Schumann embodied the spirit of the Romantic era in his affinity for small-scale musical forms and lyrical utterances, his reliance on literary and other extramusical sources of inspiration, and the supreme value he placed on emotional freedom and spontaneity. His genius found its most characteristic expression in art songs and piano music. Schumann was an inveterate improviser at the keyboard, as one might suppose from the rhapsodic fluidity that characterizes his piano writing. Only a chronic hand injury prevented him from realizing his youthful ambition to be a concert pianist. Instead, he dedicated himself to creating a new kind of music for the piano, compounded of heroic virtuosity and poetic intimacy.
In the seven years before his marriage to pianist Clara Wieck in 1840, Schumann wrote some of his greatest piano works, including Carnaval, the First and Second sonatas, Kreisleriana, Kinderszenen, and the C-Major Fantasy. Although Wieck was the muse who inspired most of these masterpieces, the composer was actually engaged to another woman, Ernestine von Fricken, while he was at work on Carnaval in the mid-1830s. Both of his flames put in appearances in Schumann’s musical masked ball—Wieck masquerading as “Chiarina” and von Fricken as “Estrella”—alongside an assortment of characters from the Italian commedia dell’arte, a pair of real-life musicians (Chopin and Paganini), and Schumann’s fictitious alter egos: the stormy, impulsive Florestan and the dreamy, ruminative Eusebius.
Carnaval is a suite of 21 short vignettes—Schumann called them scènes mignonnes, or “tiny scenes”—that depict characters, moods, or situations. Thematically, the pieces are connected by different versions of the four-note motto a-s-c-h (A, E-flat, C, and B in German notation)—the lettres dansantes (“dancing letters”) that link Schumann’s name with that of Ernestine von Fricken’s hometown in Bohemia; listen for their entrance at the beginning of “Pierrot.” Schumann himself maintained that the most interesting aspect of Carnaval was not its musical unity or characterizations, but its evocation of “different spiritual states and moods.” These moods range from the passionate abandon of “Chiarina” to the final march of the swaggering “Davidsbündler” (the alliance of Schumann and his fellow musical progressives) against the reactionary Philistines.
Composer-conductor Francisco Coll has found advocates in the world’s leading orchestras and ensembles, including the Luxembourg Phiharmonic Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Lucerne Symphony Orchestra, and Ensemble Modern. His music has been heard at festivals from Aldeburgh, Aix-en-Provence, and Aspen to the BBC Proms, Verbier, and Tanglewood; his works are performed by leading instrumentalists, including Kirill Gerstein, Javier Perianes, Pekka Kuusisto, Sol Gabetta, Augustin Hadelich, Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Sean Shibe, and Cuarteto Casals.
In 2019, he became the first composer to receive an International Classical Music Award (ICMA). In 2022, he was awarded two more: the Orchestra Award and the Contemporary Music Prize for a portrait disc of his orchestral works conducted by Gustavo Gimeno. Coll conducted his own music at the ICMA awards ceremony that year.
This year sees Coll continue his multi-season role as artistic partner to the Orquesta Sinfónica del Principado de Asturias, as both composer and conductor, which began in 2022. The 2024–2025 season also sees the Spanish premiere of Ciudad sin sueño, a work for piano and orchestra for Javier Perianes. Coll’s upcoming projects include a stage work based on Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People and a piano concerto for Kirill Gerstein (with commissioners that include the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and Boston Symphony Orchestra).
Born in Valencia in 1985, Coll studied in Spain before moving to London to work privately with Thomas Adès (becoming his only pupil to date) and Richard Baker at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. He is published by Faber Music.
Inspired by Federico García Lorca’s masterful collection Poet in New York, Coll has created a two-movement work, both waltzes, that reflects on the confrontational nature of the subjects used by Lorca throughout the text. The poetry teeters on points of crisis, and this knife-edge world is present in Coll’s dramatic, colorful, and often extreme writing. The opening waltz, Waltz in the Branches, begins with flourishes and bells before settling into triple time, with sensual rhythms and staccato stabs. The music dances through different musical landscapes, always trying to find a place for itself, much as Lorca endeavored to do with his poetry. In the second movement, Little Viennese Waltz, Coll draws from the imagery Lorca creates in the poem of the same name—beautiful scenes twisted and warped into something more macabre. The jovial nature of the Viennese waltz is broken and distorted in Coll’s music, with a longing and free melody underpinned by surreal harmonic and rhythmic shifts. The music is contorted and broken down into its gestures, tripping over itself, becoming heightened, heavy, and obsessive, echoing the poem’s themes of death and loss.
