Livermore, CA - Del Valle Fine Arts concludes its 44th season by presenting dynamic Russian pianist Ilya Yakushev in the Bankhead Theater. At age 12, he was a prizewinner in the Young Artists Concerto Competition in his native St. Petersburg. He has won numerous competitions including the 2005 World Piano Competition in Cincinnati and has performed worldwide with famed orchestras and venues such as Carnegie and Davies Symphony Halls. His performance will honor Rachmaninoff’s 150th Birthday and the 100th anniversary of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue”. Yakushev's program includes Mozart’s Fantasia in D minor, three preludes by Rachmaninoff, Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, and Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. Yakushev composed a special slide show to accompany his performance of "Pictures at an Exhibition", showing the artwork depicted in the music. Meet the pianist at the complimentary reception following the performance.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1719-1787)
Fantasia in D minor, K.397

Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943)
Prelude in G sharp minor, Op. 32, No.12
Prelude in G minor, Op. 23 No.5, Alla marcia
Prelude in C sharp minor, Op. 3, No.2

George Gershwin (1898-1937)
Rhapsody in Blue

Intermission

Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881)
Pictures at an Exhibition
1. Promenade
2. Gnomus (The Gnome)
3. Promenade
4. Il vecchio castello (The Old Castle)
5. Promenade
6. Tuileries (Dispute d'enfants après jeux) (Tuileries [Quarrel between Children after Playing])
7. Bydlo (Cattle]
8. Promenade
9. Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks
10. Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle
11. Promenade
12. Limoges, le marché (La grande nouvelle) (The Marketplace at Limoges [The Great News])
13. Catacombae, sepulchrum romanum (Catacombs, Roman sepulcher)
14. Con mortuis in lingua mortua (With the Dead, in a Dead Language)
15. The Hut on Hen's Legs
16. The Great Gate of Kiev

Ilya Yakushev appears by arrangement with Lisa Sapinkopf Artists, www.chambermuse.com

About the Artist

Pianist Ilya Yakushev, with many awards and honors to his credit, continues to astound and mesmerize audiences at major venues on three continents.
 
The British label Nimbus Records released Yakushev's CD, “Prokofiev Sonatas Vol. 1” CD. The American Record Guide wrote, “Yakushev is one of the very best young pianists before the public today, and it doesn’t seem to matter what repertoire he plays – it is all of the highest caliber.”

Ilya has performed in prestigious venues worldwide, including Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall (New York), Davies Symphony Hall (San Francisco), and Sejong Performing Arts Center (Seoul, Korea), Great Philharmonic Hall (St. Petersburg), and Victoria Hall (Singapore). His performances with orchestra include those with the San Francisco Symphony, BBC Concert Orchestra, Boston Pops, Rochester Philharmonic, Utah Symphony, and many others.

In 2023-24, dozens of engagements bring Ilya from New York City to the West Coast for recitals, concertos and — with members of the renowned St. Lawrence String Quartet — chamber music. Many of his concerts will celebrate the triple anniversary of Rachmaninoff's 150th birthday, the 150th anniversary of Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition," and the 100th anniversary of Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue." Ilya has put together a special slide show that accompanies his performances of "Pictures at an Exhibition," showing the artwork depicted in the music.
 
Winner of the 2005 World Piano Competition which took place in Cincinnati, OH, Mr. Yakushev received his first award at age 12 as a prizewinner of the Young Artists Concerto Competition in his native St. Petersburg. In 1997, he received the Mayor of St. Petersburg’s Young Talents award, and in both 1997 and 1998, he won First Prize at the Donostia Hiria International Piano Competition in San Sebastián, Spain. Mr. Yakushev was a recipient of the prestigious Gawon International Music Society’s Award in Seoul, Korea.

Ilya studied with legendary pianist Vladimir Feltsman at the Mannes College of Music in New York City.

He is a Yamaha artist.

PROGRAM NOTES

MOZART:

The Fantasia in D minor, K. 397, was composed in 1782 or between 1786 and 1787 and left unfinished. (For this reason, the catalog lists it as a fragment). It remains unclear whether the composer had planned to expand the work, or imagined it as preceding a sonata or even a fugue (perhaps in the same key). Still, it is one of Mozart's most popular piano pieces.

In 1944, it was revealed that August Eberhard Müller (1767-1817), a German composer, organist, flutist, and conductor, wrote the Fantasia's last ten bars. Müller was a strong advocate of Mozart's music, and was highly esteemed by Beethoven.

