Jean-Efflam Bavouzet Piano Recital: Beethoven, Liszt, Wagner and Debussy , by Andrew Miller
Jean-Efflam Bavouzet Piano Recital: Beethoven, Liszt, Wagner and Debussy
City Recital Hall, Angel Place: 7 March 2011
Ludwig Van Beethoven
Piano Sonata no.8 in C minor, op.13, Pathétique
Claude Debussy
Clair de lune
(from Suite bergamasque)
Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut
(from Images, Series 2)
La terrasse des audiences du clair de lune
(from Préludes, Book 2)
Debussy arranged Bavouzet
Jeux – Poème dansé
Franz Liszt
Prelude and Isolde’s Liebestod, after Richard Wagner, S447
Grosses Konzertsolo, S176
En Rêve
When speaking of modern music, it may be the complexity of rhythm or harmony of the piece in question, a lack of memorable melodies or it may be a simplicity in the rules implicitly underlying thepiece, which only makes the freeness of the music seem complex to the listener's higher faculties when they try to analyze it. Just as a thing can be understood intuitively or felt strongly to be so which the thinking, rational part of the mind finds impossible to prove, or can only justify after much difficulty. Some point to Debussy's L'après midi d'un faune as the first usher of 20th Century music. It was and is modern in its own way, even if people often seem to expect modern music to shock, and maybe are a little disappointed if it doesn't. Faune doesn't exactly shock — only insofar as it meanders and doesn't climax and resolve in a familiar romantic or classical way. Whether it shocked 120 years ago is another matter and difficult to answer nowadays — a history of the ear would be a hairy book to write. Interestingly, modern "ballet" and music were born almost simultaneously: the first modern ballet which peeled off completely from classical and romantic ballet is considered by some to be Stravinsky and Nijinsky's Sacre du printemps, and it did shock of course, starting a riot in Paris (though not in London). It's hard, and perhaps not interesting, to separate the shock of the music from the choreography. Though trained in the Imperial Ballet School, Nijinsky's choreography included nearly everything forbidden by classical ballet technique. But it wasn't just conscious technique or style which made it modern, it was the unfamiliar preter- and supernatural imagery, even stranger than romantic ballet's, the artists' free social attitudes, the hemlines inching up. Such things were perhaps implicit in the Second Viennese School's music too, though nobody tried to dance to it, so perhaps both groups' music had the same spirit, evenif they had different souls. Debussy's music also appealed to Nijinsky, even if it was Diaghilev who picked the composers, choreographing the Faune as well as Jeux,which premiered but two weeks before Sacre du printemps. Though Nijinsky's rules were also simple to the point of non-existence the actual steps were complex enough that none of his dancers remembered the choreography afterwards, except for Faune, which is seemingly simple in its angular lines and its subtle internalized emotions and simple psychology.
