VILDE FRANG, violin MICHAIL LIFITS, piano - San Francisco ...

presents
VILDE FRANG, violin
MICHAIL LIFITS, piano
Friday, March 15, 2013, 8pm
San Francisco Conservatory of Music Concert Hall
MOZART Sonata No. 24 in F Major
for Violin and Piano, K. 376
Allegro
Andante
Rondo: Allegretto grazioso
FAURÉ Sonata No. 1 in A Major
for Violin and Piano, Opus 13
Allegro molto
Andante
Allegro vivo
Allegro quasi presto
INTERMISSION
BRAHMS Three Hungarian Dances for Violin and Piano
from 21 Hungarian Dances for Piano, WoO 1
(Arr. Joseph Joachim) No. 11 in D minor
(Arr. Fritz Kreisler) No. 17 in F-sharp minor
(Arr. Paul Klengel) No. 2 in D minor
PROKOFIEV Sonata No. 2 in D Major
for Violin and Piano, Opus 94
Moderato
Scherzo: Presto
Andante
Allegro con brio
This recital is supported in part by a grant from The Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation.
The Young Masters Series is supported in part by a generous gift from the estate
of Maxine D. Wallace.
Vilde Frang is represented by Opus 3 Artists, 470 Park Avenue South, 9th Floor North,
New York, NY 10016 www.opus3artists.com
Artist Profiles
San Francisco Performances presents Vilde
Frang and Michail Lifits in their San Francisco
recital debut.
Vilde Frang
Vilde Frang was unanimously awarded the
2012 Credit Suisse Young Artist Award and
made her debut with the Vienna Philharmonic
under Bernard Haitink at the 2012 Lucerne
Summer Music Festival.
Noted particularly for her superb musical
expression as well as her well-developed virtuosity,
Vilde has established herself as one
of the leading young violinists of her generation
since she was engaged by Mariss Jansons
at the age of twelve to perform with Oslo
Philharmonic Orchestra.
Highlights among her forthcoming and
recent engagements include performances
with Mahler Chamber Orchestra, Kremerata
Baltica, Academy of St. Martin in the Fields,
Philharmonia Orchestra, Symphonieorchester
des Bayerischen Rundfunks, Konzerthausorchester
Berlin, HR-Sinfonieorchester
Frankfurt, Tonhalle-Orchester Zurich, Russian
National Orchestra, Orchestre de Paris,
the NHK Symphony in Tokyo and Orchestre
Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo, with conductors
including Ivan Fischer, Paavo Järvi,
Vladimir Ashkenazy, Mariss Jansons, David
Zinman, Sir Neville Marriner, Esa-Pekka Salonen
and Yuri Termirkanov.
She appears as a recitalist and chamber musician
at festivals in Schleswig-Holstein, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern,
Rheingau, Lockenhaus,
Gstaad, Verbier and Lucerne. Amongst her
collaborators were Gidon Kremer, Yuri Bash-
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Photo : Marco Borggreve

Photo : Felix Broede
met, Martha Argerich, Julian Rachlin, Leif Ove
Andsnes, Sol Gabetta and Maxim Vengerov,
and together with Anne-Sophie Mutter she has
toured in Europe and the US, playing Bach’s
Double Concerto with Camerata Salzburg.
After her 2007 debut with London Philharmonic
Orchestra, Vilde was re-engaged for a
concert with the orchestra and Vladimir Jurowski
at the Royal Festival Hall in the 2009
season, followed by a recital at Wigmore
Hall. Her concerto recording debut as EMI
Classics’ Young Artist of the Year 2010 was
greeted with acclaim by critics throughout
the world and received the Edison Klassiek
Award and a Classic BRIT Award for Best
Newcomer. Her second disc, a recital recording
with her duo partner Michail Lifits,
received a Gramophone Award Nomination,
Diapason Magazine’s “Diapason d‘Or” and
the Echo Klassik Award. Her most recent release,
featuring concertos by Tchaikovsky
and Carl Nielsen, received the Deutsche
Schallplattenpreis and was named Editor’s
Choice by Gramophone Magazine.
Born in 1986 in Norway, Vilde has studied
at the Barratt Due Musikkinstitutt in Oslo,
with Kolja Blacher at Musikhochschule Hamburg
and Ana Chumachenco at the Kronberg
Academy. She plays a Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume
violin lent by the Anne-Sophie Mutter
Freundeskreis Stiftung.
