2025 Edinburgh Fringe Festival - Piano Masterworks Recital

PROGRAMME NOTES

 NIKE NOCK: Cartwheels (2005)

Mike Nock (b. 1940) is a jazz pianist and composer of orchestral, instrumental, vocal and electronic works, originally from Christchurch, New Zealand.

Nock worked professionally in the US during the 1970s, collaborating with Yusef Lateef, Michael Brecker, Coleman Hawkins, Quincy Jones among many renowned jazz musicians. After settling in Sydney in 1986, he taught at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and led ensembles under his own name. Since that time, his compositions have been commissioned and performed by the Cleveland Chamber Symphony (USA), Australian Chamber Orchestra, New Zealand Piano Quartet, and the UMO Jazz Orchestra in Finland.

“Cartwheels” (2005) is an exuberant, ABA-form piece for solo piano. It was published as part of the Firestarter 3 collection of Mike Nock’s piano pieces (Promethean Editions) and recorded by concert-pianist, Michael Houstoun for his album, “Inland”, featuring the music of New Zealand composers.

FREDERIC CHOPIN: Nocturne, Op. 48 No. 2 in F# Minor (1841)

Soulful, direct, intimate and lyrical emotional expression permeates the musical language of Chopin’s Nocturnes (music evoking night) along with harmonic sophistication, operatic phrasing and ornamentation.  

The melancholy outer sections of the F# Minor Nocturne are contrasted by a middle section in D=flat major that plays like a dramatic recitative between declamatory, commanding chords and coaxing, lyrical melodic lines. The magical coda transports the listener to a dreamy, heavenly state and concludes in the key of F# major.

The two Op. 48 Nocturnes were dedicated to Chopin’s student and friend, Mlle. Laure Duperré and published in Paris, 1842 by Maurice Schlesinger.

 SERGEI RACHMANINOFF: Etude-Tableau Op. 39 No. 6 in A minor (1917)

Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943) was a Russian virtuoso pianist, composer and conductor. He was deeply influenced by the music of Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Anton Rubinstein, Chopin, Liszt, Grieg as well as Russian Orthodox, gypsy and folk music. Rachmaninoff was also involved with the Moscow Art Theatre, linking him to Chekhov and Chaliapin, and he was a contemporary of fellow pianist-composers, Alexander Scriabin and Nikolai Medtner.

Rachmaninoff’s two sets of Etude-Tableaux were composed between 1916-7, shortly before the Revolution forced him to depart Russia. The title he gave to these pieces –“study-paintings” – suggests music that goes beyond virtuoso studies of pianistic technique to individual portraits of mood, emotion, tone colour and musical narrative.

Rachmaninoff commented that the A-minor Etude-Tableau from the Op. 39 set was inspired by the tale of Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf. Full of dynamic musical movement, the music differentiates the wolf’s relentless chase and violent snaps in the piano’s lower register with Little Red Riding Hood’s innocent distress in the upper register.

 OLIVIER MESSIAEN: Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus (1944)

No. 5 Regard du Fils sur le Fils (Contemplation of the Son on the Son)

The Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus (Twenty Contemplations on the Infant Jesus) is a collection of twenty solo piano pieces composed in 1944, expressing Olivier Messiaen’s musical and Catholic reflections on the infant, Jesus. Twenty-one-year-old pianist, Yvonne Loriod gave the premiere performance of the cycle at the Salle Gaveau in Paris in 1945.

The music of the Vingt Regards draws on four original musical themes that symbolize its significant characters: the Theme of God; Theme of Mystical Love; Theme of the Star and the Cross; Theme of Chords. Messiaen envisions the significance of the Christ child beyond gentle lullabies and lilting rhythms to His destiny as man’s Saviour: there is a wondrous, divine musical character but also dramatic power and complexity in sounds that are rich in texture and dissonance. Messiaen’s musical language reflects his experience as an organist and is distinctive in emphasizing musical color, evoking nature in imitating birdsong and employing extended harmonies in a constellation of chords.

The fifth Regard is intimate and warmly reflective in character. It is unique in the cycle with alternating sections of complex chords (three different ideas, musical modes, rhythms and dynamics superimposed on three staves) and imitations of birdsong. Binding the music together is the noble Theme of God in the lowest stave (long held chords in the pianist’s left hand). The Theme’s placement in the middle of piano may even suggest God’s closeness to humanity, symbolizing – as Messiaen prefaces in the score – “the union of human and divine nature in Jesus Christ.”

SERGEI PROKOFIEV: Piano Sonata No. 6 Op. 82 in A (1940)

Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953) was a 20th Century modernist composer who aligned himself with Russian Futurism and Neoclassical aesthetics. This was tempered with his own brand of musical sarcasm and playful wit. After years of living abroad, Prokofiev returned home to Russia in 1936. With renewed artistic confidence, Prokofiev composed some of his most celebrated works during World War 2, including Piano Sonatas No. 6, 7 and 8 – the so-called, “War Sonatas”. These works form one of the most significant bodies of piano literature of the 20th Century.

Uncompromising in its dramatic power and dissonant expression, the Piano Sonata No. 6, Op. 82 is notable for machine-like rhythms, warmly human melodies that are firmly rooted in a four-movement Classical structure. The influence of the ballet is especially revealing in the middle movements while the pianistic writing is often orchestral in style.

Russian bell sonorities, warning, threatening, contrasts, chaos, irony. Driving rhythms in the first movement, indications of “col pugno” (with the fist). Irony, march second movement,  Slow waltz, rich orchestral harmones in third movement, perpetual-motion toccata theme in finale, full of inner tension, driving rhythm, lyrical melodic diversions and wistful harmonic sections.