The Romantic Century

Celebrating Chopin's 200th anniversary

Friday, January 22, 2010, 8 pm

Glenn Gould Studio, 250 Front Street West

YUVAL FICHMAN, Pianist

 

Pianist Yuval Fichman has performed as a soloist with all the major orchestras in Canada and many orchestras in the United States. He was guest soloist with the Montreal Symphony on its 50th anniversary European tour as well as with the Vancouver Symphony on a tour of Japan.
 

Fichman has given many recitals, including performances at the Kennedy Center in Washington, the 92 Street “Y” in New York, Wigmore Hall in London, the St. Lawrence Centre in Toronto, and the Piano en Valois Festival in France.

 

 

 

 

PROGRAM NOTES

 

North Country by Harry Somers (1925-1999)

Harry Somers is one of Canada's most important composers. His operas Louis Riel and Mario and the Magician received international acclaim. His music has been performed all over Europe and the Americas as well as Russia.
Somers was a gifted pianist who later turned to full-time composing. His works even showed up in film and television including a score for a 1964 TV production on the life and work of Pablo Picasso. Somers won a Juno Award in 1997 for another work on Picasso. His recording Picasso Suite won for Best Classical Composition.

The four movement suite North Country has a particularly unique Canadian sound describing Canada’s north.

Piano Concerto No. 2 in F Minor, op. 21 by Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849)
Chamber orchestra version by Nurhan Arman

The second of Chopin's two piano concertos was written before the first, but both were completed in 1830, the year in which the composer gave his final concert in Warsaw, before setting out for Vienna and then Paris. The concerto was first tried out in a private performance at home. Two weeks later it was repeated in public, in a programme that included the Fantasy on Polish Airs, before an audience of some 800 and performed again five days later, together with the Krakowiak, using a louder piano, to overcome objections of inaudibility.
Reminiscent in style of the work of Spohr or Hummel, leading composers of the time, the F minor Concerto follows its dramatic first theme with a second, gentler subject announced by the woodwind, before the entry of the soloist with the first striking theme. The romantic second movement has a brief orchestral introduction before the entry of the piano, in the mood of a Nocturne. The last movement may appear to bear all the marks of a Mazurka, its music characterized by novel orchestral effects, as the strings accompany one episode with the wood of the bow and a horn-call heralds the movement's final section, while the piano brings the work to a climax.

String Quartet in F Major by Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)
Orchestral version by Nurhan Arman

The Quartet in F major was Ravel's final submission to the Prix de Rome and the Conservatoire de Paris. The composition was rejected by both institutions soon after its premier on March 5, 1904. The quartet received mixed reviews from the Parisian press and local academia. Gabriel Fauré, to whom the work is dedicated, described the last movement as “stunted, badly balanced, in fact a failure.” Ravel himself commented on the work, “My Quartet in F major responds to a desire for musical construction, which undoubtedly is inadequately realized but which emerges much more clearly than in my preceding compositions.” As a result of major criticism and rejection, a frustrated Ravel left the Conservatoire in 1905 following what was later called the Ravel Affair.
 

Ravel's loss during the 1904 Prix de Rome and rejection from the Conservatoire de Paris catapulted his career forward: a sympathetic public rallied behind his compositions and musical style. Claude Debussy wrote Ravel in 1905, “In the name of the Gods of music and in my own, do not touch a single note you have written in your Quartet.” Ravel's string Quartet in F major stands as one of the most widely performed chamber music works in the classical repertoire, representing Ravel's early genius and rise from obscurity.
 

$40 adult, $32 senior, $12 student

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