CLAYTON
STEPHENSON 2022 GILMORE YOUNG ARTIST
A native of Brooklyn, NY, Clayton Stephenson’s love for music is apparent in his charisma, expressive power, and ease at the instrument. Even as his concert calendar expands, he is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in economics at Harvard and a master’s degree in piano performance at the New England Conservatory.
Stephenson started piano lessons at age seven, later joining the Juilliard Outreach Music Advancement Program. At ten, he began Juilliard’s pre-college program, where he studied with Matti Raekallio, Hung-Kuang Chen and Ernest Barretta. His accolades along the way have been numerous. In addition to being the first Black finalist at the 2022 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, he was a 2017 U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts and a Young Scholar of the Lang Lang International Music Foundation. Recent and upcoming highlights of Clayton’s career include appearances with the Calgary Philharmonic, and the Fort Worth, Louisville, Lansing and North Carolina Symphony orchestras; recitals at the Phillips Collection Concert Series in Washington, DC, Foundation Louis Vuitton Auditorium in Paris, Colour of Music Festival, Ravinia Festival, The Gilmore International Piano Festival, and Kissinger Sommer Festival. He has been featured on NPR, WUOL, and WQXR, and appeared in the “Grammy Salute to Classical Music” Concert at Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium.
ALEXANDER SCRIABIN (1875-1915)
Sonata No. 4 in F-sharp Major, Op. 30
Composed 1903
When Scriabin entered Moscow Conservatory in 1888, he quickly became one of its foremost pianists, second only to Rachmaninoff. An elegant and charismatic pianist, after a stint on the faculty, Scriabin devoted himself to composition and to performing throughout Europe, traveling as far as New York City. Conductor Serge Koussevitzky observed that “depending on his mood and the circumstances,” he never played a piece the same way twice.
Today’s sonata was among a flurry of compositions written in summer 1903, spent in the countryside near Moscow with his wife and children. There he began an affair with a young admirer, which, musicologist Jonathan Powell suggests, may account for the intense sensuality that pervades this work. It demonstrates all the characteristics of fin-de-siècle hyper-Romanticism: on-the-edge passion, ultra-chromatic harmony, and Wagnerian “endless melodies” set in perpetual variation. His unusually detailed dynamic markings provide “signposts to the psyche,” Powell notes. His mysticism found voice in his music, as expressed in a poem about a distant star he wrote for this sonata: “Joyfully I fly upward toward you. Freely I take wing. Mad dance, godlike play...I draw near in my longing.“
The first movement, full of yearning and desire, demonstrates Scriabin's admiration of Wagner. Surely Scriabin had played some of Liszt's many piano transcriptions from Wagner's operas.
The second movement, marked Prestissimo volando (very fast, flying), is indebted to Chopin in its spirit and style. In his early biography of Scriabin (1916), Leonid Sabaneyev recalled the composer’s instructions: “It must be a flight at the speed of light, straight towards the sun, into the sun!” The movement starts playfully in a scampering 12/8 meter, gradually builds, and ends in an explosion of joy in music marked focosamente, giubiloso (fiery and jubilant).
Over a century later, Scriabin’s music continues to hold its mesmerizing power. Among his devotees is Gilmore Piano Master Garrick Ohlsson, who writes in his Confessions of a Scriabin Player that when he plays his music, the composer “possesses me, taking me into his strange, alchemical world.” When the performance is over, Ohlsson writes, “My heart is beating faster...I have become intoxicated... as if I’m being controlled by something very powerful outside myself.” Scriabin would have been pleased.
ABOUT THE
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Chris McGuire
ARTIST
J.S. BACH (1685-1750)
/A
M. HESS (1890-1965)
"Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" from Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben, BMV 147 (Heart and Mouth and Deed and Life)
Composed 1723
Today’s work is built on a chorale tune by Johann Schop, composed in the 1660s as part of the growing body of Lutheran hymns. Bach used it in a deeply reverent cantata that speaks of preparation and longing for Jesus’s birth – “Jesus remains my joy,” the words read – first in Weimar (1716) and then in an expanded version for soloists, chorus and orchestra (1723) in Leipzig, where he had been newly named Kapellmeister (Director of Music) at St. Thomas’s Church, a prestigious post. He added
his own distinctive countermelody to the familiar tune.
Today’s version was arranged for solo piano in 1926 by acclaimed British pianist Dame Myra Hess. She redraws Bach’s choral-orchestral setting for one pianist at one keyboard: the left hand provides a supporting bass; the right incorporates both Bach’s countermelody and the long-note chorale tune, which appears first in the treble and then in inner voices.