Mozart's output in minor keys constitutes a tiny part of his production quantitatively. Only 14 of Mozart's more than 600 compositions are in D minor, including his final work, the Requiem. The emotional concentration encapsulated in pieces written in minor keys is unique, and Mozart's choice of D minor key for the Fantasia is meaningful.


The Adagio evokes the theatricality of an operatic scena, with many "changes of pulse and mood, [and] its startling silences and passionate outcries" [Zaslaw and Cowdery, The Compleat Mozart, 324.]. Chromaticism plays a prominent role in the thematic material throughout the Adagio, coloring the melodic lines and the descending bass figures in the left hand. However, Mozart resolves the tension in an arpeggiated major chord, signifying 'transcendence' over the weighty thematic material.—Enrico Elisi

RACHMANINOFF:

Rachmaninoff began work on his first substantial piece, the Symphony No. 1 in D minor, in 1895. Its premiere in 1897 was a disaster, and the resulting critical reception robbed Rachmaninoff of his confidence to compose for some three years. With the help of Dr. Nikolai Dahl, Rachmaninoff finally regained faith in his compositional prowess and embarked on writing his Second Piano Concerto. This proved to be a phenomenal success. In 1901, the year the concerto premiered, Rachmaninoff composed the Prelude in G minor, now No. 5 of his set of Op. 23. No.5 was actually the first prelude of the set, with the other 9 preludes being composed in 1903. The fifth Prelude encases melting lyricism (meno mosso) within a militant energy (alla marcia).

Unlike Chopin, who composed his 24 Preludes in one fell swoop, Rachmaninoff took 18 years to bring his 24 Preludes – in two sets of 10 Preludes Op. 23 (1903) and 13 Preludes Op. 32 (1911), and one in isolation – to completion. It is unlikely that he had any inkling that a project of such scope would take shape when he published the ever-popular Prelude in C-sharp minor in 1893, the work which brought immediate success to the then 19-year-old composer.

With the minor mode as his preferred tonal colouring, Rachmaninoff crafted achingly nostalgic melodies à la Tchaikovsky alongside sharply chiselled passages of muscular pianism. Prominent in his sound world is the ringing of bells large and small, from the tintinnabulation of sleigh bells to the weighty pendulum swings of cathedral bells evoked so dramatically in the opening of his Piano Concerto No. 2.

Rachmaninoff’s massive hand, that could easily stretch a 12th, gave him magisterial control over the keyboard and the freedom to create complex two-hand textures blooming with countermelodies and a wealth of decorative ornament. These traits are particularly concentrated in his two sets of Preludes Op. 23 (1902) and Op. 32 (1910), works more akin in their scale and ambition to Chopin's Etudes than to the same composer’s brief Preludes.

The Op. 3 "Morceaux de fantaisie" (French for Fantasy Pieces) were composed in 1892. The title reflects the pieces' imagery rather than their musical form, as none are actual fantasies. The set was dedicated to Anton Arensky, his harmony teacher at the Moscow Conservatory. The second piece of the set, entitled Prelude, is the most famous of the five.

GERSHWIN:

George Gershwin’s career is a great American success story, tempered (as with Mozart and Schubert) by early death in his 30s that cut it short. Born to Russian-Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn, he grew up in a poor household. As Aaron Copland, his slightly younger Brooklyn contemporary, also discovered, music offered opportunities. But while Copland went to study abroad as an American in Paris, Gershwin dropped out of school and started working his way up as a “song-plugger,” playing Tin Pan Alley songs for perspective customers at a music store. Soon he was writing his own songs (his first big hit was “Swanee” in 1919) and enjoying success on Broadway.

Rhapsody in Blue was commissioned in January of 1924 by Paul Whiteman, the best-known American bandleader at the time, for his concert titled, “An Experiment in Modern Music,” with the goal of alerting the public audience to the importance and influence of jazz music. It was premiered on February 12, 1924 at the Aeolian Theater in New York with Gershwin as the soloist and was orchestrated by Ferde Grofé, Whiteman’s personal arranger.

George Gershwin wrote “Rhapsody in Blue” at the young age of 25, as a way to present himself as a more serious composer. Labeled as a “jazz concerto,” it is scored for solo piano and jazz ensemble and exhibits characteristics of popular song forms while highlighting elements of jazz and blues within its free-form outline.

The title itself was thought up by Ira Gershwin who was inspired by the abstract names of James Abbot McNeill Whistler’s paintings such as Arrangement in Gray and Black. This curious title piqued the interest of the Gershwin brothers and they then created a musically equivalent title with the word “blue” suggesting “the Blues” and in addition, jazz.

