VICTOR MASLOV
3pm Saturday 18 January 2025
Conoco Room
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Russian pianist Victor Maslov has been called ‘one of those people who is close to all-round mastery of his repertoire’ (New York Concert Review). A graduate of the Royal College of Music, he studied piano with professors Dmitri Alexeev and Vanessa Latarche and conducting with Toby Purser. Maslov’s many accolades include first prizes at the 2nd International Rachmaninoff Piano Competition (Moscow, 2020) and the AntwerPiano International Competition (Antwerp, 2020). He began his studies at the Gnessin Moscow Special School of Music, where he was taught by his mother, Olga Maslova. Once asked about his fondest musical memories, the pianist responded that ‘my best memories are connected with playing at great venues, such as the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, Cadogan Hall or Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall’. He is especially known for his ardent interpretations of the music of Sergei Rachmaninoff, especially the epic Piano Sonata No. 1.
ABOUT THE MUSIC
Haydn: Piano Sonata in B minor
Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) spent almost his entire working life in the employ of the wealthy Esterházy family. He lived for many years at the family’s Hungarian estate, Esterháza, built to rival Versailles. He wrote whatever music the Esterházys wanted, which ranged from music for marionette plays and symphonies to string quartets and works featuring the baryton, a bowed string instrument with frets, like a guitar, which one of his princely patrons played. He also composed a multitude of sonatas for solo piano, including the one we’ll hear this afternoon.
Written in 1776, the Piano Sonata in B minor is in three movements, typical of the time. The outer movements are filled with stormy drama while the middle one offers respite, though it too has a tempestuous middle section. In the late 1700s, different keys had different emotional associations. The key of B minor was connected to the idea of patience and calmly awaiting what was yet to come. Haydn both endorses and subverts this ethos throughout his sonata. The opening gesture, with its ornamented figures and long-short rhythmic patterns, introduces the generative musical material that will fill the entire first movement. The second movement is a stately minuet, a favoured court dance of the aristocracy. Its sense of elegance and order is in direct contrast to the tumult of the central ‘trio’ section. When the minuet returns with exactly the same notes as the first time, the dance’s innocence seems to have been lost. But is it us as listeners, having experienced the trio, who are now hearing the regal dance differently? The final movement begins with five emphatic repeated notes that lead into a faster passage. This idea saturates the movement as Haydn seems to be exploring a conflict between darkness and light, between turmoil and calm. The profound use of silence and the trimming down of the five repeated notes to just three could perhaps be seen as foreshadowing the music of Haydn’s famous pupil, Ludwig van Beethoven.
Silvestrov: 3 Bagatelles, Op. 1
Like many of his Eastern European contemporaries, the Ukrainian composer-pianist Valentyn Silvestrov (b. 1937) began his career writing in a thorny modernist style filled with harmonic dissonance and rhythmic angularity. His Third Symphony, ‘Eschatophony’ (1966) in particular attracted substantial attention from Western European avant-garde composers. As time went on, he, like many others, embraced a more serene, introspective, harmonically consonant and melody-driven compositional voice. In the early 2000s, Silvestrov turned his attention towards choral music, much of it evoking the meditative introspection and spirituality of the Orthodox Church.
This sense of stillness pervades his 3 Bagatelles from 2005. A bagatelle is a short musical composition, something meant to sound trivial and to represent a quick response to a thought from its composer. For the past two decades, the bagatelle has been among Silvestrov’s preferred genres. The esteemed French pianist Hélène Grimaud has said that ‘Silvestrov’s bucolic Bagatelles are like walking through a forest, light shining through the boughs’. The gentle melodic unfolding of the first in the set we’ll hear this afternoon gives way to a haunting second one in which the prominence of the lower registers evokes a sense of deep pathos. The consoling third movement brings the set to a satisfying close. Because of the war in Ukraine, Silvestrov now lives in exile in Berlin.
Rachmaninoff: Études-Tableaux, Op. 39, Nos. 2, 4, 7 and 9
As a virtuoso in the grand nineteenth-century tradition, the Russian pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943) wrote many pieces that he would perform personally. While Rachmaninoff’s style was firmly rooted in standard European practices, he pushed the limits of expansive harmonies and in many ways redefined dissonance by taking what in Haydn’s time would have been considered crunchy and making it sound lush and inviting.
Rachmaninoff wrote two sets of Études-Tableaux, or ‘Picture Etudes’, the first in 1911 (published in 1914 as op. 33) and the second in 1916 and 1917 (published in 1917 as op. 39). Etudes are most often defined as study pieces, the sort of thing pianists practice to develop their technique and which one really wouldn’t want to play (or hear) in public. In the hands and minds of nineteenth-century pianist-composers such as Frédéric Chopin and Franz Liszt, however, these became musically informed pieces with a great deal of appeal to both performers and audiences. The second set of Études-Tableaux, four selections from which we’ll hear this afternoon, are significant in that they were the last pieces Rachmaninoff wrote before he and his family left Russia due to political upheaval.
