Czech Chamber Music Society • Daniil Trifonov

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky won the hearts of musicians with his Piano Concerto in B minor, Op. 23, but his works for piano cover a great diversity of genres and include piano sonatas, a form that was still very popular in the 19th century. Mastery of the piano sonata genre was one of the fundamentals of every school of composition. Tchaikovsky wrote his first Piano Sonata in C sharp minor in 1865, his last year of study at the St Petersburg Conservatoire, and in it he amassed with everything expected in the sonata genre—a first movement in sonata form, a slow and lyrical second movement, a dance as the third movement connected “subito” to the fourth movement, a robust-sounding, technically difficult finale, again conceived in a sonata-form layout. During the composer’s lifetime, this sonata was regarded as his most important student work. The composer himself reused material from the third movement (Scherzo) for the third movement of his Symphony No. 1, Op. 13 (1866). The composer left us no information about the sonata, and the manuscript was found after his death amongst his papers in Klin (a town northwest of Moscow); it was then designated as his Op. 80.

The work was given its first public performance by the Ukrainian-American pianist and composer Alexander Siloti (1863–1945), who played the first and third movements at two concerts in Odessa and Moscow in September and October 1900. That same year, the sonata was issued in print by the Moscow publisher Pyotr Jurgenson in an edition prepared by the composer Sergei Taneyev (1856–1915), Tchaikovsky’s former pupil at the Moscow Conservatoire. Taneyev had to make some minor changes, especially to the end of the second movement (Andante). However, the work’s first performer had strong opinions of his own about the sonata, so Jurgenson published yet another edition the very next year, this time containing Siloti’s versions of the first and third movements. Each subsequent performance or edition of the sonata is proof that the sonata has been unjustly neglected.

Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66, was premiered in January 1890 at the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg. Based on a fairytale by Charles Perrault, the ballet is divided into a prologue, three acts, and a concluding apotheosis. Tchaikovsky’s remarkably melodious ballet music has also found its way into the piano literature thanks to an arrangement by the pianist, conductor, and composer Mikhail Vasilievich Pletnev (*1957), winner of the gold medal at the 1978 Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition; his transcriptions of Tchaikovsky’s ballets The Nutcracker and The Sleeping Beauty date from the same period. Pletnev dedicated the concert suite for solo piano based on selections from Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty to Lev Nikolayevich Vlasenko, who was his piano teacher at the time at the Moscow Conservatoire. The suite follows the ballet’s sequence of events very loosely, singling out numbers with distinctive fairytale characters interspersed with slower contrasting passages. The arrangement poses extraordinary technical and interpretive challenges comparable to those found in the most difficult works of Franz Liszt, giving performers the chance to exploit contrasting colours and the entire sonic capabilities of the piano to an unusual extent.

Dance stylisations are certainly a dominant feature of the 19th-century piano literature, but they do not represent anything all that revolutionary, having precedents in the dance suites of the Baroque, which contained treatments of the era’s popular dance forms. However, with the growing aspirations of various nations for independence, the selection of dances placed greater emphasis on the music’s ethnic character. Czech examples include Dvořák’s furiants and Smetana’s polkas. In the case of Frédéric Chopin, the composer’s polonaises and mazurkas demonstrate his interest in Polish dances, but because the composer had made his home in Paris, his sources of musical inspiration assumed a more cosmopolitan character. That is one reason why he was so strongly affected by the fashionable trend of the Viennese waltz that was sweeping its way across all of musical Europe with such force that the dance became domesticated in many places; the word waltz had begun to refer to most dance music being written in 3/4 time.

Today, 18 of Chopin’s waltzes are available to us, although the composer wrote many more of them. Some have been lost, and we know about others only indirectly from various materials, or the sources are in private hands. The selections on today’s programme are framed by two waltzes that were found in the composer’s estate, had not been published during his lifetime, and were therefore designated as posthumous: E major and E minor, both dating from ca. 1829—1830. The Waltz in F minor, Op. 70, No. 2 is from 1855. Two of the waltzes from his Op. 64 (No. 1 in D flat major and No. 3 in A flat major) date from 1847. In particular, Waltz No. 1 in D flat major has become exceptionally popular. The composer called it the Waltz of the Puppy (Valse du petit chien), but it later became known as the Minute Waltz, although that was not intended to indicate the composition’s length. The Waltz in A minor is the second of three published as Op. 34 in 1838 under the title Grandes valses brillantes. Apart from some small exceptions, the composer dedicated these waltzes to noblewomen to whom he was giving piano lessons or who belonged to his circle of friends. Chopin was able to imbue even this originally small-scale dance form with the attributes typical of all of his piano music—the innovative use of the piano’s timbral possibilities, sophistication of piano technique, and that invention and daring, especially in the realm of harmony, which served as a model for generations of his successors.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was an excellent player of keyboard instruments, and his legacy contains works for solo piano as well as music for piano four-hands and for two pianos. The list of his solo piano compositions mainly contains sonatas as well as rondos, variations, menuets, fantasies etc. The Sonata No. 12 in F major, K 332, was probably composed in 1783 along with three other sonatas (no. 10 in C major, K 330; no. 11 in A major, K 331; no. 13 in B flat major, K 333) comprising a group of works associated with Mozart’s first years in Vienna, where he moved permanently in 1781. The actual composing of these work is usually said to have taken place in Vienna or Salzburg, but even Paris is possible.

At the beginning of the 1780s, Mozart also wrote a series of piano concertos in which he played the solo parts, and which represented a major source of his income. The composer also used his sonatas when giving piano lessons, and he strove to make them entertaining for both performers and listeners. The strictures of sonata form were no obstacle—here, too, the freedom of Mozart’s creative spirit is triumphant, in this case supported by the success of an edition of the sonatas quickly published by Artaria (1784). The first movement of the Sonata in F major (Allegro) follows the pattern of sonata form while surprising us with many details—daring modulations in the development section and new themes that arrive contrary to what is customary. Even the simpler A-B-A-B form of the second movement (Adagio) beginning in B flat major permits plenty of harmonic excursions, including some into minor keys.

The third movement (Allegro assai) is also in sonata form, but again it is full of daring excursions into related and more remote keys along with virtuosic technical elements that make this one of Mozart’s most difficult piano compositions.