Program Notes
Benedetto Lupo, piano
Saturday, March 12, 2005

About the Artist

Pianist Benedetto Lupo won the Bronze Medal at the Eighth Van Cliburn International Piano Competition.  Since then, Mr. Lupo has continued to dazzle audiences, returning each season to perform in the United States.  He made his New York City recital debut at Alice Tully Hall in December of 1992.  He subsequently won the 1992 Biennial Terence Judd International Award, earning his recital debut at London’s Wigmore Hall in 1993, as well as performances with the Hallé Orchestra.  He returned to the Hallé in June of 1994 to perform Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto.  Of this performance The Manchester Evening News called Mr. Lupo “devastatingly brilliant,” after which he was immediately re-invited to perform under the baton of Kent Nagano.

Mr. Lupo's 2004-2005 season highlights include performances of Schumann with the Phoenix Symphony, Mozart with the Vancouver and Huntsville symphony orchestras and Beethoven Piano Concerto no. 2 and Rondo with Quebec’s esteemed Les Violons du Roy under the direction of Bernard Labadie.  In addition to his Columbus recital, Mr. Lupo will appear in Bryan, Texas, and throughout Europe, including performances in Perugia, Bologna, Milan, Abruzzo, Verona, Liege, and Zagreb.  Mr. Lupo has appeared twice as soloist with the Columbus Symphony Orchestra, in May 1997 and April 2001.

Mr. Lupo’s has critically lauded recordings of Nino Rota’s neo-romantic Concerto Soiree with the Orchestra Sinfonica Siciliana on the NUOVA ERA label and with the RSI Orchestra under Peter Maag, a CD on the ARTS Label, consisting of the complete works for piano and orchestra of Robert Schumann, including the first recording on CD of the piano version of Konzertstück, op. 86. 

In addition to the Van Cliburn (for which he was consequently featured on the Emmy award-winning television documentary "Here to Make Music:  The Eighth Van Cliburn International Piano Competition" and the seven-part television series "Encore!  The Final Round Performances of the Eighth Van Cliburn International Piano Competition," on PBS) and the Terence Judd Awards, Mr. Lupo has won many competitions and awards, including First Prize at the 1980 Alfred Cortot International Piano Competition in Milan.  Mr. Lupo won Second Prize at the 1985 Robert Casadesus Competition in Cleveland, and Third Prize in the 1986 Gina Bachauer Piano Competition in Salt Lake City.  He has since served as a member of the juries of both of these competitions.

Benedetto Lupo appears through arrangement with Herbert Barrett Management, 266 West 37^th Street, 20^th Floor, New York, New York 10018.

Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849)

Polonaise-Fantaisie in A-flat major, op. 61 (composed 1846)

Allegro maestoso

Both Poland and France lay claim to the legacy of Frédéric Chopin.  He was born on February 22, 1810, in Zelazowa Wola, near Warsaw, but left Poland in November 1830, never to return.  From September 1831 through the time of his death on October 17, 1849, he spent most of his time in France.  His father Nicolas had been born in Nancy in 1771, although he came to Warsaw as a teenager looking for work.  He quickly got involved with Tadeusz Koíciuszko’s uprising against foreign domination and found himself unable to return to France after the insurrection was crushed.  In 1806, Nicolas ended up marrying the daughter of an impoverished nobleman; Frédéric was the second of their four children.

From his father, Frédéric inherited a strong Polish identity, which manifested itself musically through a lifetime of composing polonaises.  This aristocratic triple time processional dance became in Chopin’s hands an ongoing expression of personal emotion wrapped in national fervor.  He wrote more than half of his polonaises while still living in Poland, but those written in exile grow increasingly inventive and farther from their model.

By the time of the Polonaise-Fantaisie in A-flat major, op. 61, in 1846, the original dance is barely a memory and the second part of the compound title has taken over.  From the wispy introduction to the contemplative midsection to the raucous coda, there are no fewer than five themes, with harmonies that would not come fully into vogue for several decades.  The Polonaise-Fantaisie was among the final pieces Chopin would complete before his estrangement from the novelist George Sand (Mme. Dudevant) left him unable to compose.  He died in Paris on October 17, 1849.

Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849)

Sonata no. 3 in B minor, op. 58 (composed 1844)

   Allegro maestoso
   Scherzo:  Molto vivace
   Largo
   Finale:  Presto, non tanto

Of Frédéric Chopin’s solo piano works, the Sonata no. 3 in B minor, op. 58, is the longest, written during the summer of 1844.  Like most of the summers George Sand and Chopin shared between 1836 and 1846, this one was spent at her country home in Nohant.  There, Chopin was at leisure to compose rather than teach or socialize.  In May 1844, however, his father died, leaving Chopin ill and distraught.  The Sonata, op. 58 was all he managed to write that summer.

Four sixteenth notes open the Allegro maestoso and give rise to much of what follows, in ways both obvious and subtle.  The second theme, in the manner of one of Chopin’s own nocturnes, is long and heartfelt, with an arpeggiated accompaniment.  It’s this second theme alone that returns in the recap.

The brief Scherzo, placed as the second movement rather than more traditionally as the third, features two breathless outer sections in E-flat major surrounding a dreamy yet contrapuntal central trio section in B major.  The Largo is also in three parts, with the main melody of the outer sections feeling quite operatic; when that melody returns, it has a new gently rocking accompaniment.  In the longer, gentler midsection, right-hand triplets murmur over a soulful theme in the left.  In the spirit of a tarantella, the “A” section of the rondo-form Finale grows more frenzied with each repeat.  An especially virtuosic coda sweeps the sonata to its end.

