Piano Recital by Choi Sown Le

Click each piece to see programme notes by Keith Anderson.

Ferruccio Busoni, the son of an Italian clarinettist and a pianist mother of German ancestry, made his first concert appearance as a pianist in Trieste in 1875, travelling then to Vienna, where he met Liszt. On the advice of Brahms, he moved to Berlin, the principal base of his future activities. Distinguished as one of the great pianists of his time, Busoni also won a reputation as a composer, combining in his music something of Italian sensibility with a German leaning towards counterpoint and harmonic experiment. His transcriptions, of Bach in particular, follow the tradition of Liszt, a re-creation of the music on which they are based, with some freedom of interpretation. His transcription of Bach's organ Toccata and Fugue in D Minor was made in 1900 and offers a particularly impressive version of the work, re-interpreted for the piano.

In 1781 Mozart had broken with his patron, the Archbishop of Salzburg, his father's employer, and settled in increasingly precarious independence in Vienna. Early in 1787 he travelled to Prague, where his opera The Marriage of Figaro was being staged, after its earlier success in Vienna. It was on his return to Vienna that he wrote the Rondo in A Minor, K. 511, dated 11 March in the composer's hand. This is a work of some substance, opening with the principal theme that is to serve as a framework for more elaborate intervening episodes, of which the final A major section provides particular opportunities for virtuosity.

In 1789 Mozart accompanied Prince Karl Lichnowsky on a journey to Berlin, where he hoped for some advantage from a meeting with the King of Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm II, who had a particular interest in the cello and employed at his court in Potsdam the French cellist Jean-Pierre Duport, his teacher, joined there by the latter’s brother, also distinguished as a cellist. Some years later Beethoven was to visit the Prussian court, an occasion that brought his first cello sonatas. The result of Mozart’s visit was, in financial terms, he claimed, insufficient to meet the expenses of the journey. Musically it brought a request for a set of string quartets and a set of piano sonatas, as well as the Variations on a Theme by Duport, K. 573, written in Potsdam and dated 29 April, based on a Minuet from Duport’s sixth cello sonata. The nine versions of the simple D major melody include a sixth variation in D minor, a decorated Adagio eighth variation and a final Allegro, before the return of the original theme.

The son of a Vienna schoolmaster, Schubert had his musical training as a chorister in the Imperial Chapel, choosing, when his voice broke, to train as a teacher, rather than follow the academic path open to him, a course that would have left less time for music. In later years he returned intermittently to his father's school-room, as circumstances demanded, but by the time of his early death in 1828 he had begun to win a wider reputation as a composer. In 1816 he had made asetting of a poem by Georg Philipp Schmidt, Der Wanderer, lines from which have often been quoted as an epitome of the spirit of romanticism: There, where you are not / There is happiness (Dort, wo du nicht bist / Dort is das Glück).

Wandering, indeed, whether real or metaphorical, was a particular preoccupation of the romantic imagination.It was six years after his setting of Schmidt's poem that Schubert decided to make use o the opening rhythms of his song for what is, to all intents and purposes, another piano sonata. The Wanderer Fantasia, as it is generally known, only fails to meet the criterion of a sonata by the fact that its first movement is not in the expected sonata-allegro form. The second movement, in C-sharp minor, is a set of variations on the same rhythmic theme, which in due course foreshadows the following Scherzo, with its waltz-like middle section. The finale makes further use of the Wanderer theme, seeming at one point about to become a fugue, something never fully realised, in spite of continued contrapuntal development. The Fantasia is a work of considerable technical difficulty. It was published in Schubert's lifetmie with a dedication to Emanuel Karl, Edler von Liebenberg, who had commissioned it.

The two books of variations by Brahms on the theme of Paganini's 24th Caprice for the unaccompanied violin were written in 1862-63 and published in 1866, and follow earlier sets of variations, including those on a theme by Handel, which had won particular favour. The demanding Paganini Variations, two sets of 14, are in the nature of studies, presenting various technical difficulties to a performer, rather than a progressive development of thematic material. They owe something to the composer's meeting with the pianist Carl Tausig, whose virtuosity as a performer presented a certain challenge. Each set opens with the familiar theme and the first set includes an 11th A major Andante variation and a 12th in the same key, before a return to A minor in the octaves of the 13th version of the material. The second book, which also makes occasional acknowledgement of violin technique, proceeds through a demanding series of variations to a tenth marked Feroce, energico, followed by a gentle F major Andante. The set ends in virtuoso display.

The son of a French émigré and a Polish mother, Chopin had his early musical training in Warsaw, a city that then offered relatively limited opportunities as a musician. The greater part of his career was to be spent in France, but it was in 1830 that he left Warsaw for Vienna, where he hoped to make some impression. His ambitions there came to nothing and he soon moved to Paris, where he was able to establish himself as a piano teacher and as a performer in private salons suited to his intimate and poetic style of composition and performance. It was in Vienna, however, that he wrote his Grande Polonaise in E-flat, originally designed for piano and orchestra, an addition to his earlier concertos with which he hoped to make his name as a composer-performer. The Polonaise is, therefore, a work of some bravura. It was later augmented by an introductory Andante spianato for piano alone, and performed by Chopin as a solo piano work. It was published in Paris in 1836.