Nicolas Altstaedt and Fazil Say | House Program | January 30, 2025

Nicolas Altstaedt with Fazil Say
THURSDAY, JANUARY 30, 2025 AT 7:30 PM
Nicolas Altstaedt
and Fazil Say
THURSDAY, JANUARY 30, 2025 AT 7:30 PM
THE
ISABEL
AT 10

PERFORMERS
Nicolas Altstaedt, cello
Fazil Say, piano
PROGRAM
Cello Sonata, Op. 65
Dialogo
Scherzo-Pizzicato
Elegia
Marcia
Moto perpetuo
Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)
Cello Sonata, Dört Şehir (Four Cities), Op. 41
Sivas
Hopa
Ankara
Bodrum
Fazil Say (b. 1970)
INTERMISSION
Cello Sonata in C Minor, Op. 6
Allegro ma non troppo
Adagio – Presto – Adagio
Allegro appassionata
Samuel Barber (1910-1981)
Cello Sonata No. 1 in E Minor, Op. 38
Allegro non troppo
Allegretto quasi Menuetto
Allegro
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

ABOUT THIS PERFORMANCE
One of the highlights on tonight’s program
will certainly be the opportunity to hear
composer and pianist Fazil Say perform his
own Cello Sonata with cellist Nicolas Altstaedt.
This piece was written specifically for
Altstaedt, who premiered the work in 2012.
Subtitled, Four Cities, the Sonata is a musical
celebration of four Turkish locations the
composer describes as, “being full of personal
memories.” A recording that both performers
made of the piece for the Warner Classics
label, includes the cellist’s own insightful
overview as follows: “Four Cities is a plunge
into the world of poetry, mysticism, into the
history, the secrets and passions of the Orient.
I have never been more fascinated exploring
the miracles and the stories of people’s daily
lives while challenging the limits of my own
instrument. The cello is transformed into a
flute, a fiddle, a percussion instrument, until it
becomes the voice of the people, inviting us to
enter a world—one that feels closer to us than
ever before, now that we’ve encountered it
through its music.”
This recital opens with Britten’s Cello Sonata,
the first of five works he composed for the
great Russian cellist Mistislav Rostropovich.
The movements of this Sonata are all highly
distinctive, often staying within one single
mood throughout. Also noteworthy is how the
thematic material highlights imaginative uses
of specific instrumental techniques or colours,
such as the many kinds of pizzicato (plucking)
effects used in the Scherzo. An interesting
autobiographical element can be heard in the
final movement, where Britten pays tribute to
Russian composer, Dmitri Shostakovich, a
mutual friend to both musicians. Shostakovich
occasionally used a four-note motif in his
music based on the first letters of his name
following the German spelling, or DSCH. In
German, these letters represent the musical
notes D-E Flat-C-B. These are the exact notes
which the cello plays to start this movement.
Later, this “rising semitone-falling third-falling
semitone” figure is transposed and reworked
in many guises.
At the age of 14, Samuel Barber was one of the
first students to attend Philadelphia’s Curtis
Institute of Music, where he studied voice,
piano and composition. All these passions
were united in the large body of music that he
composed for voice and piano. More broadly,
it is equally appropriate to state that even
when he was composing purely instrumental
music, a lyrical melodic emphasis shines
through. This is noticeable in his only Cello
Sonata’s song-like second subject in the first
movement, the outer Adagios of the second
movement, and in the final movement’s
sections that are marked to be played at a
slower tempo.
Brahms composed two Cello Sonatas which,
like all his mature chamber music, are ever
popular. The first Sonata’s opening movement
has an expansiveness, set up immediately in
the way that the cello spins out the opening
melody for twenty bars with only off-beat
chords in the piano. After the rather refined,
Minuet-inspired gestures of the middle
movement, the work’s finale continually
explores the contrapuntal potential of the
opening theme that is initially presented in a
fugal, question-and-answer arrangement
between both instruments.
©2025 by John Burge for the Isabel.