Michail Lifits
Michail Lifits, already compared to the legendary
Wilhelm Kempff and praised for “his
inspirational tone and his wise maturity”, as
well as for “the breathtaking beauty of his
playing”, has increasingly captured public
attention since his debut at the age of 13 with
Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto.
Winner of the 57th Ferruccio Busoni International
Piano Competition in Bolzano (2009),
he had already collected first prizes in other international
competitions in Italy and the USA,
such as Pianello val Tidone (2003), Treviso
(2004), Monza (2006) and Hilton Head (2009).
Solo engagements have brought Michail
Lifits to Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall
and Lincoln Center in New York, the Auditorium
du Louvre in Paris, to the Teatro della
Pergola in Florence, the NCPA in Beijing,
the Tonhalle in Zurich and the Sala Verdi in
Milan. He is a regular guest at international
festivals in France, Germany, Poland, Italy
and the United States, including the Festival
d’Auvers-sur-Oise, the Annecy Festival, the
Kissinger Sommer, Rheingau Music Festival,
the Ruhr Piano Festival, Festspiele Mecklenburg-Vorpommern
and the Chopin Festival in
Duzhniki Zdroj. Among his appearances with
Orchestra he has played with the Hilton Head
Symphony, the Thüringen Philharmonie
Gotha, the Orchestra del Teatro Verdi di Trieste
and the Orchestra Sinfonica Siciliana in
Palermo. In 2011 he made his debut with the
Deutsche Symphonie-Orchester Berlin (DSO).
The same year saw his debut in London’s
Wigmore Hall, in the `Keyboard Trust Prizewinners
Series’ which exhibits the cream of this international
foundation’s new talent. Critics described
his performance as “Perfection itself.”
Since 2011, Michail Lifits has been under contract
with the classical label DECCA/Universal
Classics. In 2012 DECCA released his debut CD
dedicated to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Michail Lifits was born in 1982 in Tashkent,
Uzbekistan. He studied with Karl-Heinz Kammerling
and Bernd Goetzke at the University
for Music and Drama in Hanover and with
Boris Petrushansky at the International Piano
Academy Incontri col Maestro in Imola (Italy).
Program Notes
Sonata No. 24 in F Major
for Violin and Piano, K. 376
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Born January 27, 1756, Salzburg
Died December 5, 1791, Vienna
In June 1781, at the age of 25, Mozart broke
away from the two authority figures in his
life—his father and Archbishop Colloredo of
Salzburg—and set out to establish himself in
Vienna. His first task was to make himself
financially independent, and to that end he
took students and performed widely in Vienna.
But Mozart wished to succeed as a composer,
and the sources of income for a composer
were more complex. A composer could
make significant income from an opera commission,
but Mozart was also aware of a quite
different market: the increasing number of
amateur musicians in Vienna who needed
music to perform. His first publication in Vienna
was written not on commission from a
member of the nobility but for talented amateur
performers: during the summer of 1781,
while he was at work on The Abduction from
the Seraglio, Mozart wrote four sonatas for
keyboard and violin, combined them with
two sonatas written earlier, and published
the set that November as his Opus 2.
These six sonatas attracted immediate attention,
and one early reviewer wrote about
them at length: “These sonatas are the only
ones of this kind. Rich in new ideas and in
evidences of the great musical genius of their
author. Very brilliant and suited to the instrument.
At the same time the accompaniment
of the violin is so artfully combined with the
clavier part that both instruments are kept
constantly on the alert; so that these sonatas
require just as skillful a player on the violin
as on the clavier.” This reviewer makes at an
important point. Earlier sonatas for this combination
of instruments had essentially been
keyboard sonatas with the accompaniment
of violin, and in fact Mozart’s description
on the title page of the new set seems to preserve
that identity: “Six Sonatas for Clavier
or Pianoforte, with the Accompaniment of
a Violin.” The reviewer, however, notes that
these are in fact duo-sonatas (“the only ones
of this kind”) and that the musical duties are
divided evenly here (“require just as skillful
a player on the violin as on the clavier”). The
piano may retain a measure of primacy in
these sonatas, but Mozart is well on his ways
to re-defining the violin sonata and giving
the violin a much more important role.
The Allegro opens with three bright chords,
and the whole movement is characterized by
energy and thrust. The piano introduces the
more restrained second idea, and all seems
set for a standard sonata-form movement,
but Mozart springs a surprise at the development.
