|
Marc Ponthus,
pianist
 Marc Ponthus
pioneered the monographic solo piano recital of leading avantgarde composers
from the second half of the 20th century, devoting entire programs, often
their entire piano music, to composers including Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz
Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis. He has recorded for Neuma Records, Lorelt
Records and Bridge Records. Gramophone Magazine chose his recording of
Boulez’s complete piano work as Editor’s Choice. Ponthus was conductor of
the Eastside Ensemble, the IFCP Ensemble and the
Project Webern Orchestra. He has staged and directed contemporary chamber
operas. Ponthus edited and prefaced a book of essays on the music of Elliott
Carter (Pendragon Press) and produced “Pierre Boulez in Conversation with
Marc Ponthus”, a video filmed at the Deutsche Staat Opera by the award
winning film maker Sylvia Calle.
Ponthus has performed extensively in North America and abroad in series and
festivals. He composes under the “nom de plume” Oữτις. He has combined video
collage in live performances. He was the founder and artistic director of
the Institute and Festival for Contemporary Performance in New York (IFCP).
Ponthus has written and directed numerous short films. His experimental
films “Odyssey to Desire”, “Girl streaminG”, “Pianissimo”, and “if,…the
ruins of narrative” were chosen as official selections at a number of
international film festivals. Ponthus is a recipient of the Tanne
Foundation's Award for achievement in the arts.
 
Notes on the Program
Dr. Jannie
Burdeti
Ludwig van Beethoven:
Piano Sonata No. 29
in B-flat Major,
Op. 106, ("Hammerklavier")
Allegro
Scherzo: Assai vivace
Adagio sostenuto
Introduzione: Largo... Allegro – Fuga: Allegro risoluto
A work of truly Homeric proportions, Beethoven’s
Hammerklavier Sonata demands that both the performer and the
audience have faith in Beethoven’s credo: “What is difficult is
also beautiful, good, great and so forth,” words that the
composer lived by and often repeated. It is a difficult journey
indeed—a Mount Everest for pianists and audiences alike. The
Hammerklavier is the longest of Beethoven’s sonatas and took
him eighteen months to compose, between the years 1817 and 1818.
It marks a return to the four-movement form for the first time
since his Piano Sonata Op. 31, No. 3. In fact, in a letter,
Beethoven even referred to it as a sonata of five movements, at
the time considering the Largo introduction before the
finale as a separate movement. The title Hammerklavier
refers to the German name for the pianoforte. While it was
originally also used for Op. 101, the name is now used only
to refer to Op. 106.
The entire work is brutally concentrated, with everything
evolving out of the opening leap of a third (plus a few
octaves), a low B-flat to a D in the middle of the keyboard.
This third relationship lays down the foundation for the work
and informs the trajectory of the sonata’s entire tonal
structure and all its melodic workings. Another central element
of this piece is the large-scale juxtaposition between B-flat
and B-natural. The struggle between these two tonalities is most
obvious in the second movement, where there is a tense
altercation between the two, until the B-natural is heard in
almost violent (perhaps sardonic) defiance fifteen times
rapidly, after which the B-flat-major theme is heard once again.
However one might interpret this juxtaposition between the two
most unrelated of keys (B-flat major having two flats and B
minor have two sharps), we can infer something about Beethoven’s
own thoughts from one of his sketchbooks, where he wrote, “B
minor, black key.” Alfred Brendel writes that against B minor,
“B-flat major is perceived as the key of luminous energy.” He
further brings to light that the two notes that are common
between the two scales are G and D; these two tonalities act as
“deliverance and consolation” between the two extremes.
A powerful rhythmic fanfare opens the sonata. A sketch
reveals that the original idea contained the words “Vivat, Vivat,
Vivat Rudolphus!” and demonstrates that the dedicatee of the
work, Archduke Rudolf, was clearly in Beethoven’s mind from the
very beginning. It is punctuated by silences, not unlike
Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Immediately following this vigorous
declaration is a contrasting flowing and lyrical section,
motivically derived from the first statement. The development is
highly fugal and modulates according to thirds. For further
reading, Charles Rosen goes into great detail in his seminal
work, The Classical Style in understanding the role of
thirds in this sonata.