ABOUT NICOLAS ALTSTAEDT
German-French cellist Nicolas Altstaedt is one of
the most sought-after and versatile artists today.
As a soloist, conductor, and artistic director, he
performs repertoire spanning from early music to
contemporary, playing on period and modern
instruments.
Recent tours included the Australian Chamber
Orchestra, Orchestre des Champs-Elysées with
Philippe Herreweghe and Arcangelo with
Jonathan Cohen. Altstaedt made his debut in
23/24 with Bamberger Symphoniker,
Philharmonia Orchestra, Orchestre symphonique
de Montréal and the NAC Orchestra, and
returned to perform with the London
Philharmonic Orchestra, amongst others.
Since his highly acclaimed debut with the
Wiener Philharmoniker and Gustavo Dudamel at
the Lucerne Festival, recent notable residencies
and collaborations include the Budapest Festival
Orchestra, SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden
und Freiburg, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester
Berlin, Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra,
Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich, Royal Stockholm
Philharmonic Orchestra, Münchner
Philharmoniker, Orchestre National de France,
NHK and Yomiuri Nippon symphony orchestras,
Washington’s National Symphony Orchestra, and
the Sydney and New Zealand symphony
orchestras.
In 2012, Altstaedt succeeded Gidon Kremer as
Artistic Director of the Lockenhaus Chamber
Music Festival, and from 2014 to 2021 he
succeeded Ádám Fischer in this position at the
Haydn Philharmonie at the Ésterházy Palace
touring with the orchestra to Japan and China in
recent seasons.
His most recent recording for the Lockenhaus
Festival garnered the BBC Music Magazine 2020
Chamber Award and Gramophone Classical
Music Award 2020. He received the BBC Music
Magazine Concerto Award 2017 for his recording
of CPE Bach Concertos on Hyperion with
Arcangelo and Jonathan Cohen and the AFAS
Edison Klassiek 2017 for his recital recording with
Fazıl Say on Warner Classics. Altstaedt is a
recipient of the Credit Suisse Award in 2010,
Beethovenring Bonn 2015, Musikpreis der Stadt
Duisburg 2018 and was a 2010–12 BBC New
Generation Artist.
ABOUT FAZIL SAY
Fazıl Say had his first piano lessons from Mithat
Fenmen, who asked the boy to improvise every
day on themes to do with his daily life. This early
contact with free creative processes and forms
are seen as the source of the improvisatory
talent and the aesthetic outlook that make Fazıl
Say the pianist and composer he is today. He has
been commissioned to write music for, among
others, the Salzburger Festspiele, the WDR and
the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival, the
Festspiele Mecklenburg- Vorpommern, the
Konzerthaus Wien, the Dresdner Philharmonie,
the Louis Vuitton Foundation, the Orpheus
Chamber Orchestra and the BBC. His oeuvre
includes four symphonies, two oratorios, various
solo concertos and numerous works for piano
and chamber music.
In December 2016, Fazıl Say was awarded the
International Beethoven Prize for Human
Rights, Peace, Freedom, Poverty Reduction and
Inclusion, in Bonn. In the autumn of 2017, he was
awarded the Music Prize of the city of Duisburg.
His recordings of works by Bach, Mozart,
Beethoven, Gershwin and Stravinsky with Teldec
Classics as well as Mussorgsky, Beethoven and
his own works with the label naïve has won
several prizes, including three ECHO Klassik
Awards. In 2014, his recording of Beethoven’s
piano concerto No. 3 (with hr- Sinfonieorchester
Frankfurt / Gianandrea Noseda) and
Beethoven’s sonatas op. 111 and op. 27/2
Moonlight was released, as well as the CD ‘Say
plays Say’, featuring his piano compositions.
Since 2016 Fazıl Say is an exclusive Warner
Classics artist. In the autumn of 2016, his
recording of the complete Mozart sonatas was
released on that label, for which, in 2017, Fazıl
Say received his fourth ECHO Klassik award.
Together with Nicolas Altstaedt, he recorded the
album “4 Cities” (2017). In autumn 2017 Warner
Classics released his recording of the Nocturnes
Frédéric Chopins and the album “Secrets” with
French songs, which he recorded together with
Marianne Crebassa and which won the
Gramophone Classical Music Award in 2018. His
most recent recording, “Troy Sonata – Fazıl Say
Plays Say”, is devoted to his own works.