In the seven years before his marriage to Clara Wieck in 1840, Schumann wrote some of his best-loved keyboard works, including the First and Second piano sonatas, Kreisleriana, the C-Major Fantasy, and Kinderszenen. Schumann was infatuated with Wieck, a budding pianist and composer 10 years his junior; her father’s implacable opposition to the match had the predictable result of propelling them into each other’s arms. Nevertheless, living in different cities—Schumann in Leipzig and Wieck in Vienna—the young lovers were compelled to conduct their clandestine courtship through letters and music. Schumann declared that his Sonata in F-sharp Minor, Op. 11, was “a cry from my heart to yours.” And Wieck wrote to him that “my wonderment increases” each time she played the Kinderszenen. “You lay bare your entire inner life in these scenes of touching simplicity.”
Schumann originally intended to include these short pieces in his Novelleten, Op. 21, but later decided to publish them separately, in part because their simplicity made them “accessible to everyone” (and thus more salable). In a letter to Wieck, he described his Op. 15 as “an echo of the words you once wrote to me to the effect that ‘you considered me at times almost like a child.’ In short, I really felt like a youth again, and I jotted down about 30 of these charming little things, from which I selected 12 [later 13] and called them Scenes from Childhood. I’m sure you will enjoy them, but of course they will not satisfy you as a virtuoso.” Schumann added that the pieces “can be grasped at a glance, and are as light as a bubble.” To another friend he remarked that he had not sketched his childhood scenes for children, but as “reflections of an adult for other adults.”
Their apparently programmatic nature notwithstanding, Schumann conceived the Kinderszenen as abstract music and added the descriptive titles as an afterthought. Simplicity was indeed his watchword. Each of these 13 captivating miniatures is characterized by clear, uncomplicated harmonies, symmetrical phrase structures, and memorable tunes or rhythmic patterns, with abundant repetition. There is no attempt to tie the pieces together thematically, although three of them—“By the Fireside,” “Knight of the Hobby Horse,” and “Almost Too Serious”—are loosely linked by the use of a similar syncopated figure. The scenes range in mood from the playful staccato of “Blind Man’s Bluff” to the self-conscious pomposity of “An Important Event” and the tender yearning of “Dreaming.” In the end, Schumann puts away childish things and leaves us, in “The Poet Speaks,” ruminating on the meaning of it all.
When Chick Corea died last year of cancer, at age 79, he was eulogized as “a playfully prodigious jazz piano improviser” and an “architect of the jazz-rock fusion boom of the 1970s.” Corea’s voracious musical appetite, which embraced everything from “straight-up” jazz to classical music and Latin idioms, led to a string of landmark partnerships with such boundary-crossing artists as trumpeter Miles Davis, vocalist Bobby McFerrin, and saxophonist Anthony Braxton. As the Pied Piper of an increasingly multicultural age, he took a notably openminded and non-elitist approach to his art. “I have observed that the more art and music there is in a family or a community, the more pleasant and livable it is,” he said. “The creative impulse is basic to all human beings. It just needs to be recognized and nurtured to grow into something beautiful.”
The 1970s was a pivotal decade in Corea’s career. Even as he took his place in the vanguard of the movement to expand the vocabulary of modern jazz, he launched a project of a very different nature: a set of 20 Children’s Songs inspired by Béla Bartók’s Mikrokosmos, a collection of short technical studies of progressive difficulty for solo piano that are still widely used today. Corea’s songs without words range from simple two-part inventions to explorations of more sophisticated rhythms and harmonies, all infused with his trademark laid-back lyricism and musical joie de vivre. The music’s repetitive patterns, at once playful and hypnotic, recall the studied simplicity of composers like R. Schumann, Satie, and Steve Reich. Corea wrote that he aimed “to convey simplicity as beauty, as represented in the Spirit of a child.”
“Amanecer en Caracas” (“Sunrise in Caracas”): Caracas is a huge, chaotic urban mess, enveloped by the glorious Ávila mountain. It has changed dramatically in the last 20 years. It is now a war zone, effectively. But waking up in Caracas, as I remember it back then, was glorious. The sound of exotic birds, frogs, and the multicolored skyline surrounding El Ávila, is etched in my memory. Chaos within overwhelming beauty.
“The Crazy Parrots”: In Caracas, you can still see giant macaws, parakeets, and parrots zooming through the urban concrete maze. The wild birds of my childhood still excite the residents of this suffering, collapsed, urban jungle, coloring the Caracas skyline. Nature is the constant, while mankind can transform the South American experience with one brushstroke of ideology.
