Loyola e-recital
As a follow up to my previous post, here are a few pieces from my recent recording at Loyola University New Orleans. Although my solo recital scheduled for March 12th was canceled due to COVID-19, we found another way for the show to go on. Many thanks to Loyola’s piano professor, Brian Hsu, for inviting me and helping me out during my stay in New Orleans!
Please enjoy these selections from my original program, recorded in an impromptu fashion in Loyola’s Roussel Hall!
There is something satisfying about playing Gottschalk in New Orleans. A Louisiana native, Gottschalk mixed the idioms of populist American music with the “imported” virtuoso piano playing of Europe. The Banjo is probably his best known piano piece and features imitations of the folk instrument being plucked and strummed rapidly.
The first piano piece (to my knowledge) that was composed after inspiration from a painting, Liszt’s Sposalizio opens up his second volume of the masterwork Years of Pilgrimage. In fact, the whole second volume has a common theme of interdisciplinary inspiration, as the pieces reference sculpture of Michelangelo and poetry of Petrarch amongst others. This first piece in the set has as its subject Raphael’s Lo Sposalizio della Vergine, shown below. Liszt captures the reverent, elegant atmosphere of the painting in this highly original work. It deserves to be performed more often!
Raphael: Lo sposalizio della vergine (1504)
Similar to Liszt’s Sposalizio, Rachmaninoff too composes these “picture studies” and thus hints at a pictorial inspiration behind the works. Unlike Liszt’s piece, we do not necessarily know which images inspired these études, although some answers can be deduced from the conversations and writings of the composer during his lifetime. Arnold Böcklin, a Swiss Symbolist artist, inspired several works of Rachmaninoff, so his oeuvre is a likely place to look. Perhaps it is in this same Symbolist tradition that Rachmaninoff conceals the inspiration, seeking to merely suggest a truth rather than providing an obvious, outright description of it.
Arnold Böcklin: Self-portrait with death playing the fiddle
Arnold Böcklin: The Isle of the Dead