Solo Keyboard

Rachmaninov’s Prelude in B Minor, Op. 32, No. 10: Longing for the Return

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The 1887 painting, Die Heimkehr (“The Homecoming” or “The Return”), by Swiss Symbolist Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901), shows a solitary figure seated with his back to a square reflecting pool. His attention is focused on a shadowy house with a single lit window. The late autumnal landscape suggests the falling veil of mortality, greeted with a blend of quiet anxiety, detachment, and inevitability. It was this painting which inspired Sergei Rachmaninov to write the …

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Liszt’s “La Chapelle de Guillaume Tell” from “Années de Pèlerinage”: Horn Calls and Heroism

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During the 1830s, Franz Liszt embraced the romantic life of the medieval Troubadours. While in a relationship with the Countess Marie d’Agoult, Liszt wandered throughout the countryside of Switzerland and Italy, where he visited “places consecrated by history and poetry,” and found the “phenomena of nature” to be deeply stirring. These travels formed the inspiration for Années de pèlerinage (“Years of Pilgrimage”), a three-volume cycle of 26 pieces for solo piano. The …

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Bartók’s Études, Op 18: Daring Technical Exercises for Solo Piano

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Béla Bartók’s three Études, Op 18 for solo piano are daring, both technically and musically. Composed in 1918, they were intended to push the limits as pedagogical studies. The influence of Chopin, Debussy (whose piano Études were written three years earlier), and Schoenberg is evident. The three brief Études follow the traditional fast-slow-fast format. The first unleashes an exhilarating, demonic motor, punctuated with the accents of Hungarian folk music and language. In …

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Schubert’s Impromptu No. 3 in G-Flat Major: Krystian Zimerman

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Franz Schubert composed a set of eight solo piano Impromptus (D. 899 and D. 935) in the summer and autumn of 1827, months before the creation of his Winterreise song cycle, and a year before his death at the age of 31. The title, suggesting an improvisatory character piece in three-part form (A-B-A) was chosen by Schubert’s Viennese publisher, Tobias Haslinger. Long before recordings, at a time when pianos were becoming increasingly inexpensive …

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Prokofiev’s Piano Sonata No. 5 in C Major: Cool and Classical

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An enticing coolness and classicism surrounds Sergei Prokofiev’s Piano Sonata No. 5 in C Major, Op. 38. Brilliant and austere, it is the music of a composer who, early on, developed a reputation as a brash enfant terrible with piano-playing fingers of steel. Here, as in much of his music, Prokofiev, the cunning and aggressive master chess player, plays the game of quirky extended melodies, which often seem to reach a harmonic dead …

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Khatia Buniatishvili Plays Chopin: Ballade No. 4 in F Minor, Op. 52

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Frédéric Chopin’s Ballade No. 4 in F Minor, Op. 52 inhabits the world of dreams. It unfolds as a hazy musical hallucination, at once melancholy, sensuous, and volcanic. The English pianist John Ogdon called it, “the most exalted, intense and sublimely powerful of all Chopin’s compositions…It is unbelievable that it lasts only twelve minutes, for it contains the experience of a lifetime.” Composed in Paris in 1842, this was Chopin’s final solo …

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Remembering Kalevi Kiviniemi: Organ Music of Jean Sibelius

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Kalevi Kiviniemi, the renowned Finnish concert organist, passed away on April 3 at his home in Lahti after suffering a heart attack. He was 65. Kiviniemi’s international career blossomed in the late 1980s, with recitals throughout Europe, the United States, Asia, and Australia. He was at home among the world’s greatest organs, and performed frequently at Notre-Dame in Paris. Kiviniemi was the first to record the complete organ works of Jean Sibelius. …

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