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827)
Sonata No. 23, Op 57 "Appassionata"
Composed 1805
In an 1802 letter to his brothers, now called the Heiligenstadt Testament, Beethoven describes what he called his “truly wretched existence... when someone standing next to me heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing or someone heard a shepherd singing and again I heard nothing.” Such experiences, he wrote, “brought me close to despair; a little more of that and I would have been at the point of ending my life. The only thing that held me back was my art. Oh, it seemed to me impossible to leave the world until I had produced all the works that I felt the urge to compose.”
The “Appassionata” gives full rein to his grief and despair. Gilmore Piano Master Sir András Schiff
suggests it might be better called “Tragic.” One alarmed contemporary reported that Beethoven’s music had become enormously difficult: “incomprehensible, abrupt, and dark.” Another called Op. 57 a “volcanic explosion.” The formidable technical and interpretive challenges that it presents moved it well beyond the reach of Vienna’s many enthusiastic amateurs. A virtuoso pianist himself, Beethoven was pushing the limits of the rapidly developing fortepiano to match the scope of his musical vision, exploring its greater dynamic contrasts, wider variety of timbres, and bigger keyboard range.
In one of the most arresting moments in all piano literature, the first movement begins with a falling
pianissimo arpeggio outlining an F minor triad, to be played as softly as possible. The same motive repeats a half-step above, even more softly, questioning and searching. Massive chords destroy the mystery, and we’re off in a torrent of notes, with sotto voce passages juxtaposed to hammering outbursts. He “first fills the soul with sweet melancholy,” a Parisian critic wrote in 1810, “and then shatters it by a mass of barbarous chords. He seems to harbor together doves and crocodiles.”
Beethoven scholar Lewis Lockwood considers the chorale-like slow movement, in the richly comforting key of D-flat major, to be an emotional oasis between storms. A tumbling scale leads directly into the finale, announced with agitated chords, which give way to non-stop motion. Dramatic pauses signal that the end
SERGEI PROKOFIEV (1891-1953)
is near, but Beethoven is not yet finished. In a new section, marked Presto, scales and arpeggios race up and down the keyboard. Three emphatic chords bring our journey to a close. Symphonic in sound and scale, the sonata retains its tragic power to the end.
“As a man, he found himself imprisoned by deafness,” Lockwood writes. “As an artist, he broke free, continuing on a trajectory marked by significant acts of renewal and stages of stylistic transformation... If, over the years, he ever took out the Heiligenstadt Testament from its secret drawer and read it over, he must have understood that it expressed both his despair and his deeply rooted resolution to endure.” His achievement marks one of the triumphs of the human spirit.
Sonata No. 7 in B-Flat Major, Op. 83
Composed 1939-1942
June 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Two months later Prokofiev was evacuated from Moscow, along with other important artists. Because of his music written in support of the war effort, he would be named “Honored Artist of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic,” a coveted achievement. In his years away Prokofiev created a stream of chamber music and piano pieces not specifically patriotic, but intensely expressive. Among them was his trilogy of “War Sonatas,” all begun in 1939: Op. 82 (1940), Op. 83 (1942), and Op. 84 (1944). Prokofiev, a virtuoso pianist himself, premiered
the first in a performance broadcast on the radio, Sviatoslav Richter the second, and Emil Gilels the third. The Op. 83 premiere was a triumph. Prokofiev had told his wife Mira Mendelson that the sonata would be “restless and storm like.” He was right. Its drastically conflicting moods vividly express the turmoil and anxiety of war. In his memoirs, Richter wrote that the work plunged the listener “into the anxiously threatening atmosphere of a world that has lost its balance. Chaos and uncertainty reign...But this does not mean that what we lived by before
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thereby ceases to exist. We continue to feel and love. Now the full range of human emotions bursts forth . . . In the tremendous struggle that this involves, we find the strength to affirm the irrepressible life force." The sonata was awarded the Stalin Prize. The first movement, aptly marked Allegro inquieto, is in a five-part structure (ABABA). The first section is agitated, even menacing, its jagged theme in octaves, its bass pounding out dissonant chords. The introspective B section features a languid theme marked espressivo e dolente (expressive and sorrowful). The second movement, Andante
caloroso (in a walking tempo, warm), creates a kind of dream world. Its ingratiating opening melody is gently spiced with dissonance; its middle section is passionate, unsettled, wildly unhappy. The opening theme returns, and the movement concludes with a soft, yet ominous, tolling bell. The last movement, a frenzied toccata marked precipitato, is characterized by a relentless three-note figure hammered out in bass octaves on the same pitches (B-flat/D-flat) of Chopin’s Funeral March. The movement’s asymmetrical 7/8 meter draws on the Balkan rhythms so favored by Bartok. The sonata ends in a wild crash of B-flat major chords.
