Alice Sara Ott recital (piano)

The Nine Variations on a Minuet by Duport were composed during Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s last major journey when, together with Prince Karl Lichnowski, he set out for northern Germany. In Potsdam Mozart met French cellist Jean-Pierre Duport (1741 – 1818), who hailed from a family of musicians. He had also been invited to Prussia by King Frederick the Great who was a flautist and, thanks to Duport’s instruction, Frederick William II – the heir to the throne – became a king among cellists.
Mozart did not immediately get on well with Duport. On 29 April 1789, however, he composed a series of variations on a theme from a minuet by the latter (although Duport had also written many more serious works). The music strictly follows the classical scheme: the melody is initially adorned with simple ornamentation, after which a series of dynamic transformations comes into play, allowing the pianist to dazzle with his or her technique. This is followed by a sentimental variation in minor key, an ecstatic return to major key, a lofty Adagio that almost seems to dissipate in the air and a fast-paced finale (Allegro). As a farewell, the minuet theme briefly returns, now sounding poetically un-Duport-like.

Franz Schubert composed his Sonata in D Major in August 1825 at the resort town of Bad Gastein, surrounded by cliffs and waterfalls. At the same time, the composer was working on his Symphony in C Major, The Great, and the sonata, too, emerged to be completely un-chamber-like in terms of its scale. Dedicated to the pianist Carl Maria von Bocklet, it was clearly unsuitable for the amateurs for whom Schubert had done so much in the course of his lifetime. The sonata was first published in 1826 as Op. 53.
The first section begins as if it were a kind of fantaisie, improvised without any provisional plan whatsoever. This is, however, an illusion: everything in the sonata is planned and all the themes are closely linked together – the secondary theme emerges from the main theme as it develops. By the close of this section, tokens of hunting music – from the very outset implicitly laid out in the main theme – appear brighter and brighter.
The second section is utterly Schubertian in every way imaginable. The full richness of the music here is born from one theme; this is skill of the highest order. The scherzo decisively breaks off all former connections with the minuet in favour of its younger cousin – the waltz. Throughout this section, the influence of the waltz grows and grows and the scherzo ends with one of Schubert’s most charming waltz themes. The final rondo begins “toyingly,” in the style of works for mechanical instruments. But in this “music box” there is much more that lies hidden than one might initially suspect.
Anna Bulycheva

In the summer of 1873, the talented Russian artist and architect Viktor Hartmann, a close friend of Musorgsky, died unexpectedly at the age of thirty-nine. On Vladimir Stasov’s initiative and with the support of the St Petersburg Society of Architects, in February and March 1874 the Imperial Academy of Arts hosted a posthumous exhibition that featured some four hundred of Hartmann’s works created over fifteen years – drawings, watercolours, architectural designs, sketches for theatre sets and costumes and sketches of objets d’art. And between 2 and 22 June 1874 Musorgsky composed his Pictures at an Exhibition piano cycle.
This is the story in brief behind the emergence of one of Russian music’s most surprising and mysterious works. In Pictures at an Exhibition, Musorgsky’s only full-scale and fully developed instrumental cycle, there is much that is unusual even for this composer: the abundance of contrasting, fairytale and fantastical images, the principle of providing names for the sections (using seven languages) and, lastly, the bright and triumphant finale and apotheosis, unparalleled in Musorgsky’s music.
Despite all its external diversity of colour, the series Pictures at an Exhibition has a precisely balanced structure and bears the features of an instrumental mystery where there is a Hell and a Heaven, a man with his passions, the path from death and darkness to the triumph of life and light. Hartmann’s drawings and sketches proved to be an impulse for Musorgsky to create “another” reality, it is as if the composer “enters” the picture itself as sometimes happens in fantasy films, the music brings the picture to life from the inside, and often what we hear is not at all what it appears to be.
Georgy Kovalevsky