—From the publisher
Ravel made his mark in Paris at the turn of the 20th century with a group of brilliantly crafted piano pieces, including the Pavane pour une infante défunte and Jeux d’eau. Over the ensuing decades, he refined his art, ruthlessly pruning away superfluous notes and gestures in search of the “definitive clarity” that was his professed ideal. By the time Debussy died in 1918, Ravel was widely hailed as the standard-bearer for French music. He shared the older composer’s poetic sensibility and fondness for sensuous, impressionistic timbres and textures. Unlike Debussy, however, Ravel was at heart a classicist. Many of his works evoke composers and styles of the past, even as they incorporate ultramodern harmonies and compositional styles.
When Ravel put the finishing touches on his “choreographic poem” La valse (The Waltz) in 1920, he had high hopes of seeing it performed by the Ballets Russes. To his dismay, impresario Sergei Diaghilev rejected the score as undanceable, remarking acidly that Ravel’s “masterpiece” was not a ballet, but “the portrait of a ballet.” Ravel himself described La valse as “a sort of apotheosis of the Viennese waltz.” He wrote the keyboard score, in versions for both one and two pianos, before orchestrating it in his characteristically brilliant style.
Gradually and fitfully, the primordial image of a recognizable waltz emerges from the murky depths of the tremolos that constitute the work’s introduction. (In the orchestral version, they are played by the double basses.) Ravel’s “portrait” of the dance owes much to the cubist technique of dismemberment and reconfiguration; he methodically assembles the composition bit by bit, one theme morphing into another in a drawn-out crescendo. Midway through, the waltz starts over from the top, this time with new and menacing ferocity, like a dance of death.
A peerless virtuoso famed for his “transcendental” keyboard technique, Liszt took Europe by storm as a young man. As audiences in city after city succumbed to “Lisztomania,” the Hungarian’s name became synonymous with pianistic prowess and showmanship. In 1848, at the height of his fame, he virtually retired from the concert stage and devoted the rest of his life to composing, conducting, and proselytizing (with his future son-in-law Richard Wagner) for the “Music of the Future.” In his piano music, symphonic tone poems, and vocal works, Liszt experimented with forms, harmonies, and sonorities that anticipated the musical language of impressionism and modernism.
In early 1847, Liszt fell in love with Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein. It was during an idyllic sojourn on her country estate in Ukraine that the 36-year-old virtuoso returned to a cycle of 10 piano pieces called Harmonies poétiques et religieuses on which he had been working intermittently for about a dozen years. Liszt borrowed the title from a volume of poems by Alphonse de Lamartine that celebrate the presence of the divine in everyday life. “Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude”—the third piece in the collection—is prefaced with a quotation from Lamartine that begins: “Whence comes to me, O my God, this peace that overwhelms me? Whence comes this faith in which my heart abounds?”
Liszt’s musical prayer begins and ends in F-sharp major, a key often associated with the overcoming of adversity. Mirroring the trajectory of Lamartine’s poem, “Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude” traces the journey of a troubled soul, buffeted by storms and doubts, toward a rebirth of faith. The work’s outer sections—characterized by unstable harmonies, undulating accompaniment figures, and impassioned climaxes—exude a feeling of restlessness and searching. This intricately wrought frame highlights the repose of the central Andante, featuring a luminous D-major tune in dotted rhythm. When the theme returns at the end—this time in F-sharp major—it has the gentle strength of a benediction.
In 1848, Liszt accepted an invitation to become court Kapellmeister to the Grand Duke of Weimar. There, over the next 13 years, he composed his great “Faust Symphony” and a series of what he called “symphonic poems,” which epitomized the Romantic urge to synthesize music, literature, and other art forms. Unlike Brahms and Felix Mendelssohn, who continued to write multi-movement works in the mold of Mozart and Beethoven, Liszt came to believe that Classical sonata form was outmoded. In its place he erected long, single-movement musical structures based on the cyclical transformations of a small number of themes or motives. Among the first fruits of this endeavor was the Sonata in B Minor, one of the 19th century’s most revolutionary masterpieces. Although it was completed in early 1853, the work was so ahead of its time that four years passed before Liszt’s pupil Hans von Bülow gave the premiere in Berlin.
An uninterrupted musical panorama stretching across a full half-hour, the B-Minor Sonata falls into discrete sections that correspond roughly to those of traditional sonata form: exposition, development, recapitulation, and coda. Within the first 15 bars, Liszt presents three of the main ideas on which the sonata will be built: a lugubrious descending scale, an energetically bounding melody, and an ominously rumbling repeated-note figure. A contrasting lyrical theme, in resplendent D major, serves as the framework for the sonata’s middle “slow movement,” marked Andante sostenuto. This in turn is followed by a lively, fugue-like section, based, as in a conventional recapitulation, on themes heard earlier. Resisting his initial impulse to go out with a bang, Liszt brings the sonata to a close with a tender reminiscence of the Andante.
—Harry Haskell