Solo
Piano Recital by
(the
Netherlands)
PORTRAIT OF
PIERRE
BOULEZ
(France)
Une page d’éphéméride [A Calendar Page] (2005) *
Prélude, toccata et
scherzo (1944–45)
*
Douze notations [Twelve Notations]
(1945)
01. Fantasque – Modéré
02. Très vif
03. Assez lent
04. Rythmique
05. Doux et improvisé
06. Rapide
07. Hiératique
08. Modéré jusqu’ à très vif
09. Lointain – Calme
10. Mécanique et très sec
11. Scintillant
12. Lent – Puissant et âpre
02. Très vif
03. Assez lent
04. Rythmique
05. Doux et improvisé
06. Rapide
07. Hiératique
08. Modéré jusqu’ à très vif
09. Lointain – Calme
10. Mécanique et très sec
11. Scintillant
12. Lent – Puissant et âpre
Incises [Interpolations] (1994; revised and
expanded 2001) *
__________
* Bulgarian premiere
*
* *
The event is held under the
patronage of
H. E. Bea ten Tusscher
(Ambassador of the Kingdom of
the Netherlands)
and thanks to the generous
support of:
*
* *
The Performer
Ralph van Raat (b. 1978) has been
completely fascinated by classical music of the twentieth century since the age
of 14. Although his repertoire ranges from Bach to Boulez, his primary focus
has always been on composers dating from Debussy, Bartók and Ives to present
day masters. His aim is to convince his audiences of the immense beauty and
diversity of
the music of our own time through solo recitals,
lecture-recitals, concerto performances, CD-releases and special projects.
Pianist and
musicologist Ralph van Raat studied the piano with Ton Hartsuiker and Willem
Brons at the Conservatory of Amsterdam and musicology at the University of
Amsterdam. During his piano studies he was admitted to the select Provision for
Outstanding Musicians, a special training course for exceptional students. He
graduated cum laude in piano as well
as in musicology. As part of the Advanced Programme of the Conservatory of
Amsterdam, and funded by the Dutch cultural trust Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds,
Van Raat studied with Claude Helffer in Paris, with Ursula Oppens at Chicago’s
Northwestern University, with Liisa Pohjola in Finland and with Pierre-Laurent
Aimard at the High
School of Music in Cologne. He has won a large
number of prestigious international prizes and awards.
Van Raat regularly appears
as a recitalist in both the Netherlands and abroad – in Europe, the Middle East and Asia as well as in the United States.
His concerts are regularly broadcast by both Dutch and foreign radio and
television networks. He has been engaged for his own radio series on
contemporary music by Dutch national broadcasting and has been honoured with
his own concert series by the Concertgebouw of Amsterdam, the Muziekgebouw in
Amsterdam and De Doelen in Rotterdam.
Van Raat has often
performed as a soloist with orchestras including the Los Angeles Philharmonic,
London Sinfonietta, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Concertgebouw
Orchestra, the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, the Netherlands Radio
Philharmonic Orchestra, the Radio Symphony Orchestra of Frankfurt, the Aarhus
Symphony Orchestra, the Dortmunder Philharmoniker, the Shanghai Philharmonic
Orchestra and the China National Symphony Orchestra. He has worked closely with
conductors such as Valery Gergiev, JoAnn Falletta, Susanna Mälkki, David
Robertson, Peter Eötvös, Stefan Asbury, Michel Tabachnik, Jac van Steen and
Otto Tausk. He has performed as a soloist at many prestigious international festivals.