The scherzo that follows is, according to Rosen, “a parody of
the first movement.” As much as it is light and ephemeral, it is
in equal portions manic. The trio offers a moment of dark
lyricism in the parallel key of B-flat minor. This scherzo’s
extraordinary sense of compactness gives way to the most
expansive and spacious of slow movements,
“a
mausoleum of the collective suffering of the world,” according
to Wilhelm von Lenz. The opening measure of an ascending A to
C-sharp in octaves was an afterthought—added only later to
clarify, once again, the third relationship. The first section
is a hymn of the deepest solemnity—one must listen to it with
profound stillness and reverence to grasp its monumental arches
and hushed vastness. After a fleeting, transcendental shift to G
major, a taste of the Benedictus from the Missa
solemnis, Beethoven asks the pianist to take off the soft
pedal, and the music opens up into a Bellini-like operatic aria
that seems to search the heavens, intensified with trills and
melismata. A third section descends into deep, resonant bells,
in D major, a dialogue between the resonant bass and the
soprano, while the left hand accompanies between the two
extremes. A sudden stilling of the atmosphere marks the
commencement of the development section, which traverses a chain
of descending thirds. A full recapitulation then ensues, but it
begins now enlaced in a halo of thirty-second notes, as in the
variation movements from the Piano Sonatas Op. 109 and Op. 111.
The most heartbreaking climax of the movement is reserved for
the coda, after which a shortened version of the opening is
heard, followed by a resolution, not in spirit, but tonally,
ppp and in F-sharp major.
The introduction to the last movement begins with Fs in broken
octaves, a semitone below the preceding F-sharp-major chord, and
almost prelude-like. Charles Rosen calls it “The Birth of
Counterpoint, or The Creation of a Fugue.” One literally hears a
fugue coming into being, primordial, and eventually intensifying
until it breaks out into trills. The fugue proper begins with a
leap in the left hand, a third plus an octave, a direct
reference to the opening of the first movement. William
Kinderman writes that the fugue “seems not to affirm a higher,
more perfect or serene world of eternal harmonies, as in Bach’s
works, but to confront an open universe.” The subject of the
fugue, in all its elemental force, is the longest in the history
of fugues and, as Vladimir Feltsman points out, consists of 108
notes. This number in itself is highly significant and symbolic
in both nature and in mystical traditions. The fugue is massive,
in seven sections (another significant number), and nearly
encyclopedic in its use of fugal techniques. One hears the
extensive subject in inversion (upside down), retrograde
(backwards), augmentation (slower), diminution (faster), and
stretto (coming in one on top of the other). The retrograde is
especially noteworthy, as it is in the “black key” of B minor
and set apart in character. A Palestrina-like D-major episode is
another moment of marked contrast, evoking Beethoven’s setting
of “in nomine Domini” from the Benedictus of the Missa
solemnis, as noted by William Kinderman and Jürgen Uhde.
Throughout his life, Beethoven resented the overwhelming
popularity of his Septet, Op. 20. What was praised as
“beautiful” was no longer of interest to him—he sought something
deeper, something closer to “truth.” Kinderman suggests that,
like the Eroica Symphony, the Hammerklavier draws
inspiration from the Prometheus myth. As Prometheus was forced
to suffer due to his gift to humanity, Kinderman writes that
“the Hammerklavier Sonata implies an analogous narrative
progression of heroic struggle and suffering, leading to a
rebirth of creative possibilities.”