V. YOUMANS (1898-1946) arr /ART TATUM (1909-1956)
Tea for Two
Composed 1924
Tea for Two began its life as a romantic ballad in the 1925 Broadway musical No, No Nanette, music by Vincent Youmans, lyrics by Irving Caesar. An intimate expression of “twoness,” it tells the story of a couple in love. “Picture you upon my knee, just tea for two and two for tea, and me for you and you for me alone.” Art Tatum, the ultimate virtuoso in a world of remarkable jazz pianists, chose it for his first solo recording in 1933. It was a hit. In versions fast or slow, upbeat or moody, the tune has found an enduring voice in performances by Doris Day, Ella Fitzgerald, the Emmet Cohen Trio, and as far afield as the Soviet Union, where Dimitri Shostakovich arranged it for orchestra. Even Horowitz played it — until he heard Tatum.
A contemporary described Tatum’s
1931 performance in New York City: “Just as suddenly as he gave them the melody he was out of it again, but never far enough away from it to render it unrecognizable...The right hand was playing phrases which none of the listeners had imagined existed, while the left hand alternated between a rock solid beat and a series of fantastic arpeggios which sounded like two hands in one ...Just when it seemed that he had surely lost his way, Tatum came in again with a series of quick changing harmonies that brought him back smack on the beat. His technique was astounding.” Pianist Fats Waller sat in stunned silence. One night when he saw Tatum enter a club where he was performing, Waller announced to the crowd: “Ladies and gentlemen, I play the piano, but God is in the house tonight.”
GEORGE GERSHWIN (1898-1937)
Rhapsody in Blue
Composed 1924
Few events were more shocking to the American musical world than the sudden death of George Gershwin of a brain tumor at age thirty-eight, his biographer Richard Crawford writes. By age twenty he had become a sought-after composer of Broadway shows and by thirty America’s most famous composer of concert music and a leading songwriter.
Gershwin was only twenty-six when dance band leader Paul Whiteman asked him to write a concerto. Crawford notes that Whiteman’s goal was “to demonstrate that the rhythmically vivacious dance music called jazz...could be elevated by the syncopated ‘symphonic’ arrangements” in which his orchestra excelled. The concerto, called Rhapsody in Blue, was premiered at New York’s Aeolian Hall on February 12, 1924, with the composer at the piano, in a concert billed “An Experiment in Modern Music.” It was a smash, as popular with critics and audience as it was profitable for the composer, earning Gershwin a quarter of a million dollars in the days before income tax. He became the man who brought jazz into the concert hall, blending those irresistible new sounds with the classical tradition.
Because the Rhapsody had been written in such a hurry – Whiteman gave Gershwin only six weeks – he asked his chief arranger Ferde Grofé to provide the instrumentation. It was originally scored for piano and jazz orchestra; in 1942 Grofé arranged it for full orchestra.
Few openings are more striking than the opening solo, rising chromatically over two octaves from a low F to a high B-flat, hitting most of the notes on the way, and played by the clarinet, the voice of Klezmer music. The work is indeed a rhapsody “in blue,” featuring the bent notes so beloved by blues singers and jazz musician. Blue notes are also heard in frequently repeated syncopated chords, their top notes bouncing between two adjacent pitches. It is aptly named “rhapsody,” a genre open to the composer’s imagination with no expected structure. Large in scale, it is structured in sections, although with frequent changes of tempo, key, and character. Its Andantino slow section features one of Gershwin’s most compelling melodies; in other sections the music swings in bustling urban rhythms that are irresistible. It is a true concerto. Gershwin knew his Bach, Beethoven, and Liszt and honors the concerto principle: an equal relationship between soloist and orchestra, set in dialogue and in opposition, each sharing the spotlight.
“The unique outlook and talent behind that music made Gershwin irreplaceable when death claimed him before his thirty-ninth birthday,” Crawford writes, “an American composer considered ‘young’ and ‘promising’ by his contemporaries, and destined by fate to remain ever so.”
© 2023 Zaide Pixley, PhD Professor Emerita, Kalamazoo College
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