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(Notes by Michael Lebovitch)
Deidre McKay: time, shining (Dublin, 1996, rev. 1998)
“Initial sketches of this piece evoked the memory of a field walk on my parents’ farm in south Down, some years earlier, across heavily snow-laden drumlins, stilled, by the snowfall, into incandescent silence. In the snow-lit half-dark, it felt as though sound had been sucked from the air - the experience of which felt, momentarily, like exiting time. Something of this memory resonated with the music I had begun sketching, affecting a presence as I wrote.
Commissioned by composer/pianist Ian Wilson, who gave its première in Belgrade, April 1997.”
(by Deidre McKay)
RAVEL: Le Tombeau de Couperin (1919)
At the outbreak of World War I, Ravel announced that he would compose a French suite utilizing dance rhythms from France’s courtly past. He started work but set it aside. Patriotic moods were prevailing. Many of his friends were going off to the front. Ravel’s attempts to enlist were rejected: he was too short and slight, and he was more valuable as a composer. Still he persisted and was accepted as an orderly at a hospital, tending to wounded soldiers. Later, in 1916, he did succeed in becoming an ambulance driver at the front and served with great distinction. “Le Tombeau de Couperin” was his first composition after the war. The war had a staggering effect on him – loss of great many of close friends, the death of his beloved mother, and he returned home very frail, and of very cynical and morose frame of mind. Out of all of this came music as evocative of life’s joys as he would ever write.
A tribute to great clavicinists of 17th and 18th centuries, of which Francois Couperin (1668-1733) was the most eminent, the “Le Tombeau” was initially composed as a piano suite in six parts. Each part was dedicated to a friend fallen in the war. The suite was premiered in April 1919 by Marguerite Long, Ravel’s favorite pianist, to whose husband, lost in the war, he dedicated the Toccata.
The brief Prelude is all lighthearted gaiety and sprightly anticipation. The Fugue has a simple polyphonic structure, full of lyricism, none of the complexities of JS Bach. The serene Forlane is an old Italian dance adopted in France in the 16th century. In Venice, it was danced by gondoliers in pairs with rowing motions while stepping to the rhythm of the dance. The Rigaudon originated in the Provence and Languedoc regions of France, close to the place of Ravel’s origins in the Pyrenees. The Rigaudon is wonderfully lovely. The Menuet is the most old-worldly of the suite. The composer’s ingeniousness throughout lies is his evoking Couperin while remaining distinctly Ravelian. The Menuet concludes with an unresolved dissonance. The Toccata is a lesson in virtuosity and perpetual motion. You are on the edge of your seat and then realize you have forgotten to breathe for the entire three-minute piece. Fast and happy sunniness, it requires a pianist of considerable skill – another example of Ravel discovering a new language for the piano.
A year later, Ravel orchestrated four pieces of the suite for a large orchestra. Both versions remain very popular with both conductors and pianists, and have never left the performance stage ever since.
Betsy Jolas: Piece Pour (1997)
French-American composer Betsy Jolas is not a household name in the US, but she is an important living composer active both in Europe and the US. She lived and studied in the US in the 1940s, during WWII but returned to France to continue her studies. In 1975, she joined the faculty of the Paris Conservatory where she took over Olivier Messiaen’s composition classes. She is a prolific composer in a variety of genres, including opera and orchestral works, with a particular affinity for a human voice including a large number of works for solo voice and for various choral groupings.
Her compositional output includes a number of chamber music and solo piano works. Jolas’s music is most delightful and novel — if only because one encounters it so rarely — and leaves a listener wondering what other treasures might be ripe for discovery. Her music draws on an unorthodox collection of influences, including Renaissance polyphony, French impressionism and some of the more humane strands of late European modernism, yet it sounds like nothing but itself – firm but pliable, rhythmically adept, and full of expressive ardor. A master craftsman of composing for the voice, she, following an old tradition, often asks instrumentalists to do the work of singers, such as in Mendelssohn’s “Songs Without Words” for the piano, which represents perhaps the most famous example. And in Piece Pour, composed in 1997, she both adheres to that tradition and blows it up from within. Music clearly sounds contemporary, if only for being consistently atonal, and yet, Jolas never encourages a break with the past and her music is expressive and beautiful – at least when she deems it necessary.
BEETHOVEN: Piano Sonata in B-flat major, Op. 106, “Hammerklavier” (1818)
With his 29th piano sonata in B-flat major, Op. 106, Beethoven intended to create “the greatest sonata ever”, and he appropriately labeled it “Grosse Sonate fur das Hammerklavier”. Beethoven described the Op. 106 work as “a sonata that will give pianists something to do, and that it will be played 50 years hence” – an accurate prediction. Very few pianists in the 19th century dared to tackle the sonata (Franz Liszt, Clara Schumann and few others being exceptions). The monumental “Hammerklavier” sonata presents the listener with music of great intellectual vigor, stupendous architectural scope and musical craftmanship never heard before. The sonata starts with a fanfare-like introduction, immediately causing the listener to sit up and be drawn and enveloped in waves of energy. The First movement is characterized by sudden modulations and dramatic climaxes, often startling to the listener.