Rather than developing these themes,
he instead seizes on a brief turn-figure from
the end of the exposition and builds the development
on this. He brings back his principal
themes in the recapitulation and closes
the movement out quietly on the turn-figure.
The Andante is remarkable for the range of
its sounds, for it seems in constant, murmuring
motion. Some of this is the sound of
quietly-pulsing sixteenths that runs through
the accompaniment, but Mozart also has
both instruments trilling at length here. The
concluding Rondo gets off to an elegant start
(Mozart’s marking grazioso is exactly right),
but this attractive tune is interrupted by a
number of varied and substantial episodes
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efore the movement makes its way to the
nicely-understated close.
Violin Sonata in A Major, Opus 13
Gabriel Fauré
Born May 13, 1845, Pamiers
Died November 4, 1924, Paris
One of Fauré’s students, the composer Florent
Schmitt, described his teacher as an “unintentional,
unwitting revolutionary.” The
term “revolutionary” hardly seems to apply
to a composer best-known for his gentle Requiem,
songs, and chamber works. But while
Fauré was no heaven-storming radical bent
on undoing the past, his seemingly-quiet
music reveals enough rhythmic, harmonic,
and melodic surprises to justify Schmitt’s
claim. The Violin Sonata in A Major, written
in the summer of 1876 while Fauré was vacationing
in Normandy, is dedicated to his
friend, the violinist Paul Viardot. Following
its first performance, the sonata was praised
by Fauré’s teacher Saint-Saëns for its “formal
novelty, quest, refinement of modulation, curious
sonorities, use of the most unexpected
rhythms…charm [and]…the most unexpected
touches of boldness.” This is strong praise,
but close examination of the sonata shows
that Saint-Saëns was right.
One of the most interesting features of the
opening Allegro molto occurs in the accompaniment,
which is awash in a constant flow of
eighth-notes. The first theme appears immediately
in the piano, and already that instrument
is weaving the filigree of accompanying
eighth-notes that will shimmer throughout
this movement: one of the challenges for performers
is to provide tonal variety within this
continual rustle of sound. The movement is
in sonata form, and the descending second
theme, introduced by the violin, is accompanied
by a murmur of triplets from the piano.
The movement concludes on a fiery restatement
of the opening theme.
Distinguishing the Andante is its rhythmic
pulse: a 9/8 meter throbs throughout the
movement, though Fauré varies its effect by
syncopating the accents within the measure.
The third movement, a scherzo marked Allegro
vivo, goes like a rocket. Fauré chooses
not the expected triple meter of the traditional
scherzo but a time signature of 2/8, an
extremely short rhythmic unit, particularly
when his metronome marking asks for 152
quarter-notes per minute. He further complicates
the rhythm by writing in quite short
phrases, so that the effect is of short phrases
rapidly spit out, then syncopated by sharp
off-beats. A lovely, graceful trio gives way to
the opening material, and the movement suddenly
vanishes in a shower of pizzicato notes.
The tempo marking for the finale—Allegro
quasi presto—seems to suggest a movement
similar to the third, but despite its rapid tempo
the last movement flows easily and majestically.
Or at least it seems to, for here Fauré
complicates matters harmonically. The piano
opens in the home key—A major—but the
violin seems always to prefer that key’s relative
minor, F-sharp minor, and the resulting
harmonic uncertainty continues throughout
the movement until the sonata ends in unequivocal
A major.
To emphasize this sonata’s originality may
have the unhappy effect of making the music
sound cerebral, interesting only for its technical
novelty. That is hardly the case. Fauré’s
Sonata in A Major is one of the loveliest violin
sonatas of the late nineteenth century, full of
melodic, graceful, and haunting music.