Karlheinz Stockhausen:
Klavierstück
X
“I think there have always been different kinds of artists:
those who were mainly mirrors of their time, and then a very few
who had a visionary power, whom the Greeks called augurs: those
who were able to announce the next stage in the development of
mankind, really listen into the future, and prepare the people
for what was to come.” —Karlheinz Stockhausen
Karlheinz Stockhausen, one of the most influential and enigmatic
composers of the past century, was truly a visionary that carved
his own path. Born in 1928 near Cologne in Germany, his mother
was admitted to a mental asylum when he was four years old, and
when he was seventeen his father was killed in World War II. He
studied piano and music pedagogy at university, but only in his
last year did he discover his desire to compose. An important
member of the influential Darmstadt School of composers, he was
extremely involved in electronic music and later founded the
Stockhausen Courses in Kürten, which run to this day. His
website states that “Stockhausen’s entire oeuvre can be
classified as ‘Spiritual Music.’” He believed that he was from
the planet Sirius, and when he died in December of 2007, he was
survived by two wives. His largest composition is Licht: Die
sieben Tage der Woche (“Light: The Seven Days of the Week”),
a twenty-nine-hour opera in seven parts, composed between
1977 and 2002, which includes not only numerous singers and
orchestra with synthesizer, but also a string quartet that is to
perform in a helicopter situated above the concert hall.
Out of his large output of 376 compositions, fourteen are for
the piano. These works are none other than his Klavierstücke, of
which he once said, “They are my drawings.” What originally
started as four pieces for piano, written in 1952 during his
studies with Olivier Messiaen, turned into a much larger cycle.
Stockhausen planned for twenty-one pieces that would be
organized in sets of 4 + 6 + 1 + 5 + 3 + 2, and where each set
would have a cyclical or unifying element, but ultimately, he
stopped after nineteen. After he completed the second set of six
pieces (Klavierstücke VI to X) in 1961 (after numerous
revisions) and the single Klavierstück XI in 1957, he went on a
hiatus from these works. It was not until 1979 that he resumed
writing eight more pieces, now abandoning the idea of the
original sets and also the medium altogether. His Klavierstücke
XII, XIII, and XIV are part of his cyclical opera, Licht,
while XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII, and XIX are electronic music for the
synthesizer—an instrument he often hailed as the successor of
the piano.
From the onset, Klavierstück X bursts into an exciting and
climactic opening, presenting all of its ideas amalgamated
together. Stockhausen does not indicate a tempo and only
instructs the performer to play the whole work “as fast as
possible” while keeping the duration of the notes proportionate.
As a result, the performance time for the piece varies widely.
The sonic landscape of Klavierstück X is filled with tone
clusters and cluster glissandos (for the latter, fingerless wool
gloves are often used by performers). The complexity of events
happening simultaneously lessens over time, and as the dust
settles from the initial outburst, each idea is separately
explored and concentrated on. Musicologist Ed Chang describes
the piece as a “big initial explosion of clusters and glissandi,
followed by a series of smaller explosions, each with their own
substructure.” Stockhausen brings about the idea of contrast by
opening with disorder, and with time, as the piece progresses,
the musical ideas become more organized. One way this is
achieved is by repeating certain character elements that become
more familiar to our ears with time. Clusters and glissandi
clusters are the focus point and are developed in short sections
that are interspersed with long silences. Those lengthy reposes
play an important structural role and are filled with the
harmonic resonance from the previous sounds, adding
kaleidoscopic colors to each moment of stillness. Throughout
this serial work, Stockhausen uses different variables, such as
dynamics, range, order versus disorder, and duration and
character of chords, to develop his ideas. Almost every one of
these variables is organized in groups of seven (e.g., the piece
contains seven possible dynamics: ppp, pp, p,
mf, f, ff, and fff). As the work
reaches its conclusion, the pitch range gradually expands
vertically and leaves the listener with one last isolated
cluster, a faint memory of the initial explosion.copyright© Foundation for Chinese Performing Arts
 |
查詢: 中華表演藝術基金會會長譚嘉陵, 電話: 781-259-8195