The qualifier ‘tableaux’ – pictures – is telling. Rachmaninoff remarked that these etudes were inspired by ‘external visual stimuli’, though he wouldn’t reveal what they were, except in a few cases. He wanted listeners to form their own impressions without any influence from him or anyone else. The resultant pieces are filled with vivid aural imagery of an abstract sort.
Among the rare Études-Tableaux for which a descriptor exists is the first on today’s programme: No. 2, marked ‘Lento assai’ (very slow) and subtitled ‘The Sea and the Seagulls’. The movement evokes a sense of profound melancholy as a languid, expansive melody unfolds over an undulating accompaniment. To add to the profundity of the movement, Rachmaninoff embeds the opening of the ‘Dies Irae’ (Day of Wrath) chant from the Latin Requiem Mass in the left hand as the movement commences, with hints of the theme recurring throughout. (Rachmaninoff often quoted the ‘Dies Irae’, such as in the Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini for piano and orchestra.)
The other three movements offer an array of abstract musical images. No. 4, marked ‘Allegro assai’ (very cheerful) is a playful scherzo, though flashes of an underlying grotesqueness erupt every now and again. This particular Étude-Tableau hearkens back to Haydn with its clarity of textures and use of imitation, where the same material reappears in different voices. Furthermore, it is in the same key, B minor, as the Haydn sonata that opens the programme. No. 7, marked ‘Lento lugubre’ (slow and lugubrious) is like a cinematic funeral march: fragmented and prismatic. It is as if we are observing the same scene from different angles. Sounds resembling the tolling of bells (a distinctively Russian characteristic) add to the pensive mood. No. 9, marked ‘Allegro moderato, tempo di marcia’ (moderately fast, the speed of a march) is filled with Rachmaninoff’s characteristically thick textures, lush harmonies and piquant rhythmic figures.
Rachmaninoff: Sonata No. 1 in D minor, Op. 28
Rarely performed because of its extreme difficulty, Rachmaninoff’s Piano Sonata No. 1 reflects the composer-pianist’s exceptional ability to meld an intensely Russian sense of passion and longing with the German emphasis on structural design required when calling a piece a ‘sonata’. In 1908, when Rachmaninoff composed the sonata, he was at an emotional and mental low point. He and his family were living in Dresden, where they moved to in 1906 so that he could recover from the cataclysmic critical response to his First Symphony. A sense of emotional rawness thus permeates the sonata. After a private hearing in Moscow, several of the composer’s friends suggested ways in which he could trim the sprawling outpouring of emotion. Rachmaninoff took their recommendations to heart, and the first performance of the revised version took place on 17 October 1908 when it was played by Konstantin Igumnov in Moscow.
Rachmaninoff took as his inspiration for the sonata Goethe’s Faust; early performances even included this title on the programme. Living in one of the cities associated with Franz Liszt, Rachmaninoff followed Liszt’s model in terms of his predecessor’s monumental Sonata in B Minor and Faust Symphony. The three movements of Rachmaninoff’s sonata could be considered as musical portraits of Faust, Gretchen (his beloved) and Mephistopheles. While these characters may have served as the initial inspirations, their attributes become abstracted, moving the sonata away from its programmatic beginnings into the realm of absolute (i.e., non-programmatic) music. This is not that different from what Rachmaninoff was doing with his Etudes Tableaux, where an extramusical idea inspires a piece of music whose musical meaning comes entirely from within itself.
The sonata is filled with a multitude of tonal and timbral colours and offers a kaleidoscope of emotions and moods, from ones suggesting the fragility of a particular moment in time to pure exhilaration. The sonata is unified through three recuring musical ideas: repeated notes, scales and the interval of a perfect fifth (the opening of ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’). The latter appears both melodically (horizontally) and harmonically (vertically) and goes both upwards and downwards. This musical building block is stated softly at the very beginning of the first movement, and a titanic transformation of that simple idea opens and concludes the third movement.
The first movement, Allegro moderato, alternates between sections filled with anguish and unrest and others in which a chant-like melody emulating Russian Orthodoxy is surrounded by delicate filigree. This conflict remains unresolved as the movement ends softly. The second movement, Lento, with its organic unfolding of interwoven lyrical melodies, exudes a profound sense of yearning. The final movement, a virtuoso tour-de-force with thunderous descending passages played in double octaves and others in which multiple musical pulses overlap, explores new worlds of sound through near-apocalyptic harmonies, the powerful sound of Russian bells and gentle reminiscences of music heard in earlier movements.
--Notes by William Everett
