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presents…

NATASHA PAREMSKI | Piano ALFREDO RODRÍGUEZ | PianoFriday, September 27, 2019 | 7:30pmHerbst Theatre

PROKOFIEV Visions fugitives, Opus 22 Lentamente Con vivacità Andante Assai moderato Allegretto Allegretto Animato Feroce Molto giocoso Inquieto Con eleganza Dolente Pittoresco (Arpa) Poetico Comodo Con una dolce lentezza Allegretto tranquillo Presto agitatissimo e molto accentuato Ridicolosamente Lento irrealmente RAVEL Gaspard de la nuit Ondine Le gibet Scarbo

BALAKIREV Islamey

Ms. Paremski

INTERMISSION

Improvisations by Mr. Rodríguez

The Shenson Piano Series is made possible by Fred M. Levin and Nancy Livingston, The Shenson Foundation

This program is made possible in part by the generous support of Robert and Ruth Dell

Natasha Paremski is represented by Arts Management Group130 West 57th St., Ste. 6A, New York, NY 10019 artsmg.comAlfredo Rodríguez is represented by Unlimited Mylesunlimitedmyles.comHamburg Steinway Model D, Pro Piano, San Francisco

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ARTIST PROFILESBoth Natasha Paremski and Alfredo Rodrí-guez return to San Francisco Performances for the second time. Ms. Paremski made her recital debut here in March 2007 and Mr. Ro-dríguez offered a solo concert in December 2017. Mr. Rodríguez is currently San Francisco Performances’ Jazz Artist-in-Residence.

With her consistently striking and dy-namic performances, pianist Natasha Pa-remski reveals astounding virtuosity and voracious interpretive abilities. She contin-ues to generate excitement from all corners as she wins over audiences with her musi-cal sensibility and powerful technique.

The 2018–19 season featured recitals in New York and Chicago, in addition to concerto appearances in North America, as well as Europe and South America. In 2019–20 she performs the Rachmaninoff cycle with Symphoria Syracuse, returns to the Columbus Symphony, and will perform with the Knoxville Symphony, Jackson-ville and Charleston Symphonies. She will also give a recital for San Francisco Perfor-mances at the Herbst Theatre.

Paremski is a regular return guest of many major orchestras, including the Minnesota Orchestra, San Francisco Sym-phony, Oregon Symphony, Buffalo Phil-harmonic, and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra with whom she has performed every year since 2008. She has performed with major orchestras in North America including the Dallas Symphony Orches-tra, Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, Toronto Symphony, Baltimore Symphony, Houston Symphony, and others.

Paremski has given recitals in Paris, London, Buenos Aires, Tokyo, and numer-

ous U.S. cities including Seattle, Kansas City, and Santa Fe. She has also appeared on the Rising Stars Series of the Gilmore and Ravinia Festivals.

Paremski was awarded several presti-gious prizes at a very young age, including the Gilmore Young Artists prize in 2006 at the age of 18. In September 2010, she was awarded the Classical Recording Founda-tion’s Young Artist of the Year. Her first recital album was released in 2011 to great acclaim, topping the Billboard Classical Charts. In 2012 she recorded Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and Rachmaninoff’s Paganini Rhapsody with the Royal Philhar-monic Orchestra on the orchestra’s label distributed by Naxos.

Paremski began her piano studies at the age of four at Moscow’s Andreyev School of Music. She then studied at the San Fran-cisco Conservatory of Music and at the Mannes College of Music, from which she graduated in 2007. At the age of 15 she de-buted with Los Angeles Philharmonic and recorded two discs with the Moscow Phil-harmonic Orchestra.

Born in Moscow, Natasha Paremski moved to the U.S. at the age of eight and is now based in New York.

Over the past decade, Alfredo Rodríguez has grown from a young local Cuban artist to a globally recognized Grammy nominee. After meeting Quincy Jones at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 2006, Rodríguez left Cuba and his family behind to immigrate to the United States to pursue his dream. Schooled in the rigorous classical conservatories of Havana, Rodríguez’s riveting artistry is in-formed as much by Bach and Stravinsky as it is by his Afro-Cuban and jazz roots.