Ralph van Raat has had
an exclusive contract with the international record label Naxos since December 2006. His first recording for Naxos, the complete piano works by John
Adams, received top ratings in several magazines. It was highlighted as a CD of
the month in Gramophone. His second
CD, with Frederic Rzewski’s The
People United Will Never Be Defeated, was labelled a Benchmark CD in BBC
Music Magazine and Highly Recommended by Gramophone. In December 2010, within a month after its
release, Van Raat’s CD with Hans Otte’s Das
Buch der Klänge (The Book of
Sounds) was chosen as CD of the Week by Dutch public radio. Van Raat’s
recording of Arvo Pärt’s piano music received a 5/5 star rating in BBC Music Magazine. One of his most recent recording, piano duo works by Debussy and Messiaen has
been nominated for the Spellemannsprisen 2012, the Norwegian equivalent to the
Grammy. The Rzewski recording as well as those of the complete piano works by
John Adams, Gavin Bryars and Sir John Tavener have all been bestsellers, having
ranked among the Top 20 bestselling Naxos
albums worldwide. This resulted in the publication of a special dedicated
Artist Portrait CD-box in 2009, with his complete recordings for Naxos to date.
Many composers
worldwide have dedicated piano compositions and concertos to him. He has worked
directly with many composers on the interpretation of their piano works.
Van Raat teaches
contemporary piano music interpretation at the Conservatory of Amsterdam. He
regularly gives master classes, lectures and workshops and has done so at the
conservatories of Tirana, Nizhny Novgorod, Kiev, the Ligeti Academy of the ASKO/Schönberg Ensemble, etc. as well as
for many other universities and institutes.
Ralph van Raat was
named a Steinway Artist by the Steinway piano company in 2003, joining an
exclusive circle of renowned artists including Vladimir Horowitz, Martha
Argerich, Alfred Brendel, Lang Lang and Keith Jarrett. He records exclusively
on Steinway pianos and uses the Steinway piano as his preferred instruments for
performances worldwide.
(© Simon van
Boxtel)
* * *
The Composer
Pierre Boulez (1925 – 2016) is one of
the most significant French composers of his generation, as well as a
noted conductor and music theorist who championed the work of 20th century
composers.
Boulez
majored in mathematics at the Collège de Saint-Étienne, where he also studied
music; he later studied mathematics, engineering and music in Lyon. In 1944–45,
he studied with the composer and organist Olivier Messiaen
at the Paris Conservatory. Subsequently (1945–46), he studied twelve-tone
technique with René Leibowitz, who had been a student of Arnold Schoenberg, the
father of twelve-tone music.
In
1954, Boulez founded a series of avant-garde concerts, the Concerts Marigny, which were later renamed Domaine Musicale. By the 1960s, Boulez had gained an international
reputation not only as a composer but also as a conductor, particularly of 20th
century repertoire. In the mid-1970s, with the support of the French
government, Boulez created and directed the Centre for
Musical and Acoustical Research (IRCAM), the experimental music organisation
housed in the Pompidou Centre in Paris. The instrumental group he established
there, Ensemble InterContemporain, has become one of the world’s most important
contemporary music ensembles. Boulez toured with the group as its conductor
until 1991 and continued as president thereafter.
Boulez’s
complex, serialist music is marked by a sensitivity to the nuances of
instrumental texture and colour, a concern also apparent in his conducting. His
earlier compositions combine the influence of the twelve-tone composers with
that of Messiaen and, through him, of certain East Asian musical elements.
Boulez was also influenced by the work of the poets Stéphane Mallarmé and René
Char.
*
* *
The Programme
/ The Works
As part of this all-Boulez
programme, I will have the pleasure to present the Bulgarian premiere of Boulez’s
still unpublished triptych Prélude, toccata et scherzo (1944–45). With permission by the Boulez Family and the Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel,
I’ve performed its world premiere at the Philharmonie de Paris in September
2018, as well as its North American premiere at Carnegie Hall a month later. This
substantial work will be combined with Boulez’s opus 1, the Twelve Notations, written only a few
months later, and the two works which resulted from Boulez’s very last returns
to his native instrument, the piano: the highly virtuosic Interpolations (1994, revised
2001) and the dramatic A Calendar Page (2005).
