A HERO’ S JOURNEY: SCHUMANN & STRAUSS
Symphoniker, Orquestra Sinfônica do Estado de São Paolo, Orquestra Sinfónica de Castilla y León, Teatro Real and Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte Carlo, Sydney and Tasmanian symphony orchestras. Perianes returns to Orquestra de la Comunitat Valencia to playdirect all five Beethoven Concerti, and concludes the play-direct Beethoven cycle with Galicia Symphony.
Perianes frequently appears in recitals across the globe, with performances this season at Heidelberger Frühling, Gulbenkian, Ostrava, Barcelona, Alicante, Scherzo Madrid, Bozar, Liege, Künzelsau, and Sydney Opera House. He also appears at prestigious festivals such as the BBC Proms, Lucerne Festival, Argerich Festival, Salzburg Whitsun, La Roque d’ Anthéron, Grafenegg, Prague Spring, Ravello, Stresa, San Sebastián, Santander, Granada, Vail, Blossom, Ravinia and the Canary Island Music Festival.
Perianes exclusively records for harmonia mundi. His most recent releases feature a selection of Scarlatti’ s Sonatas, Granados’ Goyescas, and Chopin’ s Sonatas No. 2 and No. 3 interspersed with the three Mazurkas from Op. 63.
Perianes was awarded the National Music Prize by the Ministry of Culture of Spain and named Artist of the Year at the International Classical Music Awards( ICMA).
NOTES ON THE PROGRAM
By James M. Keller
Maria Theresia von Paradis
Born: May 15, 1759, in Vienna, Austria Died: February 1, 1824, in Vienna, Austria
OVERTURE TO DER SCHULKANDIDAT(“ THE SCHOOL CANDIDATE”) [ 1792 ]
Maria Theresia von Paradis was the wellborn daughter of the Imperial Secretary for Commerce and Court Councilor to Austrian Empress Maria Theresia, after whom she was named. She studied with some of Vienna’ s most esteemed musicians: piano with Leopold Koželuch, voice with Vincenzo Righini and Antonio Salieri, composition with Salieri and Abbé Vogler. Already as a teenager she was performing as a singer and pianist at prestigious Viennese venues. Among the compositions written for her by colleagues were Salieri’ s C-Major Organ Concerto and keyboard concertos by Haydn( in G major, Hob. XVIII / 4) and possibly Mozart( the one in B-flat major, K. 456, which she may have premiered). Although sources document that she produced a substantial body of work, including two piano concertos, three cantatas, and numerous songs, much of her oeuvre is lost.
All that survives of her five( maybe six) operas is perhaps half of Der Schulkandidat. Since its libretto is also lost, the piece cannot be reconstructed, but at least its overture lives on as a performable standalone item. The opera was a singspiel, a popular genre that mixed spoken theatre with segments of composed music( like, for example, Mozart’ s Die Zauberflöte, which was premiered a year earlier). In fact, it was labelled a“ rustic singspiel,” and its vigorous Overture, which strives for good humor rather than aristocratic elegance, is beautifully crafted for its purpose.
Apart from her music, Paradis staked a place for her work assisting the blind. She lost her sight as a young child. Some of her vision was restored through treatment by Anton Mesmer( of“ mesmerism” fame), but that proved only temporary. She toured widely as a performer, and while in Paris in 1784 she consulted with Valentin Haüy, a pioneer in the history of education, in the establishment of the first school for the blind, the Institution des Jeunes Aveugles. One of the graduates of that school would be Louis Braille, famous for his system of writing for the blind— a method he devised to facilitate the reading of both words and music.
Instrumentation: Two flutes, two oboes, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings.
Robert Schumann
Born: June 8, 1810, in Zwickau, Germany Died: July 29, 1856, in Endenich, Germany
PIANO CONCERTO IN A MINOR, OP. 54 [ 1841 – 1845 ]
Robert Schumann encountered the genre of concerto at something of a crossroads. In 1839, he wrote to his then-fiancée Clara Wieck,“ Concerning concertos, I’ ve already said to you that I can’ t write a concerto for virtuosi and have to think of something else.” At that time, piano concertos were nearly always what we would consider lightweight vehicles for showmanship, and most of their authors— Kalkbrenner, Thalberg, Herz, Pixis, and so on— have slipped to the fringe of the repertoire. Chopin’ s two piano concertos( 1829 and 1830) and Mendelssohn’ s two( 1831 and 1837) were exceptions to the rule, to the extent that they managed to accommodate more serious musical content to audience expectations for dazzling virtuosity.
Between 1827 and 1839, Schumann made four stabs at piano concertos, but he left all of them in fragmentary form. In May 1841, he composed a one-movement Phantasie for Piano and Orchestra. It received two private run-throughs that August, with Clara Schumann( now his wife) as soloist and their friend Felix Mendelssohn conducting the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. That was the last the Phantasie was heard, and Schumann’ s attempts to publish it came to naught. But there was enough good in it to inspire greater things. In the summer of 1845, Schumann set about revising it into the first movement of his full-scale concerto. Early listeners were struck by the extent to which the piano and the orchestra interacted, as opposed to the more standard turn-taking of the forces in standard virtuoso concertos of the day. This is a supremely“ symphonic” concerto in the democratic way in which the soloist and the orchestra pursue their unified intent. Nonetheless,
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