The premiere of this piece hit the public audience by storm which led to Grofé eventually reworking the orchestration to fit the more commonly seen arrangement today with piano solo and symphony orchestra. Rhapsody in Blue catapulted George Gershwin into a world-famous career. It brought jazz into the concert hall using a musical language that was fresh, spontaneous, and uniquely American.

To provide greater availability for a work of such importance, the original publishers secured from Gershwin a solo piano version wherein the orchestral parts are fused together with the solo piano part. (Due to concerns that the composer's arrangement presented too many technical demands, a modified arrangement was delicately solicited from pianists of the time. Gershwin's untimely death precluded any modification from the composer himself.)

MUSSORGSKY:

Modeste Mussorgsky produced his Pictures at an Exhibition to perpetuate the memory of a friend. In the process, he created a monument far more massive and lasting than his subject.

Mussorgsky was an ardent Russian nationalist, but he was far more interested in folk art than in the grandiose ornamental designs of the aristocracy. Mussorgsky's career began in the military, but he resigned from the life of a fastidious officer to study music and supported himself as a civil servant.

Yet, his soul was far less complacent than one would expect from a life-long bureaucrat – he lived in a commune and the radical ideology he absorbed there infused his music, as he devoted himself to seeking truth in art by crafting a natural style without classical artifice.

Victor Hartmann was a close friend who shared Mussorgsky's ideals in his own field of architecture and painting. When Hartmann died in 1874, aged only 39, Mussorgsky was devastated. In abject bitterness, he wrote: “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat live on and creatures like Hartmann must die?” But soon his incomprehension took a more constructive tack. The following year saw a memorial exhibit of 400 Hartmann works, including sketches, watercolors and costume designs produced mostly during the artist's travels abroad. Locales include Poland, France and Italy; the final movement depicts an architectural design for the capital city of Ukraine. Mussorgsky was deeply moved. Seized with inspiration, he quickly reacted to the exhibition by writing a suite of ten piano pieces dedicated to the organizer.

The work opens with a brilliant touch–a “promenade” theme that reemerges throughout as a transition amid the changing moods of the various pictures. By alternating 6/4 and 5/4 time, its regular metric “walking” pace is thrown off-balance and cleverly suggests the hesitant gait of an art-lover strolling through a museum, attracted by upcoming pleasures but hesitant to leave the object at hand without a final glance at a telling detail.
 
The ten pictures Mussorgsky depicts are a gnome-shaped nutcracker; a troubadour plaintively singing outside an ancient castle; children vigorously playing and quarrelling in a park; a lumbering wooden Polish ox-cart; a ballet of peeping chicks as they hatch from their shells; an argument between two Warsaw Jews, one haughty and vain, the other poor and garrulous; shrill women and vendors in a crowded marketplace; the eerie, echoing gloom of catacombs beneath Paris; the hut of a grotesque bone-chomping witch of Russian folk-lore; and a design for an entrance gate to Kiev. Mussorgsky clearly chose these subjects for the variety of moods they invoked and the opportunities they presented for a wide array of musical depictions.

Alcoholism and severe depression not only cut short Mussorgsky's life but plagued his most creative years and prevented him from advocating his work, which succumbed to the dismissive attitude of the cultural gatekeepers. Fame came only after his early death at age 42, when well-meaning admirers indulgently undertook to edit his operas in order to correct what they perceived to be artistic flaws. Only in more recent times have the originals been revived to display their frank elemental power.

The Pictures at an Exhibition met a similar fate. The score remained unpublished until 1886, five years after Mussorgsky's death. But then, almost immediately, an amazing phenomenon began–while the original version generated little interest among pianists, over two dozen composers were seized by a compulsion to orchestrate it, the most famous of which was Maurice Ravel.

And what about the piano version that started it all? Although there had been others, it was a recording of an extraordinary recital in Sofia, Bulgaria by Sviatoslav Richter in 1958 that refocused public attention on the original. This recording fully vindicated Mussorgsky's work as a masterpiece in its own right, without need of translation, embellishment or improvement. Hartmann would have been proud of his friend's work! — Peter Gutmann

Date and Time:
Saturday, April 27, 2024 at 7:30 pm

Location:
Bankhead Theater,
2400 First Street,
Livermore, CA 94550

Tickets start at $35. Students under 18 are free with an accompanying adult for only $20. College student tickets are $16. Go to the Bankhead Theater website LivermoreArts.org/event-list for online purchases.

Tickets may be obtained at the Bankhead Theater box office, 2400 First Street, Livermore, 925-372-6800.

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