Rodríguez has distinguished himself as the definition of jazz and improvisation without boundaries. He is the man behind the piano with fingers that seem to travel from one end of the world to the other, just within the span of the keys; his mastery of the art has earned him frequent appear-ances on prestigious stages around the world such as the Playboy Jazz Festival at the Hollywood Bowl, Montreux Jazz Fes-tival, North Sea Jazz Festival, Jazz in Mar-ciac, Umbria Jazz and Jazz à Vienne.

In 2012 Rodríguez released his debut album Sounds of Space on the critically ac-claimed Mack Avenue Records. From there he went on to release The Invasion Parade which earned him his first Grammy nomi-nation. In 2016, he released Tocororo, which featured Ibeyi, Richard Bona, Ganavya, Antonio Lizana, and Ibrahim Maalouf. Two years later, his fourth album, The Lit-tle Dream led him to an incredible perfor-mance on NPR’s Tiny Desk. Most recently, Rodríguez teamed up with fellow Cuban artist, Pedrito Martinez, for the duo’s de-but album Duologue.

Quincy Jones expresses, “Alfredo is very special and I do not say that easily because I have been surrounded by the best mu-sicians in the world my entire life. He is without doubt one of the best young pia-nists I’ve ever seen and with the enormous skills that he already possesses, his poten-tial is limitless.”

PROGRAM NOTES

Visions fugitives, Opus 22

SERGE PROKOFIEV(1891–1953)

Prokofiev composed this collection of 20 brief pieces for piano during the years 1915–17, just as the Russian Revolution exploded around him. These pieces were not composed in the sequence in which they were published, and listeners should not search for a progres-sion or for any unifying element. Prokofiev’s title is the key to understanding this music, for these pieces truly are fleeting—or fugi-tive—visions: each is a tiny tone-impression, some lasting only a matter of seconds.

Prokofiev took his title from a poem by Konstantin Balmont:

In every fugitive vision I see worlds,Full of the changing play of rainbow hues.

The full quotation is important, for this music does change by the instant, very much

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like the shifting tints of a rainbow. Prokofiev varies the pieces—and moods—sharply. The lyric gives way to the fierce, which gives way to the sardonic, and so on. Particularly strik-ing are the quiet pieces—this music came from a period in Prokofiev’s career when he delighted in outraging audiences, and the gentleness of the Visions fugitives surprised early audiences. An exception to this is the next-to-last piece, marked Presto agitatis-simo e molto accentuato. Written during the revolutionary struggles early in 1917, it was meant to depict—in just a few moments of violent sound—the fighting Prokofiev saw around him.

Gaspard de la nuit

MAURICE RAVEL(1875–1937)

Maurice Ravel had a lifelong fascina-tion with magic and the macabre, and they shaped his music in different ways. While still a student at the Paris Conservatory, he fell in love with a curious book written 60 years earlier: Gaspard de la nuit, a collection of prose-poems by Aloysius Bertrand (1807–1841). Bertrand said that these spooky tales from the middle ages were “after the manner of Callot and Rembrandt,” and Bertrand gave these tales a further whiff of brimstone by claiming that the manuscript had been deliv-ered to him by a stranger: Gaspard himself, simply an alias for Satan.

Ravel composed his Gaspard de la nuit—a set of three pieces that blend magic, night-mare, and the grotesque—in 1908, at the same time he was writing his collection of luminous fairyland pieces for children, Ma mère l’oye. Ravel’s completed work descends from a curiously mixed artistic ancestry: Bertrand’s prose-poems were originally in-spired by the visual arts (paintings, etchings, and woodcuts), and in turn—his imagina-tion enlivened by Bertrand’s literary imag-es—Ravel composed what he called “three poems for piano.” This heterogeneous back-ground makes itself felt in the music, for at its best Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit blends word, image, and sound.

Each of the three pieces in Gaspard de la nuit was inspired by a particular prose-poem, but Gaspard de la nuit should not be under-stood as the attempt to recreate each tale in music. Rather, these pieces evoke the par-ticular mood inspired by Bertrand’s prose-poems. Still—there are moments of such detailed scene-painting that one imagines Ravel must have had specific lines in mind as he wrote.

