Galuppi is the most famous native son of Burano, an island in the Venetian Lagoon. After Vivaldi’s death in 1741, Galuppi came into his own as a prolific stage composer, collaborating with playwright Carlo Goldoni on a dozen highly successful comic operas. In his instrumental music for keyboard and sundry chamber ensembles, Galuppi helped foster a taste for the elegant, melodious galant style that appealed to cultivated amateurs and aristocrats alike. The opening slow movement of this undated C-Major Sonata, featuring a winsome melody underlaid with a simple arpeggiated accompaniment known as an Alberti bass, exemplifies the composer’s professed virtues of “charm, clarity, and good modulation.”
Bach was still an ambitious journeyman organist when he wrote his seven early keyboard toccatas, BWV 910–916. Derived from the Italian verb meaning “to touch,” a toccata is a virtuosic instrumental piece in a quick tempo designed to show off the player’s agility and lightness of touch. BWV 911 is the work of a prodigiously gifted musician who is experimenting with new forms and techniques, determined to show the world what he’s capable of doing. The first section is freely rhapsodic, in the manner of a prelude, and built largely on scalar patterns. Smooth, stepwise motion continues to predominate in the quietly ruminative Adagio interlude that follows. After pausing briefly on a G-minor cadence, Bach abruptly switches to a livelier, more angular mode in a densely fugal Allegro.
By the early 1890s, Brahms was beginning to look forward to resting on his laurels. Although he no longer felt up to writing another major solo work for the piano, he summoned the energy to produce four sets of fantasy-like piano miniatures, opp. 116–119, in rapid succession. The A-Minor Intermezzo opens with a tenderly ruminative melody built on short repeated phrases. Little by little, the music becomes more animated as it climbs into a higher register, but the brighter, more assertive mood of the middle section soon fades and the piece closes on a sweetly melancholy note.
One of music’s bona fide revolutionaries, Chopin enriched the piano repertoire with dozens of nocturnes, waltzes, etudes, and other solo pieces that imbued the superficial brilliance of the salon style with unprecedented poetic depth. He had a special affinity for the mazurka, a triple-meter folk dance from his native Poland that was enthusiastically adopted by the haute monde of Paris, where he settled in 1831. The 60-odd mazurkas that Chopin composed between the mid-1820s and the last year of his life are marked by a distinctive blend of folk-like simplicity and urbane sophistication. This specimen from his Op. 67 set (published posthumously) conforms to the basic model of a balanced A-B-A song structure, with simple “oom-pah-pah” accompaniments set against florid, metrically playful figurations in the right hand. Yet the A-Minor Mazurka is also full of idiosyncratic touches, such as the chromatic curlicues and swoops that enliven the main theme.
The four miniature masterpieces that comprise the Op. 119 Klavierstücke (Piano Pieces) represent Brahms’s last works for solo piano. He wrote them in the summer of 1893 in the Austrian spa resort of Bad Ischl, his beloved warm-weather getaway from the hustle and bustle of Vienna. The second piece, a dark-hued Intermezzo, exhibits the symmetrical A-B-A form that Brahms favored, with agitated sections in E minor flanking a graceful major-key waltz.
Although the expatriate Chopin had little firsthand experience with authentic Polish folk idioms, he knew enough about the mazurka to reproduce the characteristic two-part texture of a lyrical descant voice floating above a droning bass (often played by a bagpipe). Compared to the Mazurka in A Minor heard earlier on the program, the Mazurka in C-sharp Minor is considerably freer and more expansive—both formally and harmonically. The bittersweet, modally inflected melodies and crisp dotted rhythms epitomize Chopin’s intimate identification with the genre.
Clara Schumann, Brahms’s old flame and trusted confidante, enthused about the Op. 117 intermezzos in her diary, describing them as “a veritable fountain of pleasure,” awash in “poetry, passion, rapture, heartfelt emotion,” and “the most wonderful tonal effects.” All three pieces are built on contrasts of mood, texture, and tonality. In the third piece, Brahms uses a turbulent, rhythmically unstable interlude as a foil for the dogged, dirge-like tread of the outer sections.
The third of Chopin’s Op. 68 mazurkas is as compact and direct in expression as the C-sharp–Minor Mazurka (heard earlier on the program) is spacious and circuitous. The vigorous theme, constructed almost entirely of block chords, has a decidedly martial character. Chopin lets us hear it twice—first loud, then soft—before striking off in a new direction with a bright fanfare of unison As. The dance is briefly interrupted by a meandering, otherworldly passage whose tonal and rhythmic ambiguity contrast sharply with the clear-cut features of the mazurka’s outer sections.
