivace seventh variation ushers in a whole new palette), and there is a strong sense of propulsion driving the music from there to the interlude. With the arrival of the 14th variation, following the virtuosic arpeggios of the interlude, the workâs home key of D minor has changed to D-flat Major, but following the gentle 15th variation, the work once again returns to D minor. The variations from here to the coda tie together into an intense climax which, once arrived at, actually becomes a reflective and quiet close. As has been done in many performances of the Corelli Variations, including a recording done by Rachmaninov himself, the 12th Variation is not included on this recording.

D.T. Baker © 2003