At this summer’s final Carte Blanche Concert, Swiss-born pianist Gilles Vonsattel, winner of the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation’s 2002 International Piano Competition, offers a varied recital program spanning nearly two centuries of repertoire, from Beethoven and Liszt to modern American maverick Frederic Rzewski. Vonsattel offers some insights into this intriguing program.
What’s the idea behind the program, and how did you go about choosing the repertoire?
Odds are that most of us involved in Music@Menlo as musicians or audience members will live relatively long life spans, and that the world we leave will look and sound very different from the world we entered. This was certainly the case for Dvořák, who lived from 1841 to 1904. I was drawn to the idea of a program that brings to life some of the seismic shifts in Dvořák’s world. So, we have two works representing the more liberating and forward-looking aspects of Beethoven’s music (the Sonata quasi una fantasia, op. 27, no. 2, and the Opus 126 Bagatelles), followed by Franz Liszt’s Funérailles, commemorating one of the titanic political upheavals of the year 1848 as well as marking the rise of nationalism in Eastern Europe. We then move on to another revolutionary year in Europe’s history—1905—via Janáček’s Sonata 1.X.1905, written in memory of an “ordinary laborer” killed during demonstrations in favor of a Czech university in Brno. Whereas Liszt’s Funérailles is a gigantic statement, a summoning of funeral bells, marches, immense lamentations, and doomed cavalry charges—“the cry of revolt of an entire people,” as Cortot wrote about Chopin’s Opus 10 Number 12—the Janáček piece is a deeply personal and intimate statement. We then have one of the few lighthearted moments on the program, in the form of Saint-Saëns’s virtuosic tour de force, the Africa Fantasy for Solo Piano. With this piece, I’d like to tip my hat to a few themes: exoticism and tourism in music (so much is made of Dvořák’s journey to America after all!), colonialism, and nostalgia for the past. Saint-Saëns’s work dates from 1891, but it belongs squarely among Liszt’s exotic and extravagant musical fantasies. Finally, we end our journey with real music from America: the blues and the sounds of the industrialization and mechanization of life. Frederic Rzewski’s Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues is a modern masterpiece, written in 1979 but fully inhabiting the 1920s in sound and spirit.
It’s a demanding program, in terms of stamina, stylistic variety, and technical demands…what’s the biggest challenge for you in presenting this recital?
In general this program demands a full-blooded, big pianism, and so it can be easy to obliterate many of the subtleties and opportunities for shading and expression possible and necessary in every work. After all, it’s when our adrenaline is pumping and all hell is breaking loose that it is so difficult to maintain control over the slightest of touches, over half pedaling, over slight changes in tempo…but this feeling, if achieved, is just magical! It’s something to aim for.
If you could hear any of the composer-pianists on your program (with the exception of Rzewski, if you’ve heard him play) in recital, who would you most want to hear and why?
How could any pianist pass up the opportunity to hear Franz Liszt perform? While it is clear that in his touring heyday, Liszt benefited from an unprecedented hype and marketing frenzy, there can be no doubt that he was a performer of staggering power. Even his detractors could not deny his gifts. As Clara Schumann memorably wrote in her diary, “We heard Liszt. He cannot be compared to any other player—he is absolutely unique. He arouses fear and astonishment and yet is a very kind artist. His appearance at the piano is indescribable—he is an original—totally involved with the piano.” I would choose to hear Liszt in the decade following his retirement from concert life, as he set out to compose “the music of the future.”