Hungarian Dances
No. 2 in D minor
No. 11 in D minor
No. 17 in F-sharp minor
Johannes Brahms
Born May 7, 1833, Hamburg
Died April 3, 1897, Vienna
Brahms had a life-long fascination with
Hungarian music, which for him meant
gypsy music. As a boy in Hamburg, he first
encountered it from the refugees fleeing revolutions
in Hungary for a new life in America,
and he was introduced to gypsy fiddle tunes
at the age of 20 while on tour with the Hungarian
violinist Eduard Reményi (it was on
that tour that Brahms began his lifelong
collection of Hungarian folk-tunes). Over a
period of years, he wrote a number of what
he called Hungarian Dances for piano fourhands
and played them for (and with) his
friends. He published ten of these in 1869
and another eleven in 1880, and they proved
a huge success. There was a ready market
for this sort of music that could be played at
home by talented amateurs, and these fiery,
fun pieces carried Brahms’ name around the
world (they also inspired the Slavonic Dances
of his friend Antonín Dvořák)
In the Hungarian Dances, Brahms took
csardas tunes and–preserving their themes
and characteristic freedom–wrote his own
music based on them. To his publisher,
Brahms described these dances as “genuine
gypsy children, which I did not beget, but
merely brought up with bread and milk.” It
has been pointed out, however, that Brahms
did not begin with authentic peasant tunes
(which Bartók and Kodály would track down
in the twentieth century), but with those
tunes as they had been spiffed-up for popular
consumption by the “gypsy” bands that
played in the cafés and on the streetcorners
of Vienna. Brahms would not have cared
about authenticity. He loved these tunes–
with their fiery melodies, quick shifts of
mood, and rhythmic freedom–and he successfully
assimilated that style, particularly
its atmosphere of wild gypsy fiddling (in fact,
he assimilated it so successfully that several
of the Hungarian Dances are based on “gypsy”
tunes that he composed himself).
This concert offers three of Brahms’ Hungarian
Dances. Program notes for the individual
dances would be a form of intellectual
overkill. Sit back, enjoy this fiery music, and
sense why Brahms loved it as much as he did.
Sonata No. 2 in D Major
for Violin and Piano, Opus 94
Serge Prokofiev
Born April 23, 1891, Sontsovka
Died March 5, 1953, Moscow
This sonata, probably the most popular
violin sonata composed in the twentieth century,
was originally written for the flute. But
when David Oistrakh heard the premiere on
December 7, 1943, he immediately suggested
to the composer that it was ideal music for
the violin. Together, composer and violinist
prepared a version for violin and piano,
and Oistrakh gave the first performance of
this version on June 17, 1944. The music remains
very much the same (the piano part is
identical in both versions), but Prokofiev altered
several passages to eliminate awkward
string crossings for the violinist and added
certain violinistic features impossible on the
flute: pizzicatos, doublestops, harmonics.
Ironically, the violin version–which profits
enormously from the flexibility and range of
sound of the violin–has become much more
popular than the original.
In contrast to the bleak First Violin Sonata
(which the composer said should sound “like
wind in a graveyard”), the Second Sonata is
one of Prokofiev’s sunniest compositions.
There is no hint in this music of the war raging
in Russia at this time, none of the pain
that runs through the earlier sonata. The
third movement is quietly wistful and the
music is full of Prokofiev’s characteristically
pungent harmonies, but the sonata is generally
serene, a retreat from the war rather than
its mirror.
continued on page 4
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Frang Notes continued from page 3
The sonata is in the four-movement slowfast-slow-fast
sequence of the baroque sonata.
The opening Moderato, in sonata form,
begins with a beautifully poised melody for
the violin, a theme of classical purity. The
violin also has the second subject, a singing
dotted melody. Prokofiev calls for an exposition
repeat, and the vigorous development
leads to a quiet close on a very high restatement
of the opening idea.
The Presto sounds so brilliant and idiomatic
on the violin that it is hard to imagine
that it was not conceived originally for that in-
strument. This movement was in fact marked
Allegretto scherzando in the flute version,
but—taking advantage of the violin’s greater
maneuverability—Prokofiev increased the
tempo to Presto in the violin version, making
it a much more brilliant movement. It falls
into the classical scherzo-and-trio pattern,
with two blazing themes in the scherzo and
a wistful melody in the trio. The end of this
movement, with the violin driving toward the
climactic pizzicato chord, is much more effective
in the violin version than in the original.
The mood changes markedly at the Andante,
which is a continuous flow of melody
on the opening violin theme. The violin part
becomes more elaborate as the movement
progresses, but the quiet close returns to the
mood of the beginning. The Allegro con brio
finale is full of snap and drive, with the violin
leaping throughout its range. At the center
of this movement, over steady piano accompaniment,
Prokofiev gives the violin one of
those bittersweet melodies so characteristic
of his best music. Gradually the music quickens,
returns to the opening tempo, and the
sonata flies to its resounding close.
—Program notes by Eric Bromberger
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