“El borrachito” (“The Drunk”): We lived in my grandmother’s apartment for a while in an area called Sebucán. The apartment faced an asylum, a small bodega, and a newspaper stand. I remember a drunk vagrant, a rail-thin man who would march up and down the street playing salsa music on his little beaten-up boombox.
“Extrañando mi país” (“Missing Home”): When I was eight years old, my family took me to the US to continue my piano studies. I never recovered from leaving my beloved Venezuela. I always returned, intermittently, but the scars of abandoning everything and everyone I loved remained with me. It was the most painful sacrifice I made for my music.
“La canción de mi madre” (“My Mother’s Lullaby”): As it is customary with most Venezuelan mothers, my mother would sing to me to put me to sleep. She is not a singer. In fact, I am the only musician in my family. But it is in this way that I first began connecting the sounds to my fingers. At just a few months old, I began to find the sounds on my little toy piano. There is no particular melody I improvise to in this last piece. It is just an emotional recollection of the sweetness of her voice, the innocent purity of that time, and a period of my life long gone.
About the Composer
Born in 1906, Shostakovich came of age in the 1920s, during the brief halcyon period of the workers’ state. Despite his early success as both composer and pianist, his incorrigible political cynicism, and his contempt for the proletarian pap produced under the banner of “socialist realism,” repeatedly landed him in hot water with the Soviet authorities. The international acclaim for the “Leningrad” Symphony—composed during the Nazi siege of Leningrad in 1942 and widely hailed as a symbol of Russian resistance—finally brought him a modicum of security. Fundamentally tonal, but laced with dissonant harmonies and kinetic energy, Shostakovich’s music epitomizes the restless, existentialist spirit of W. H. Auden’s The Age of Anxiety.
In early 1943, Shostakovich and his family returned to Moscow from Kuibyshev (now known by its historical name of Samara) in the Ural Mountains, where they had been evacuated with other leading artists a year and a half earlier. At the tail end of his stay in the USSR’s wartime capital, the composer had begun to plan a sequel to his acerbically dissonant Piano Sonata No. 1 of 1926. The Sonata No. 2 was dedicated to his piano teacher, Leonid Nikolayev, who had died a few months earlier of complications arising from typhoid fever. Ironically, it was while he was recuperating from the same illness in a Moscow sanatorium that Shostakovich finished the Sonata in B Minor on March 17, 1943. Eager to get started on another symphony, the composer dismissed his Op. 61 as “a trifle, an impromptu,” but later came to regard it as his best work for the piano.
In contrast to the First Piano Sonata—a work of such concentrated ferocity that Shostakovich reportedly left blood on the keys after playing it for his fellow students at the Leningrad Conservatory—the character of the B-Minor Sonata is introspective, expansive, and conspicuously unvirtuosic. By turns dramatic, lyric, and tragic, its three movements are larded with quotations from Shostakovich’s own Symphony No. 1 and various works by Nikolayev (whom Shostakovich rated highly as a composer). Moreover, the first and last movements contain cryptic allusions to Shostakovich’s musical “signature,” D, E-flat, C, B (spelled D, S, C, H in German notation), in both chordal and melodic form. The final Moderato con moto is a monumental set of variations on a 30-bar theme, which is presented at the outset in bare-bones monody. One contemporary critic discerned a link between the “emaciated, serious, almost hungry” music of Shostakovich’s sonata and the deprivations suffered by the beleaguered citizens of America’s wartime ally.
Jazz has always connoted a way of making music as much as a distinctive sound and style. This helps explain why the boundary between it and classical music has been so permeable. In embracing the spontaneity of the jazz idiom, Gabriela Montero is partaking of a centuries-old tradition. Improvisation was second nature to most of the composers whose works form the core of the modern concert repertory. Bach improvised his fugues at the keyboard, just as Duke Ellington did with his jazz compositions. It’s not surprising that European classical musicians like Stravinsky and Ravel were captivated by their first encounters with jazz in the early 20th century. The influence cut both ways: the music of jazz artists like Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, and Bill Evans is deeply infused with classical elements. So is Third Stream jazz, the cool neo-classicism of the Modern Jazz Quartet, the eclectic modernism of Anthony Braxton, the classical-jazz fusion of Keith Jarrett—and the unclassifiable music of Chick Corea.
—Harry Haskell
© 2022 Carnegie Hall