Beatrice Rana, Piano
Performers
Beatrice Rana, Piano
Program
J. S. BACH French Suite No. 2 in C Minor
DEBUSSY Pour le piano
BEETHOVEN Piano Sonata No. 29 in B-flat Major, Op. 106, "Hammerklavier"
Encores:
SAINT-SAËNS "The Swan" from The Carnival of the Animals (arr. Leopold Godowsky)
DEBUSSY Etude No. 6, "Pour les huit doigts"
Event Duration
The printed program will last approximately two hours, including one 20-minute intermission.At a Glance
J. S. BACH French Suite No. 2 in C Minor, BWV 813
Composed in the early 1720s, around the time Bach took up his final posting in Leipzig, the six French Suites catered to the public’s demand for music in the fashionably melodious galant style. The seven movements of the C-Minor Suite are based on courtly dances and run the gamut of expression, from playfulness to pathos.
DEBUSSY Pour le piano
In the three short pieces that this exquisite mini-suite comprises, Debussy paid homage to the 18th-century masters he professed to emulate. Although critics associated him with painters like Manet and Whistler, he maintained that his music depicted not superficial impressions but essential “realities.” Musicians alone, he declared, enjoyed “the privilege of being able to convey all the poetry of the night and the day,” whereas painters could “recapture only one of her aspects at a time.”
BEETHOVEN Piano Sonata No. 29 in B-flat Major, Op. 106, “Hammerklavier”
This monumental—and notoriously difficult—sonata marked a watershed in Beethoven’s artistic development. With its soaring rhetoric and penetrating introspection, the “Hammerklavier” anticipates the musical language of the composer’s so-called late period. The centerpiece of the work is an intensely ruminative Adagio sostenuto, which German critic Paul Bekker famously called “the apotheosis of pain, of that deep sorrow for which there is no remedy, and which finds expression not in passionate outpourings, but in the immeasurable stillness of utter woe.”