All Saints' Recital

These last three years, I have scheduled my annual solo recital on the series at Southeastern, the university where I teach, close to All Saints' Day, and the performance takes place in the beautiful setting of Lakeland's All Saints' Church. It impresses me more deeply each year how the Festival of All Saints' is such a spiritually integrated artful time as the rituals of the Church invite us to ponder the lives of all those who went before us and the arts resonate with that great heritage of being.

Here are the repertoire and my program notes for Tuesday. In the middle of the notes is a link to the improvisation I've transcribed for the recital. 




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Aux Cyprès de la Villa d’Este: Thrénodie 2                        Franz Liszt

                                                                                           (1811-1886)

Improvisation on “Sweet Hour of Prayer” (2008)               Charles Hulin

from Children’s Corner                                                       Claude Debussy

Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum                                 (1862-1918)

The Little Shepherd

Golliwogg’s Cake-walk

Intermission

Intermezzo Op. 18, No. 2                                                    Johannes Brahms

                                                                                            (1833-1897)

The Man of Sorrows (2000)                                                Scott Eric Petersen

from Fifty Etudes (1976)                                                      Donald Waxman        

            . . . Lambent Trajectories

            . . . Descent of Swifts

            . . . “Rough wind that moanest loud” - Shelley

The letters of Franz Liszt reveal his deep regard for Michelangelo, the great creator he saw as most experiencing “the loneliness of genius . . . in the course of a long life.” Originating in a period of creative struggle and adjustment to his own aging, Liszt’s second threnody was inspired by cypresses he believed Michelangelo had planted in a cloister near Rome’s Diocletian Baths. The work’s opening theme seems to reference the famous motif of the opera Tristan und Isolde by his son-in-law, Richard Wagner.

A little over ten years ago, I posted a YouTube video of an improvisation on William Bradbury’s “Sweet Hour of Prayer” along with images of my home church, Lasker Baptist in North Carolina. That tune and place are linked for me because of the ease with which I have often settled into a spirit of communion in Lasker over the years. This fall I transcribed that improvisation to play on this occasion.

The beginning of Debussy’s Children’s Corner sounds a bit like an exercise from Muzio Clementi’s technique manual, Gradus ad Parnassum. Debussy’s creative strategy is to lead the listener through impressionistic transformations of this material reminiscent of Monet’s response to the fluidity of light and color.  

According to pianist E. Robert Schmitz, in writing this suite, Debussy was hoping to provide “the finest music to complete the make-believe universe” of his daughter’s nursery. He wanted to give  her “an incentive to joy.” For example, the “divine arabesques” of “The Little Shepherd” bring the image of a shepherd to life with “the sounds of his reed and dance.”

“Golliwogg’s Cakewalk” consists of layer after layer of sarcasm.  The cakewalk form reached Debussy through minstrelsy but was based on an Antebellum dance of slaves which, in turn, seemed to poke fun at the manners and movements of plantation owners. Debussy adds his own bit of commentary by quoting the opening motif of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde followed by “the musical equivalent of hee-haw” as described by musicologist Ann McKinley.   

During this All Saints’ season, I dedicate my performance of the beloved Op. 118 intermezzo of Brahms to the memory of my parents.

Scott Eric Petersen was a fellow student at Peabody and his work, The Man of Sorrows, comes from our student days. His descriptions of each movement are as follows.

I.

Eternity. Preincarnation.

The fall of man. The conflict of the messiah. The decision of God.

The idea of the Incarnation. Eternity.

II.

A meditation on God as man. 

III.

The beginning of life.

Birth – sudden screaming cold contrast to eternal warmth and love. Pain.

Peace in mother’s arms.

Irwin Freundlich, past chair of Juilliard’s piano department, described Donald Waxman’s etudes as “The most important contribution to the literature of piano etudes for students since the days of Czerny. . .” Waxman, a product of Juilliard himself, set about applying a modern musical language to the elements of a pianist’s technique.

In the first of the etudes I am playing, Waxman invites the pianist to glide over large stretches of keys with a hint of jazz harmony. In the second, he seems to convey both the sound and movement of a swoop of swifts by stacking triad upon triad. In the final selection, Waxman recasts themes of Romanticism in a dissonant toccata based on Shelley’s poem, “A Dirge.”

“Rough wind, that moanest loud
Grief too sad for song . . .
Wail, for the world's wrong!”