"Hands Together for Opera"
Opera? For piano four hands?? It has been somewhat forgotten that the medium of piano four hands was at one time the most popular - and practical - way for a music lover to experience a favourite piece of music. In the 19th century up through the early 20th century, virtually every new piece of orchestral, operatic, and even chamber music was also published as a piano duet score that could be purchased and played at home. The Prelude to Bizet’s opera Carmen, which opens our program, is taken from one such an arrangement of the entire opera that was published ca. 1880.
The process of transcribing music, especially orchestral pieces, for piano is one that I rather enjoy. I get absorbed discovering the inner details and workings of a piece and am fascinated how the result often reveals new aspects of the music. These five Puccini aria transcriptions are recent projects of mine and are being given their first public performance this evening.
Lisa and I are amid an on-going collaboration with Toronto-based composer Elizabeth Raum. We are creating a work for four hands and narrator that retells the story of Carmen, paring away Bizet’s additions and returning to the original source novella by Prosper Mérimée. Stay tuned for more information as this project develops. In the meantime, we present Raum’s Sonata for Piano Four Hands as an introduction to her energetic, richly textured and approachable style. There is a charming programmatic element to this work, which you may read about in the composer’s own notes reprinted on the back of this page.
The American composer Samuel Barber wrote Souvenirs as a suite of dance pieces that nostalgically look back to the elegant style of high-society New York City of the 1920s. Originally composed as piano duets, they later were transcribed for orchestra and used as music for a ballet scenario. The Pas de deux is tuneful and romantic yet tinged with melancholy. The music floats away at the end, as if to express a yearning left unfulfilled.
España is a colourful orchestral showpiece by French composer Emmanuel Chabrier. Written in 1883, it was inspired by a 6-month tour of Spain Chabrier took with his wife the previous year. The work was encored at its first performance and made Chabrier instantly famous. While his contemporaries heaped praise upon España, the modest composer routinely described it simply as “a piece in F Major”. This piano duet version was made by Chabrier’s composer colleague André Messager and masterfully recreates the brilliance and dazzling excitement of the original. –Gregory Millar
Sonata for Piano Four Hands
by Elizabeth Raum
Commissioned by the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music and dedicated to Jean-Paul Bierny and Fred Chaffee
Sonata for Piano Four Hands was commissioned by the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music for performance by Bernadene Blaha and Kevin Fitz-Gerald. The first movement is based on two motives: the first, a triplet figure heard in the primo part twice before being answered by descending thirds in the secondo part. The insistence of these statements being passed back and forth establishes a tension between the two with the triplets expanding into a driving ostinato accompanying the augmentation of the descending thirds which develops into a theme. The roles are soon reversed with the primo part taking up the theme accompanied by the ostinato in the bass. Back and forth they argue, ascending and descending, until a truce is finally reached. Here, a conciliatory calm prevails, more romantic in style, although the underlying tension still persists punctuated by flashes of the original motives. Declarations from each part pervade this middle section as the music grows more and more intense and angry until we have returned to the original conflict. But the battle seems to have spent itself and the movement ends quietly as if exhausted by strife.
The second movement, the “Geneva Variations”, so named for the granddaughter of the composer, is based on a song that the three year old made up herself. Upon hearing the tune, the composer was so taken with it that she decided to use the melody as the theme in her set of variations. This movement is programmatic as may be surmised by the use of the Dies Irae in the first and last variations. The theme represents the child, or the beginning, but even in childhood there is the shadow of eventual death and this is established in Variation 1, (“Foreboding,”), where the Dies Irae is woven into the secondo part, and again in the last variation. But in between, there’s the body of life starting with childhood (Var. 2 “Innocence”), then youth with its romances, adventures, and difficulties (Var. 3, “Rebellion”) and then parenthood and children (Var. 4, “Carousel”) and finally in the fugue (Var. 5, “Fugue”) the realization of death again. However, within this variation are the recurring melodies of happy times, memories of the events of life. The program is more implied than specific, but the composer felt this inspiration upon hearing the theme sung by one so young.
The Geneva Variations segue into the third movement in A Major, the key of hope, called “Hymn to the Children.” The anxieties of the previous movements are swept away by a passionate declaration of the joy of life.