From
1944, the young Pierre Boulez started to get lessons in harmony from Olivier
Messiaen and counterpoint from Andrée Vaurabourg-Honegger, before his official
enrolment as a student at the Paris Conservatoire in 1945. It was during this
time that he wrote the large-scale triptych Prélude,
toccata et scherzo. The work is a testimony
of the young composer’s gifts of invention, featuring extremes in dynamics,
register and pianistic demands. While the Prélude
echoes the piano writing of his primary role models (Messiaen, Honegger and
Jolivet) by the irrational rhythms, gamelan-like harmonies and somber,
expressive character, the Toccata
foreshadows the later Boulez: it drives a fugal theme (containing sections of
all twelve tones of the chromatic scale) to explosive outbursts in between
rather rhapsodic interpolations which borrow the interval structures from the
theme. The closing Scherzo also
consists of two contrasting elements: a volatile percussive theme alternating
with a static melodic theme accompanied by bell-like chords. This movement is
highly structured, with both melodic and harmonic material derived from a
rising seven-note motif which is repeatedly audible in the right hand
throughout the movement, with rhythmical interjections in the left hand.
The
lyrical, tolling bell sections of the Scherzo foreshadow the mood of some of
the otherwise radically different Twelve Notations, which he composed months after finishing the above-mentioned triptych.
The expansive and drawn-out structures suddenly made room for short pieces,
highly concentrated in their expression, amount of notes and moods. The cause
of this radical change can be found in the fact that Boulez had just been
introduced to the works of Anton Webern by Rene Leibowitz, with whom he had
started to study at the end of 1945. Notated on the back of several sheets filled
with sixteenth-century counterpoint, the number twelve plays an important role
in this collection of pieces: each consists of twelve bars, and they all make
use of the same twelve-tone row. It is striking how different each miniature
sounds despite using this same pitch material; not only are echoes of Debussy’s
impressionism audible, but also the irregular rhythms so typical of Messiaen,
and the tam-tam-like rumbling of bass notes, relating to Boulez’s interest at
the time in ethnic music.
Even
in Boulez’s last completed piano work, A Calendar Page
from 2005, many facets of his earlier works have remained. Written by
invitation of Universal Edition to
compose a piece for piano students, this gem contains highly contrasting
sections: slow free-timed sections full of resonance sounds and thunderous
basses at the beginning and the end, and a rapid rhythmic middle section which
accelerates until the notes crash at high speed into the almost weightless last
section. If Boulez shows here his mastery of intensity of expression in the
most concise forms, then he finds an at least equal counterpart in Maurice
Ravel, whose Menuet in cis, scribbled
on the back of an exercise of one of his students in 1904, turned out to be a
tiny masterpiece, despite its casual presentation.
Interpolations
was composed after a period of more than 30 years, during which Boulez did not
write any works for piano solo. A double commission was the driving force for
returning to the instrument: the Umberto Micheli Piano Competition of Milan
asked for a short compulsory work in to be performed in 1994, and Boulez was
committed to write a new work for his friend Paul Sacher’s birthday in 1996.
The initial version lasted only a few minutes, despite the many notes that the
pianist had to play. The notes of the piece were mainly derived from
transpositions of the symbolic pitch collection S-A-C-H-E-R: es (e-flat),
a, c, h (b-natural), e and d/re.
In
2001, Boulez not only increased the metronome speed of the already fast-paced
piece considerably, but he also added a huge section, bringing the duration of
the work to about ten minutes. The long ‘melodic’ lines, after a rather free
introduction, and the incisive interruptions by short repeated chords are
striking. The title refers to these events, as well as to the similarly named
rhythmic units of several notes analogous to a motif. Also very striking are
the heavy and dark chords in the sections that Boulez had added after 1994.
These chords are held by the pianist through the middle pedal. Even the
‘melodic’ sections have transformed into a frenzy of alternating rubato and
strictly timed passages, almost being in a state of delirium.
The
explanation for this mood change might be found through the fact that Sacher
had died in 1999: half-way into the work, the character seems, correspondingly,
to shift from breathtaking but icy gesturing into the foreboding grim tolling
of bells.
Ralph van Raat
(© Simon van
Boxtel)