Claude Debussy(1862-1918)

Estampes (composed 1903)
   Pagodes (Pagodas)
   La soirée dans Grenade (Evening in Granada)
    Jardins sous la pluie (Gardens in the rain)

Many commentators have noted Claude Debussy’s fondness for threes, manifested as sets of three works, as works in three movements, and as individual movements in three parts.  One such sets of three works, and one that marks a particular turning point in his career as a composer of piano music, is Estampes.  Until that composition in 1903, Debussy had not really taken on the genuine challenges of the piano in any sustained manner, certainly not in the ways we now think of as uniquely his.  He was only now beginning to address the piano’s problems of balance and texture, taking advantage of the instrument’s inherent qualities by tending to concentrate sustained melodies to the lower sonorities and lighter figures to the higher.  The rhythmic interplay between those layers grows increasingly striking.  It’s also interesting to recall that Debussy is the composer who said he conceived his piano music as being played on an instrument “without hammers.”

The three movements of Estampes also reflect several of Debussy’s enduring interests:  the musics of Asia and of Spain, depictions of water, and portrayals of nocturnal scenes.  The work also reminds us of Debussy’s lifelong preoccupation with the visual arts, his close friendships with sculptors and painters, and (as is revealed in letters) his at least partially serious regret over having chosen the life of the composer over that of the artist.  The title Estampes translates as “prints” and the work is dedicated to Jacques Émile Blanche (1861-1942), the French painter best known for portraits of literary authors.

In a letter to a friend, Debussy referred to Estampes as sort of an imaginary vacation.  Its first movement, Pagodes (Pagodas), takes us to Asia, the music of which had fascinated Debussy for years.  He regularly attended the series of Universal Expositions in Paris, world’s fairs that familiarized the French public with other cultures.  The Expositions of 1889 and 1900 in particular introduced him to the Javanese gamelan, the evocation of which is clear in Pagodes.  Unlike many other French composers who used Asian sounds as mere exotic spice, Debussy was drawn to the non-Western musical scales and the melodic uses of percussion.

La soirée dans Grenade (Evening in Granada) takes us to Spain.  No less an authority than Manuel de Falla stood in awe of Debussy’s ability to conjure Spain authentically here without actually quoting folk material.  In reality, though, Maurice Ravel might have provided the impulse.  Debussy had borrowed the score of Ravel’s original two-piano version of Habañera following its first performance in 1898, and paid subtle tribute five years later by labeling La soirée dans Grenade as “mouvement de Habañera.”

Enrique Granados (1867-1916)

Works from “Goyescas” (composed 1909-1913)
   Los requiebros (Flattery)
   Quejas, ó La maja y el ruisenor (Laments, or The lady and the nightingale)
   El Pelele (The straw doll)

Although it’s not uncommon for a composer to extract selections from an opera into a suite, the case of Goyescas by Enrique Granados is quite the opposite.  Taking inspiration from paintings by fellow Spaniard Francisco Goya, Granados composed a suite of six piano pieces entitled Goyescas (meaning “Goya-esque”).  So popular did they become that his friend, the American pianist Ernest Schelling urged Granados to expand the suite into a full-blown opera.  Thereby hangs a tale.

Schelling (1876-1939) had already championed Granados by being the first to play his piano music outside of Spain and by arranging for the publication of his music in New York.  It was at Schelling’s Swiss home that Granados completed the opera.  By that time, however, World War I had begun.  So rather than premiering the work at the Paris Opéra, Schelling pulled strings to bring the premiere to New York’s Metropolitan Opera.

Determined to attend that premiere on January 28, 1916, Granados set aside his deathly fear of the ocean and sailed to New York with his wife.  Aside from the ecstatic reception to Goyescas, the composer also managed to present several piano concerts and make some piano roll recordings while in New York.  His fame became such that Woodrow Wilson invited him to play at the White House.  This engagement, however, caused Granados and his wife to miss the scheduled sailing that would have taken them directly home to Spain.  Instead, they took a ship to Liverpool, where they boarded the Sussex, bound for Dieppe.  Crossing the English Channel, the Sussex was torpedoed by a German submarine on March 24, 1916.  Granados was picked up by a lifeboat, but then discovered his wife still struggling in the water.  He dived in to save her, but they both drowned.  The composer was 48 years old.

To Granados, Goya (1746-1828) distilled the essence of the Spanish character in his paintings, and the composer tried to do the same in his piano suite.  Published in two books in 1912 and 1913, Goyescas reflects in musical terms Granados’s fascination with Goya’s treatment of color and the contrasts of mood.  Los requiebros (Flattery) and Quejas, ó La maja y el ruisenor (Laments, or The lady and the nightingale) respectively open and close the first book of the piano suite.  The former takes its inspiration from Goya’s Capricho, Tal para cual, and is a set of variations on a tonadilla by Blas de Laserna (1751-1816).  The latter is a set of variations on a folksong from Valencia, featuring a cadenza that mimics the sound of a nightingale.

El Pelele (The Straw Doll) was written in 1913 and published separately from the suite in 1915.  Because it was also based on the Goya painting of the same name, El Pelele is often performed with the suite.  It was later worked into the opening scene of the opera.

Program notes by Jay Weitz, Consulting Database Specialist for music, OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Dublin, Ohio.  He is a contributing performing arts critic for the weekly alternative newspaper Alive:  Music, Art, and Culture in Columbus (http://www.columbusalive.com).

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