Brahms displayed a lifelong interest in the character piece, a popular Romantic genre closely associated with his revered Robert Schumann. The Romance in F Major, with its nobly striding melody and freely rhapsodic midsection, suggests that the 60-year-old composer was not merely turning away from the long-form works that had occupied him in the past, but embracing a genre that enabled him to distill his mastery of mood, craft, and keyboard technique to its essence.
Highly strung, self-centered, and relentlessly driven, Scriabin shattered the mold of musical Romanticism much as Liszt had done. As both composer and pianist, he combined a wide-ranging intellect and a tendency to mystical idealism with an exceptional sensitivity to tonal nuance. In addition to his formidably challenging piano works, he is best known for the luxuriantly orchestrated Poem of Ecstasy and the ballet Prométhée, which illustrated his theory of the synesthetic equivalence between colors and musical keys.
The Fourth Sonata departs from the Lisztian idiom of Scriabin’s earlier piano works. Its two highly compressed movements take less than half as long to play as the four-movement Third Sonata, anticipating the single-span structures of his later works. The tenderly ruminative Andante in F-sharp major segues seamlessly into the tempestuous Prestissimo volando (“flying as fast as possible”) by way of three widely spaced B-major chords. The sonata’s emotional trajectory is outlined in a prose poem that Scriabin admittedly “put together after the fact, based on the music.” The opening image of a distant star twinkling softly through “gentle mists” is transformed into an emblem of “deep, mad yearning” as the music soars to a rapturous love-death climax, ultimately drowning in a “sea of light.”
A member of the Parisian artists’ circle known as Les Apaches, the young Ravel aligned himself with the gadflies who challenged France’s hidebound cultural establishment at the turn of the 20th century. The five pieces that comprise Miroirs are inscribed to individuals known for their progressive stances in matters of taste. According to Ravel, the suite marked “a considerable change in my harmonic evolution, one that disconcerted even those musicians who had been most familiar with my compositional style up to then.” Dedicated to painter Paul Sordes, “Une barque sur l’océan” (“A Ship at Sea”) is a virtuosic exercise in billowing arpeggios that cuts loose from traditional harmonic and structural moorings.
Berg was the most Romantic of the early 20th-century Viennese modernists—contemporaries dubbed him “the Puccini of 12-note music.” Schoenberg praised his prize pupil’s “burning desire to express himself no longer in the classical forms, harmonies, and melodic forms … but in a manner in accordance with the times, and with his own personality.” Berg’s music, both freely atonal and 12-tone, stands out for its warm-blooded sensuality and rhapsodic lyricism. A case in point is the Op. 1 Piano Sonata, written not long before he graduated from Schoenberg’s composition class. Berg’s method of construction is characteristically economical: the short, single-movement work is based on a handful of rhythmic and melodic motifs that are stated and restated, varied, elaborated on, and combined in a wonderful example of what Schoenberg later called “developing variation.” Much of the musical argument derives from the opening theme, a rising dotted figure followed by a series of skipping descents. Although the sonata lacks a traditional tonal center, the essentially triadic nature of Berg’s luxuriantly chromatic harmonies is never in doubt as the music passes through a series of impassioned climaxes on the way toward its final resolution on a quietly luminous B-minor chord.
Like Chopin, Catalan composer Mompou was essentially a miniaturist who established a second home in Paris while remaining deeply attached to the music of his homeland. Under the influence of Debussy and Satie, he forged a spare, delicately expressive style that he described as primitivista. Calling Mompou a “poet of the piano,” French critic Émile Vuillermoz praised his devotion to “the ideal of simplicity, purity, clarity, and conciseness.” These qualities are apparent in the early piano suite entitled Intimate Impressions. “Secreto” (“Secret”), with its gently rocking rhythm and hint of exoticism, projects a mood of wistful introspection.
Composed in 1907, Scriabin’s Fifth Sonata is a kind of pendant to his Poem of Ecstasy. Indeed, the composer described it as “a grand poem for piano” and prefaced the score with a verse epigraph that reflected his vision of the creative artist as a divinely inspired being endowed with almost supernatural powers. The concentrated intensity of the sonata’s single movement belies its relative brevity. Now pummeling the keys, now caressing them, the pianist runs a gauntlet of technical challenges that would put even Liszt’s “transcendental execution” to the test. Scriabin’s harmonic language verges on atonality, contributing to the sense of controlled delirium. The work’s structure is equally complex, with a welter of recurring themes embedded in the densely woven texture. For instance, the terse, stabbing gestures of the opening bars, which flash across musical space like bolts of lightning, return in the middle of the sonata, marked Leggierissimo volando (“flying as lightly as possible”), and again at the very end, soaring inconclusively into the stratosphere.
—Harry Haskell
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