Ondine pictures the water sprite who tempts mortal man to her palace beneath the lake. Ravel’s shimmering music evokes the transparent, transitory surfaces of Ber-trand’s text, the final line of which reads: “And when I told her that I was in love with a mortal woman, she began to sulk in an-noyance, shed a few tears, gave a burst of laughter, and vanished in a shower of spray which ran in pale drops down my blue win-dow-panes.” Do we hear a conscious setting of these images over the closing moments of this music, which vanishes as suddenly as the water sprite herself?

Le gibet (“The Gallows”) evokes quite a dif-ferent world, and all commentators sense the influence of Poe here (during his American tour of 1928, Ravel made a point of visiting Poe’s house in Baltimore). Bertrand’s text be-gins with a question: “Ah, what do I hear? Is it the night wind howling, or the hanged man sighing on the gibbet?” He considers other possibilities, all horrible, and finally offers the answer: “It is the bell that sounds from the walls of a town beyond the horizon, and the corpse of a hanged man that glows red in the setting sun.” Muted throughout, this piece is built on a constantly-repeated B-flat, whose irregular tolling echoes the sound of that bell.

The concluding Scarbo is a portrait of some bizarre creature—part dwarf, part rogue, part clown—who seems to hover just outside clear focus. The text concludes: “But soon his body would start to turn blue, as transparent as candle wax, his face would grow pale as the light from a candle-end—and suddenly he would begin to disappear.” Ravel’s mu-sic—with its torrents of sound, sudden stops, and the unexpected close—suggests differ-ent appearances of this apparition.

It should be noted that Gaspard de la nuit is music of stupefying difficulty for the perform-er, and this was by design: Ravel consciously set out to write a work that he said would be more difficult than Balakirev’s Islamey, the next piece on this program and one of the great tests for pianists (alert listeners may detect hints of the beginning of Islamey in Scarbo, perhaps an act of homage on the part of Ravel). Ravel’s effort to write blisteringly difficult mu-sic for the pianist succeeded brilliantly. From the complex (and finger-twisting) chords of Ondine through the dense textures of Le gibet (written on three staves) and the consecutive seconds of Scarbo, Gaspard de la nuit presents hurdles that make simply getting the notes almost impossible. And only then can the pia-nist set about creating the range of tone color, dynamics, and pacing that bring this evanes-cent music to life.

Islamey

MILY BALAKIREV(1837–1910)

From Borodin’s In the Steppes of Central Asia to Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherezade, the Far East has exercised a strong imaginative pull on Russian composers and Mily Bala-kirev’s famous piano showpiece breathes that same exotic atmosphere. Balakirev wrote this brief but fiery composition, which he sub-titled “Oriental Fantasy,” during the summer of 1869, when he was 32. Islamey has become famous not just for its exotic color and excite-ment but also because it is so difficult for the performer. The music sends the pianist flying across the complete range of the keyboard, employs gigantic chordal melodies that re-quire huge hands, and goes at a dizzying speed. Islamey may have become famous as a virtuoso piano piece, but Balakirev himself regarded it as a preliminary sketch for a sym-phonic work. Its thunderous passagework and bright colors make it an ideal candidate for orchestration, and it has in fact been or-chestrated by several different composers.

Islamey begins with a great rush of notes (the meter is 12/16), and this opening idea is treated almost obsessively, repeating con-stantly and growing more complex as it does. The middle section, marked Andantino espressivo and set in a gently rocking 6/8, builds to a climax full of runs and massive chords. The opening material returns, and Balakirev propels Islamey to its close with a brilliant coda marked Presto furioso.

Balakirev was a first-rate pianist, but even its creator found Islamey too difficult to per-form. The premiere was given by the dedica-tee, Nikolai Rubinstein (brother of Anton), on December 12, 1869. Over 30 years later, Bala-kirev came back to this music and revised it. This version, completed in 1902, is the one usually heard today.

—Program notes by Eric Bromberger