X 11/3/95 Belfast Music Society Celebrity Concerts

Estampes Miroirs The Lark GORDON FERGUS-THOMPSON Two Studies PROGRAMME Liebesfreud Piano No. 15 based on Op. 10 No. 7 No. 45 based on the second of the Trios Nouvelles Etudes' Interval Concert-Paraphrase on Chopin's Valse, Op. 18 Prelude in E flat, Op. 23, No. 6 Etude-Tableau in E flat minor, Op. 39, No. 5 Scherzo from 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' Supported by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland CITY BEL Saturday, 11 March 1995 Elmwood Hall at 7.30 pm F A Too Co S DEBUSSY RAVEL GLINKA transcribed Balakirev COUNCIL CHOPIN transcribed Godowsky RACHMANINOFF RACHMANINOFF MENDELSSOHN transcribed Rachmaninoff GODOWSKY KREISLER transcribed Rachmaninoff NATIONAL FEDERATION OF MUSIC SOCIETIES NEMS

Estampes Pagodes La Soirée dans Grenade Jardins sous la pluie These three pieces were composed in 1903 and first performed early the following year by the great Spanish pianist Ricardo Viñes. They reveal Debussy searching for a new and personal piano style - impressionistic is the term often applied to his idiom, though it was a word he heartily despised. However, their very title, Estampes - Prints - has a visual connotation Pagodes reflects Debussy's interest in Eastern music, an interest that he shared with many of his contemporaries, not only in the world of music, and probably sparked off originally by the oriental displays at the 1889 Paris Exhibition. It is surely significant that, for the first of his pieces to move away from traditional piano textures, he should turn away from Western culture. CLAUDE DEBUSSY (1862-1918) It has often been observed that the best Spanish music was written by foreigners. Although Debussy had virtually no first hand experience of the country, his portrait of an evening in Granada was sufficiently authentic for Spain's greatest composer, Falla, to comment that 'down to the smallest detail, it makes one feel the character of Spain.' Musically it is related to Ravel's Habañera (1898), sharing, as well as the rhythm, the repeated note C sharp, as axis. The rain- swept gardens of the final piece are painted in brilliant piano writing of kaleidoscopic colouring. The movement is a radical recomposition of an early Image (1894) and weaves two French nursery tunes into its texture. Miroirs Noctuelles Oiseaux tristes Une barque sur l'océan Alborada del gracioso La vallée des cloches MAURICE RAVEL (1875-1937) A variety of impressionistic sound-paintings make up the five pieces of Miroirs (mirrors - an appropriate title), composed in 1904/5. One writer has described them as 'dream sequences', with their often rapid 'cinematic' changes of mood and texture. Each of the pieces in the cycle bears a dedication to one of the group of Ravel's friends who called themselves the Apaches.

The first is dedicated to the poet Léon-Paul Fargue and is inspired by his poem Noctuelles (Moths); their flutterings are clearly audible in the music. The 'sad birds' of the next piece, written, like Estampes, for Viñes, are 'lost in the torpor of a sombre rain forest, during the hottest hours of summer'. The ceaseless motion of the waves and the sparkle of sunlight on the water are painted in the next piece, a painting of a ship on the ocean. The Alborada was a song sung to waken lovers from their night of bliss and warn them of approaching dawn. In this, Ravel's first published Spanish piece (the Habañera did not appear in print until 1907), the singer is the jester, who tries every trick he can to waken the lovers. The church bells of Paris apparently provided the stimulus for the tintinnabulatory finale to the set, dedicated to his pupil, the now unfairly neglected composer, Maurice Delage. The Art of the Transcriber Rachmaninoff was perhaps the last of the great composer-pianists in the 19th century tradition. His works for his own instrument include 2 sonatas, 24 Preludes, divided between Op. 23 and Op. 32 and 2 sets of studies (Etudes Tableaux). Rachmaninoff also made a number of transcriptions of others' music which he regularly programmed in his recitals. The whole moral question of the rights and wrongs or arranging someone else's music is a complex one. It was Liszt who most of all in the 19th century made a speciality of this genre, contributing transcriptions of works as varied as Schubert songs, Bach organ works, Beethoven sympho- nies and Allegri's Miserere. He only arranged one work by the Father of Russian music', Glinka, but Glinka's song The Lark (1840) became very popular in the transcription (1864) by his fellow Russian, Balakirev (who later composed an oriental fantasy, Islamey, that is quite as technically difficult as anything Liszt ever wrote). Most would have no major 'problem' with this type of arranging, which brings the music before a wider audience and is also a valid musical exercise in translation from one 'soundworld' to another - something found several centuries earlier than Liszt. Equally acceptable, and with as long a pedigree, is the composition of variations on others' themes, often with fancy titles such as Paraphrases, Fantaisies or Reminiscences. Where the purists squirm is when pianists (especially) take someone else's composition and rewrite it to show off their own virtuosic skills, But, if the authenticity movement is to be true to its ideals, then such aberrations' as the rewriting of Chopin by his fellow countryman, Leopold Godowsky (1870-1938), (or, for that matter, that of Handel's Messiah by Mozart) are just as much an authentic reflection of the 'spirit of their age'. Alec Macdonald 1995

Tonight's Artist Gordon Fergus-Thompson's award-winning interpretations of French Impressionist and Russian romantic music have been acclaimed throughout the European Press. His compact disc recordings of Balakirev, Scriabin, Rachmaninoff and the complete solo piano music of Debussy have been hailed 'masterly' and 'transcendental': 'seldom has this music been interpreted with such philosophic import'. Following a sensational debut at the Wigmore Hall in 1976, he firmly established himself as a major recitalist and concerto player, appearing as soloist with the Philharmonia, English Chamber Orchestra, CBSO, RLPO, Halle, Bournemouth and all the BBC Symphony Orchestras, with such conductors as Jacek Kaspszyk, Sir Edward Downes, Helmut Müller- Brühl, Sir Charles Groves and David Atherton. He has given over 150 broadcasts on BBC Radio 3 and has toured extensively in the United Kingdom, France, Switzerland, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Australia and the Far East. In 1991 Gordon Fergus-Thompson won the prestigious M.R.A. 'Best Instrumental Recording of the Year' award for his outstanding 'Complete Works of Debussy', and achieved the unprecedented success of being a double winner as in 1992 he received the same award in tribute to his superb recording of Volume 1 of Scriabin's Complete Solo Piano Works. Gordon Fergus-Thompson records exclusively for ASV. Next Recital Saturday, 1st April 1995 CHANDOS BAROQUE PLAYERS Elmwood Hall 7.30 pm