Featuring Liszt’s Sonata in B Minor, Beethoven’s Rondo a Capriccio in G Major, Chopin’s Scherzo in B Minor and Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit, young pianist Piotr Alexewicz performs this demanding programme on a Steinway D, 595375. He says of these works: “Liszt”019s Sonata in B minor is an electrifying work, one of the most magnificent monuments of Romantic piano music, and at the same time rather an un-Lisztian example of a creative, albeit highly polemic, reference to tradition.
This B minor Sonata, completed at the beginning of 1853 and dedicated to Schumann, is quite an isolated, yet exceptionally weighty, attempt to break the impasse in the Romantic perception of the genre. This remarkable work remains the subject of all manner of programmatic interpretations.
During the earliest period in Beethoven’s oeuvre, in Bonn and the first years in Vienna, he wrote primarily for the piano or as we often forget today the harpsichord. In the case of the Rondo a capriccio, Op. 129, despite the misleadingly high opus number (given by the publisher), this is an early work, with sketches rediscovered in our times enabling us to date it to the period around 1795-97.
In 1835, when Schlesinger published Chopin’s First Scherzo in B minor in Paris, the musical world could not contain itself with amazement. In an oft-cited review, Robert Schumann, a great admirer of the Polish composer, asked: ‘How should gravity array itself when jest is already darkly robed?’ The generic name is Italian for ‘jest’, and that is precisely the sort of light character displayed by scherzos familiar to the public at that time.
The Romantic French writer Aloysius Bertrand wrote a number of ‘prose poems’ which came to inspire a composition by Maurice Ravel,who in 1908 selected three episodes as the programmatic framework for a piano suite. With time, it became renowned as one of the foremost achievements in twentieth-century piano music. In this cycle, Ravel finally liberates himself from the influence of Debussy and shows his own, highly individual idiom in all its glory.
