Malcolm Bilson (fortepiano)

Friday, 17 July at 8pm

World-renowned Professor Malcolm Bilson of Cornell University has been at the forefront of the period-instrument movement for more than 30 years. A frequent soloist with leading early-instrument orchestras throughout the world, he will be visiting Sydney as keynote speaker at the 9th Australasian Pedagogy Conference.

Natsuko Yoshimoto (violin), James Cuddeford (violin), Jeremy Williams (viola),
Patrick Murphy (’cello), Kees Boersma (double bass), Alison Mitchell (flute),
Diana Doherty (oboe), Frank Celata (clarinet), Bernadette Balkus (piano)

Programme

HAYDN - Sonata in E minor, Hob XVI:34
MOZART - Fantasy in C minor, K 396
MOZART - Eine kleine Gigue, K 574
DUSSEK - Fantasia and fugue in F minor
MOZART - Sonata in F, K 332
BEETHOVEN - Sonata in E flat, op 31, no 3

About Malcolm Bilson

Malcolm Bilson has been in the forefront of the period-instrument movement for forty years.  On period pianos he has recorded the complete Mozart piano concertos with John Eliot Gardiner for Deutsche Grammophon, the complete Beethoven sonatas for Claves (with six of his former doctoral students) and the complete Mozart and Schubert piano sonatas for Hungaroton.  He has performed and taught all over the world and is in Sydney as a participant and Keynote Speaker at the Ninth Australasian Piano Pedagogy Conference, held at the University of New South Wales.  Malcolm Bilson is the Frederick J Whiton Professor of Music at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

Programme Notes

Copyright © 2009, Malcolm Bilson

In 2007 a conference was held at Stanford University in California on Old recordings. anyone who has heard recordings from 80 or 100 years ago know that musicians performed quite differently then; this was as true for 'popular' as it was for 'serious' music. Yet all the really important changes in musical performance came around the middle of the 19th century, a good half-century before recordings began. Concerts had by that time moved from the salon to the large concert hall, and virtually every instrument had changed in order to meet the new requirements. Larger halls demand not merely a bigger sound, but a generally richer and fuller type of delivery (think of an actor projecting to a large theatre contrasted with an actor speaking into a close microphone).

Although virtually all instruments underwent changes, none changed as drastically as the piano. For those of you hearing a Walter fortepiano for the first time, it is important to realize that there are many other types of piano as well. The 'modern' piano (all pianos nowadays are based on the Steinway recipe of about 1870) was a conglomeration of many trends of the time, and by the end of the 19th century had become the standard for piano production around the world; it has not changed to the present day. Yet Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Chopin and Liszt all played many types of piano similar to neither a Steinway nor a Walter.

Those of you who know the works on tonight's programme may be surprised by some of my interpretations. Although virtually every serious musician works today from so-called Urtext editions, Steinway-type pianos can realize composers' indications often quite differently from late 18th-century instruments, due to their slower developing tone and different registral balance between bass and treble. Having always been passionately interested in interpretation, it is just these dissimilar expressive attributes that originally led me to the earlier instruments.

Haydn - Sonata in E minor, Hob XVI:34

Presto / Adagio / Vivace molto

Haydn wrote some 60 piano sonatas, yet only five are in a minor key. The present E-minor work, Hob 34, is especially remarkable for the fact that all the material of the first movement is stated in the first two measures: the rising arpeggio in the left hand and the descending three notes in the right. Revolutionary here is the concept that no voice accompanies in any ordinary sense; all voices are thematic. The movement builds up to a dramatic climax, followed by a flowing, highly decorated second movement and a rondo finale alternating between minor and major, marked by Haydn innocentemente.

Mozart - Fantasia in C minor, K 396

Adagio

The Mozart fantasy in C minor, K 396, appears to have been originally conceived as an opening movement for a sonata with violin accompaniment. The first half of the work is complete, but the violin enters only quite late, at bar 24. It was completed by Abbé Stadler, who completed several of Mozart's unfinished works; this is most certainly Stadler's best effort. This C minor (the key of pathos!) fantasy is a highly dramatically charged work and Stadler seems quite up to the task; the entire crossed-hand section in the middle is by Stadler.

Mozart - Eine kleine Gigue, K 574

Allegro

I often follow the C minor fantasy with the extremely brief Eine kleine Gigue, K 574, written in 1789 for a fellow organist in Leipzig. One traditionally calls this work is a kind of homage to Bach, but there is hardly anything Bachlike about it. It seems almost an exercise in just how daring one can be and still remain musically understandable!

Dussek - Fantasia and fugue in F minor, C 199, op 55

If the Mozart fantasy follows a more or less formal sonata-form pattern, while using as its subjects highly improvisational material, the Fantasy and Fugue in F minor by Jan Ladislas Dussek (or Dušik), written in 1804, is far more like a genuine free improvisation, giving rein to virtually any thought as it comes along, and journeying to the remotest possible keys. Written in London, where keyboard writing was in many ways far ahead of the more conservative Viennese style, one hears in this music clear foreshadowings of Schubert, even Liszt. The Fugue is scarcely strict in any Bachian sense, and even has a repeat mark for the 'exposition' (which I sometimes take, but not always...).

Mozart - Fantasia in C minor, K 396

Adagio

Mozart's sonata in F, K 332, is one of his most popular keyboard sonatas, and is often given to students as one of the easier ones. This is somewhat surprising, for it is in fact perhaps his most brilliant and virtuosic sonata altogether. This is surely the type of composition the pianist Artur Schnabel referred to as "too easy for the 9-year olds and to difficult for the world's greatest artists". I often demonstrate the first movement of K 332 when comparing a Walter to a Steinway; its opening bars are clearly set off from one another (what they called in the 18th century 'sighing' motives); these would sound choppy on a modern piano and are thus virtually always heard in a simple legato, robbing the music of its real meaning, in my opinion. The second movement is simply two statements of a sonata-form exposition with no development (the so-called sonatina form). The repeat, highly decorated by Mozart for the first edition can serve as a model for embellishing repeats where Mozart has not provided them. The third movement alternates sparkling passage work with lyrical, even pathos-like lyrical passages and comes to a quiet close.

Beethoven - Sonata no 18 in E flat, op 31, no 3

Allegro / Scherzo: Allegro vivace / Menuetto: Moderato e grazioso / Presto con fuoco

Beethoven's meteoric success as a young musician in the late 1790s in Vienna was principally as a brilliant pianist, but not as a performer of his (or anyone else's) piano sonatas. Piano sonatas were considered Hausmusik and were not heard in public arenas. Beethoven excelled as an improviser (an activity known in German as freies Fantasieren), and as such seems to have had few rivals.

Gradually Beethoven began to bring this improvisational aspect into his written-out piano sonatas; indeed, the two sonatas of op 27 each bear the title Sonata quasi una fantasia. Of all the sonatas of the middle period, however, the sonata in E flat, op 31, no 3, is one of the most improvisatory in nature, and by far the most humorous.

Among other curiosities in this work: the second movement marked scherzo is in duple, not the normal triple time and the third movement is a minuet (normally one has either a scherzo or a minuet, but not both), and as a result the work has no real slow movement. The finale, a virtuosic perpetuum mobile, brings the work to a fiery close.