Ravinia 2024 Issue 1

MARTIN THEATRE 7:30 PM THURSDAY, JUNE 20, 2024 JONATHAN BISS, piano SCHUBERT Impromptu in F minor, D. 935, no. 1 Impromptu in B-flat major, D. 935, no. 3 SOREY For Anthony Braxton * –Intermission– SCHUBERT Piano Sonata in B-flat major, D. 960 Molto moderato Andante sostenuto Scherzo: Allegro vivace con delicatezza Allegro, ma non troppo * First performance at Ravinia home, first to B-flat minor, then to G-flat major. The former is often dark and always suffused with Sehnsucht —longing. ( Sehnsucht is the cen- tral fact of Schubert’s existence. A line from Die Taubenpost , his final song—“Sie heißt die Sehn- sucht” [“She is called longing”]—could be con- sidered his motto.) The latter tries to be light-hearted, doesn’t quite manage, and in the process only grows more sehnsuchtsvoll : a Schubert signature. Almost every bar features a series of large upward leaps, a gesture that would be carefree in any other pair of hands. But even when Schubert yodels, he does so mit Sehnsucht . The end of the last variation is not the end of the Impromptu; there is a partial reprise of the theme, in a lower octave and at a slower tempo. It now bears the weight of its history—a histo- ry it did not have when we first heard it, only ten minutes earlier. It has lost its innocence and grown even more beautiful. –Program notes © 2024 Jonathan Biss TYSHAWN SOREY (b.1980) For Anthony Braxton On May 6, 2024, Tyshawn Sorey was announced the winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Mu- sic for his Adagio (For Wadada Leo Smith) , a composition for saxophone and orchestra (“an anti-concerto”) co-commissioned by the Lu- cerne Festival and Atlanta Symphony Orches- tra. Timothy McAllister was saxophone soloist in the Lucerne (August 20, 2022) and Atlanta (March 16, 2023) premieres. Sorey dedicated the score to trumpeter and composer Wadada Leo Smith, his friend and frequent collaborator. Proclaimed a “musical shapeshifter” (National Public Radio) and “category-defying” ( Rolling Stone ), this multi-instrumentalist, conductor, creator, and thought-leader transcends bound- aries of musical style and creative process. Sorey initially earned recognition for his collaborative work as a jazz percussionist (and, occasionally, Gustav Klimt’s Schubert at the Piano (1945) FRANZ SCHUBERT (1797–1828) Selections from Four Impromptus , D. 935 Schubert’s genius was equally well suited to the epic scale and to the miniature. In piano sona- tas and chamber music works of forty minutes or longer, he takes existing forms and expands them, testing their natural limits and turning digression into a sublime art; in hundreds of Lieder, each no more than a few minutes long, he pierces and, in some case, shatters your heart with a single change of harmony or turn of phrase. The Four Impromptus , D. 935, occupy a middle ground. Already deeply moving when heard in- dividually, they become something greater when experienced in their entirety. Written exactly a year before Schubert’s death at the age of thir- ty-one (consider it: 935 pieces of music written by the age of thirty), the successive tonalities, forms, and moods of these four freestanding pieces suggest a grand sonata in F minor. However, freed from the strictures of the word “sonata” and the long shadow it—and Bee- thoven’s thirty-two towering examples of the form—casts, Schubert’s imagination becomes even more uninhibited, the results even more wondrous. The first Impromptu is not a sona- ta form; it has no development. Instead, its ex- pected two themes—the first tragic, the second consoling but still so full of sorrow—are supple- mented by an unexpected third. Marked pianis- simo appassionato , it is many seemingly con- tradictory things at once: fervent, mysterious, urgent, halting, haunting. Its effect is transfor- mative: when it is followed by the return of the Impromptu’s opening idea, it has moved away from defiance and towards resignation. Accep- tance is still a long way off, but the fight has been revealed to be futile. The third Impromptu has another kind of de- ceptive simplicity, its lilting B-flat-major theme falling and then rising in perfect symmetry: a child’s poem. But over the course of five wi- de-ranging variations, it develops into so- mething different. Even the variations which merely embellish the theme somehow deepen it in the process; Schubert is constitutionally inca- pable of writing meaningless music, and every appoggiatura, every neighbor tone, shades and complicates the music’s narrative. That narrative is further complicated by the journey two of the variations take away from the B-flat-major RAVINIAMAGAZINE • JUNE 7 – JUNE 30, 2024 74