Kirill Gerstein, Piano
Performers
Kirill Gerstein, Piano
Program
R. SCHUMANN Carnaval
FRANCISCO COLL Two Waltzes Toward Civilization (after Lorca's Poet in New York) (NY Premiere)
RAVEL La valse
LISZT "Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude" from Harmonies poétiques et religieuses
LISZT Piano Sonata in B Minor
Encores:
CHOPIN Waltz in A-flat Major, Op. 42
RACHMANINOFF Mélodie in E Major from Morceaux de fantaisie, Op. 3, No. 3
Event Duration
The printed program will last approximately two hours, including one 20-minute intermission.Listen to Selected Works
At a Glance
R. SCHUMANN Carnaval: Scènes mignonnes sur quatre notes, Op. 9
Like most of Schumann’s solo piano works of the 1830s, Carnaval was in part a musical valentine to his future bride, Clara Wieck. But it also memorializes his first love, a young pianist named Ernestine von Fricken, to whom the composer was briefly engaged. Underlying the score are the contrasting personalities of Schumann’s fictitious alter egos: the stormy, impulsive Florestan and the dreamy, ruminative Eusebius.
FRANCISCO COLL Two Waltzes Toward Civilization (after Lorca’s Poet in New York)
The language in Federico García Lorca’s Poet in New York teeters on points of crisis, and this knife-edge world is present in Coll’s dramatic, colorful, and often extreme writing. The searching first waltz gives way to the second movement, a Viennese waltz broken and distorted into something more macabre, echoing the poem’s themes of death and loss.
RAVEL La valse
Ravel described his riotous orchestral extravaganza La valse as “a sort of apotheosis of the Viennese waltz” that he originally intended as a ballet. Written for keyboard before being orchestrated, the piece owes much to the cubist technique of dismemberment and reconfiguration.
LISZT Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude, from Harmonies poétiques et religieuses; Piano Sonata in B Minor
A key figure in the Romantic movement, Liszt was a musical visionary who prefigured many of the major compositional developments of the 20th century. He expresses his fervent religiosity in Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, which is based on a volume of poems that celebrates the presence of the divine in everyday life. The massive, single-movement Piano Sonata in B Minor illustrates the technique of thematic transformation that he also employed in his many symphonic tone poems.