Joel Fan, Solo Recital (LIVE)
The Gretna Music Festival’s season opened with a live solo recital performed by Joel Fan, featuring music of Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Prokofiev, Villa-Lobos and much more.
With live concerts cancelled for much of 2020, the Gretna Festival decided to stream concerts recorded from previous seasons. These concerts were previously recorded for broadcast on the local NPR station.
Joel Fan’s solo piano recital was originally presented at Elizabethtown College’s Leffler Chapel and Performance Center on October 6, 2007. Please have a listen to this blockbuster recital program at the video below:
This live recital performance includes the following works:
No. 10, Pentatonic Theme, from 10 Sketches on Aksak Rhythms, Op. 58, Adnan Saygun (1907-1991)
Piano Sonata No. 3 in a minor, Op, 28, Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953)
La Nuit du Destin, Dia Succari (b. 1938)
Instants d’un Opera de Pekin, Qigang Chen (b. 1951)
Piano Sonata in A-flat Major, Op. 110, Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
— intermission —
Cristal, Cesar Mariano (b. 1943)
Choros No. 5, ‘Alma Brasileira,’ Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959)
Danca Negra, Carmago Guarnieri (1907-1993)
Nine New Bagatelles, William Bolcom (b. 1938)
Piano Sonata No. 2 in b-flat minor, Frederic Chopin (1810-1849)
Concert Paraphrase on Verdi’s ‘Rigoletto,’ Franz Liszt (1811-1886)
— end —
Here are the original program notes, written by Carl Kane:
Sergei Prokofiev, Sonata No. 3 in a minor, Op. 28
Spring of 1918 could not have been the best of times to drop in on St. Petersburg, yet that is what Prokofiev did. It wasn’t like he had much choice about it, having fled three times already from the Reds, the Whites, the riots and the civil strife that had enveloped wartime Russia. Concertizing must have been a nightmare then, and heaven only knows (or the masses’ opiate Lenin, depending which side you’re on) how the Classical Symphony, the Third and Fourth Piano Sonatas made it to a stage before a living audience. But make it there they did, the Classical surpassing all expectations, hitting big-time, quickly going international and making the composer’s reputation. And the Third Sonata was no slouch either. One might even say that, if the Classical was a rosebush among revolutionary briars, the Third Sonata was at least a bonus flower.
Fashioned from material first drafted in his student years a decade before (hence its sometime subtitle, ‘From Old Notebooks’), this single-movement, virtuosic work makes the perfect recital showpiece. Erlkönig-like triplets start things with a bang, but Prokofiev quickly passes in steely-nerved intensity anything Schubert conceived. A brief interlude injects some respite for both listener and artist (though even here a neurotic ostinato persists), before the triplets return, more fanatical than ever, sweeping us to an intense, abrupt, inevitable conclusion.
Ludwig van Beethoven, Sonata No. 31 in A-flat Major, Op. 110
To compose a theme that, by pure chance, exactly duplicates onepreexisting would be remarkable coincidence. Yet that is what seems to have been done by Beethoven in the Adagio ma non troppo third movement of his Op. 110. Here the first nine notes parallel those exactly of Es Is Vollbracht (It is finished), the aria at the death of Jesus from Bach’s Passion of St. John. Bach’s oeuvre was largely unknown in Beethoven’s lifetime, so it is unlikely that the instance was a deliberate quote. Still the parallel – of purpose just as much as notes – is striking.
In 1822, Beethoven had just gone through an early bout with the systemic illnesses (hepatitis, dropsy, cirrhosis) that would claim him six years on; he had also recently emerged from the low point of his public life, an embarrassing legal battle over custody of his nephew. Thus the third movement theme in question, after a genial first movement and a restive second, can be seen to represent the nadir of the composer’s suffering (Vincent d’Indy places it among “the most poignant expressions of grief conceivable to man”). There follows a fugue which might be termed a resurrection, though the woeful theme is heard one final time before the fugue returns in varied form, this time marked poi a poi di nuovo vivente (“with more and more new life”).
The motif thus of death, or suffering, seems to have caused Beethoven and Bach, two great creative minds, to think alike, fashioning independently a melody from which to pen rebirth.
Frédéric Chopin, Sonata No. 2 in b-flat minor, Op. 35
A consummate master of the musical miniature, Chopin is oftengiven insufficient credit when it comes to the coherence of his larger works. Take for instance the Sonata No. 2 in b-flat minor, of which no less an expert than Robert Schumann wrote, “The notion of calling this a sonata is a caprice, if not a joke, for he has just bound together four of his most reckless children.”This charge may be amusing, but it hardly seems fair. Granted, the work in question may lack the inner logic of a Waldstein, not to mention a Hammerklavier. Still it holds together as well as, say, a Spring or Rhenish symphony. The famous funeral march of the sonata’s third movement, though written two years before the work’s rest (1839), even shares the main theme, played backwards, of its opening movement. And there are other ways, still more boring to discuss, in which Chopin knits his work together. Take the fact that six – six! – major themes start out upon the mediant; and only the finale fails to feature repeated notesin its first subject, although here the octave triplets do trace identically the falling seventh, rising second contour of the work’s head.
But you’re asleep, for I’ve digressed. Suffice it to say, the B-flat minor Sonata, like most of Chopin’s large-scale works, is unified just fine. And best of all, it makes great listening.
No offence, Mr. Schumann.
Franz Liszt, Concert Paraphrase on Verdi’s ‘Rigoletto’
The opera paraphrase was a peculiar species of musicalarrangement, wildly popular in its heyday – roughly the mid-19th to early 20th centuries. In it, the latest operatic hits were transcribed for keyboard and given virtuoso treatment. Pre-CD, pre-radio, pre- gramophone, in this way urban audiences got to hear their favorite tunes more often, rural ears got to hear them sometimes for the first time, and pianists got dazzling, if musically vacuous crowd pleasers with which to bring down the curtain.
The supreme master of this form, Franz Liszt, gave the paraphrase treatment to more than half a hundred operas, including 7 by Verdi: I Lombardi, Ernani, Il Trovatore, Simone Boccanegra, Don Carlo, Aida, and Rigoletto. Of these, the Concert Paraphrase on ‘Rigoletto’ (1859) is the most frequently performed. Here Liszt elaborates in brilliant fashion on a group of melodies, all lifted from Bella figlia dell amore, the opera’s familiar Act IV quartet.
Notes by Carl Kane