Choi Sown Le - Piano Recital

Click each piece to see programme notes by Dr Lam Ching Wah.

Muzio Clementi was born in Rome in 1752, the son of a silver-smith. In 1774 Clementi moved to London, where he began to take part in professional concert life as a composer and performer, playing his own sonatas, some of which were published at this time, and directing performances at the Italian opera. Success in London was followed by similar success abroad at the courts of Paris and Vienna, in the latter appearing with Mozart, who, as so often, had a poor opinion of his rival's musical taste and feeling, but grudgingly admitted his technical ability in right-hand playing of passages in thirds.

The six sonatas of Opus 25 were published in 1791 by Joseph Dale. The lyrical F sharp minor sonata, later renumbered as Opus 26, No. 2, won particular praise, its slow momvement the inspiration for a poem by the late nineteenth century Vicenza poet Antonio Fogazzaro. The last movement includes passages in thirds, a technique for which Clementi was particularly well known both as performer and composer.

In the spring of 1789 Mozart accompanied Prince Karl Lichnowsky on a journey to Berlin and the Prussian court at Potsdam, seat of King Wilhelm Friedrich II, nephew of Frederick the Great and an enthusiastic amateur cellist. He was well enough received by the king, although the director of the royal chamber music and cello teacher of the king, the French composer and cellist Jean-Pierre Duport, regarded him with some suspicion. The variations that Mozart wrote at Potsdam on a Minuet from Duport's Sixth Cello Sonata might have proved flattering to Duport and pleasing to the king, whose favourite melody this seems to have been. After the statement of the theme there is a melodic variation in semiquavers, followed by a version in whcih the running semiquavers appear in the lower part. There is use of arpeggios in the third variation, triplets in the fourth and a fifth that leads to a sixth in the tonic minor key. The seventh variation makes use of octaves, the eighth is an ornamented Adagio, while the ninth has a brief cadenza leading to a restatement of the theme itself.

The son of a singer in the service of the Archbishop-Elector of Cologne and grandson of the Archbishop's Kapellmeister, Beethoven's early career in Bonn was as a court musician. In particular, he had enjoyed the friendship and support of Count Ferdinand von Waldstein, to whom the Sonata in C major, Op 53, was dedicated in 1805. Waldstein had encouraged him by his parting suggsetion that Beethoven would receive the spirit of Mozart through the hands of Haydn. Beethoven's friendship with Count Waldstein cooled, as the years went by, with the composer embracing revolutionary principles that the latter, as a loyal Austrian patriot, could not stomach, during a career that took him away from Bonn and away from Vienna for much of the time.

The so-called Waldstein Sonata has an impressive first momvement of contrasting material, with its opening series of repeated chords, answered at once in a higher register, and its exploration of the widder range of keyboard now available. The relatively brief slow movement leads to a last movement of particular charm, dominated by a principal theme that suggests the cheerful simplicity of an Austrian Lndler, treated with varying degrees of complexity, finally emerging through multiple accompanying trills.

Brahms' two books of Paganini Variations, Opus 35, carry the title of Studies, an accurate description of their nature and intention. The well known theme is that of the violinist Paganini's 24th Caprice, there too the subject of virtuoso variations, as it was to be with later composers. Brahms was influenced by the pianist Karl Tausig, whom he met in Vienna in 1862, and whose virtuosity as a performer offered something of a challenge. Unlike the Handel Variations, the Paganini Variations are not conceived in terms of the progresive development of the thematic material, and Clara Schumann, among others, was in the habit of making her own selection of variations for public performance. The two sets of fourteen variations, many of which are left without explicit performance directions, explore the technical possibilities of the isntrument and make very considerable demands on a performer, a possible reason for the practice of selecting from the two sets. They include variations in double sixths and in double thirds, variations with the composer's beloved cross-rhythms, studies in octaves, in staccato and legato and indulge in every technical challenge imaginable. They were first published in 1866.

The son of a French émigré who had settled in Poland, Fryderyk Chopin shared his father's strong feeling of patriotism towards his adopted country, although circumstances led him, from the age of twenty, to make a career for himself in Paris. A pianist of great sensitivity and a master of poetic nuance on the instrument, he found his place in the relatively refined ambience of the salon rather than in the more ostentatious surroundings in which more flamboyant pianists like Liszt or Kalkbrenner excelled. Among the forms that Chopin used for his compositions were those derived from Polish dances, the Mazurka and the Polonaise. At the same time he found an eloquent means for poetic expression in the night-piece, the Nocturne, which the Irish pianist John Field, who had established himself in Russia, had explored.

Chopin's Nocturne in C sharp minor was his second attempt at the form, written in 1830 in Warsaw, at a time when his playing was drawing comparison with that of Field. The direction Lento con gran espressione (Slow, with great expression) indicates the character of the work, which was first published posthumously in Poznan in 1875.

Chopin was largely responsible for the creation of the Ballade for piano. The word itself describes a kind of poetic composition that had found particular favour in Germany at the close of the eighteenth century, with the verses of Goethe and Schiller appearing in the famous Balladenjahr of 1797. Thereafter the Ballade continued to hold the romantic imagination as a re-creation of the primitive narrative verse of an earlier age, particular that of the Scottish borders.

The four Ballades of Chopin are said to have been inspired by the verses of the poet Adam Mickiewicz, an exile in Paris and a friend of the composer. The source of the first Ballade, it has been suggested, was the poem Konrad Wallenrod, a medieval story of patriotic vengeance wrought through treason, and a thinly disguised attack on the Russian domination of Poland. Here the characteristic lilt of the music is preceded by a dramatic introductory passage, a call to the listener's attention. After this the tale unfolds, a story of increasing intensity, with moments of serenity, moments of passions, and what seems to be the recurrent voice of the narrator, captured in the first, principal theme. The first Ballade was completed in 1835 and published the following year with a dedication to the Hanoverian ambassador in Paris, Baron Stockhausen.