The Scherzo Second movement is a humorous yet a bit mysterious parody of the Allegro First movement, transforming the material of the preceding movement based on thirds. In a way, Beethoven needed to introduce a contrast between the First and Third movement by accentuating the joyous dance quality, and to prepare the listener to the intensity of the glorious, long slow Third movement to follow. Again, in the Scherzo movement, the listener is startled by the 18 repeated double octaves toward the close of the Second movement.
The great Adagio sostenuto Third movement is the longest slow movement in Beethoven’s output. It is an immense sonata form that a critic described as a “mausoleum of collective suffering”. The recapitulation is not merely a repeat of previously presented material, but rather a profound re-interpretation of the opening theme which is elaborated by quick figurations in the right hand over deep chordal pedal points in the bass, creating a very moving effect.
The Finale starts with a slow introduction, somewhat mysterious, as though Beethoven is looking for other possibilities, perhaps a throwback to the Baroque times, leading to one of the most revolutionary fugal finales writing ever, an embodiment of Beethoven’s most radical artistic statement yet.
The monumental scale of the “Hammerklavier” sonata is the first in a series of towering achievements soon to include his “Diabelli” Variations, the Missa Solemnis, the Ninth Symphony, and his late string quartets.
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Danny Driver
Gramophone Award nominated pianist Danny Driver is recognised internationally as an artist of sophistication, insight and musical depth. His studies at Cambridge University and the Royal College of Music inspired his uniquely holistic approach to performance and programming. Driver's 2021-2022 season will include a three-concert curated series at London's Wigmore Hall focussed on solo and chamber works of György Ligeti (including the complete Études for Piano), and a co-curated series at Turner Sims Concert Hall with spotlight on J S Bach. More imminently he juxtaposes Beethoven's Hammerklavier Sonata with works by Maurice Ravel, Deirdre McKay and Betsy Jolas over the 2019-2020 season.
Driver has performed with orchestras throughout the world, with recent highlights including BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, BBC NOW, Hallé, Minnesota Orchestra, Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, American Symphony Orchestra, RTÉ Concert Orchestra, Hong Kong Pro Arte, Queensland Symphony Orchestra and Uppsala Chamber Orchestra. His frequent performances with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra have been heard across the UK, at London’s Cadogan Hall and the BBC Proms (where he has performed twice as a soloist). He has collaborated with conductors Andrew Litton, Martyn Brabbins, Alexander Shelley, Mario Venzago. Marzena Diakun, Rebecca Miller, Rory Macdonald and Sir James Macmillan.
Recital invitations bring Driver to concert halls and music festivals across Europe, Asia and North America. Most recent highlights include several recitals at the Wigmore Hall, London Southbank Centre’s International Piano Series, Lichfield Festival (as their Artist-in-Residence 2018), Music Toronto, Salle Bourgie in Montreal, Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, and several performances of Ligeti’s Piano Études interlaced with Debussy’s complete Images across the United States and Japan. In December 2019 Driver makes his first appearance at Perth Piano Sundays in Scotland with a complete performance of Ligeti's Piano Études, shortly after recording them for Hyperion Records (London).
Driver’s passion for chamber music sees him regularly invited to such esteemed chamber music festivals as Oxford May Music, O/Modernt, Eilat, Bard Music Festival, Carducci Festival, and Australian Chamber Music Festival while he enjoys long-standing musical partnerships with violinist Chloë Hanslip, cellist Oliver Coates, and baritone Christian Immler. Recent projects with these artists have included the complete Beethoven Piano & Violin Sonatas at Turner Sims Concert Hall (recorded live for Rubicon Classics), a recording of Bernstein’s Arias & Barcarolles (to be released later in 2018), song recitals in Switzerland, France, Germany and Canada, and performances of Thomas Adès’ Lieux Retrouvés and Morton Feldman’s Patterns in a Chromatic Field (cello and piano) at the South Bank Centre and King’s Place respectively.
Driver’s decade-long relationship with the prestigious Hyperion Records label has spawned a varied and internationally acclaimed discography of works by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Handel, York Bowen, Benjamin Dale, Mili Balakirev, Robert Schumann, and Erik Chisholm. Of his first volume of C P E Bach Sonatas, Bryce Morrison wrote in Gramophone: “It would be impossible to over-estimate Driver’s impeccable technique and musicianship.…this is one of the finest of all recent keyboard issues’. His most recent release, Volume 70 of Hyperion’s Romantic Piano Concerto series, featured piano concertos by Amy Beach, Dorothy Howell, and Cécile Chaminade. His recordings have won him numerous awards including Limelight Magazine’s Instrumental Recording of the Year 2014, and his recent inclusion in the New York Times’ list of 2017’s Best Classical Recordings (Beach, Howell and Chaminade Concertos with the BBCSSO).
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Program 
Program Notes