Nicolas Altstaedt received a 2009 BorlettiBuitoni Trust Fellowship and is a BBC New Generation Artist. He was awarded the Credit Suisse Young Artists Award 2010 and gave his debut with the Vienna Philharmonic under Gustavo Dudamel at the Lucerne Festival 2010.
Born in 1982 into a family of German and French descent, Nicolas Altstaedt was one of Boris Pergamenschikow’s last students in Berlin, where he is continuing his studies with Eberhard Feltz.
He has performed with the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich, the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, and the Musikkollegium Winterthur, among others. He has worked with conductors including Sir Neville Marriner, Sir Roger Norrington, and Adam Fischer. He performs with Gidon Kremer, Yuri Bashmet, Alexander Lonquich, and Jörg Widmann. He also regularly appears at festivals like Lockenhaus, Jerusalem, Salzburg Summer and Salzburg Mozart Festival.
His latest of many other CDs includes world premiere recordings of pieces by Wilhelm Killmayer, that has just been nominated for the International Classical Music Award.
He has been granted a three-season residency with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, New York and plays a Nicolas Lupot cello (Paris 1821) loaned by the Deutsche Stiftung Musikleben.
Variations in G on a Theme from Handel’s Oratorio, Judas Maccabaeus, WoO 45
Dedicated to Princess Christiane von Lichnowsky, the Variations were composed in 1796. They take their theme from Handel’s Chorus, See the Conquering Hero Comes from the Oratorio, Judas Maccabeus. Judas Maccabeus was first performed in 1747 at Covent Garden, less than half a century before the Variations were produced. Here we witness the beginning of Beethoven’s lifelong fascination with the music of George Frederic Handel. Towards the end of his life, Beethoven possessed the complete works of Handel and proclaimed Handel as “the greatest composer that ever lived. I would uncover my head, and kneel before his tomb.”
Handel’s theme is presented by the piano alone, as a chorale. The first variation is for piano solo as well. The cello makes its entrance in the second variation. In the third variation the cellist has the opportunity to exhibit his virtuosity through a series of leaps, whilst the following variation constitutes the first minore section — the second being in the eighth variation. After the ninth variation where Beethoven reduces the theme to its skeletal form, the tenth is an agitated section which leads to the final, eleventh variation, where the culmination is enriched by a web of ornamentation and passages of technical brilliance, moving into an altered metre, and brought to an exuberant close.
三首小品，
為大提琴及鋼琴而作
Three Pieces for cello and piano 布朗卓 Nadia Boulanger
When Nadia Boulanger passed away on 22 October 1979, she left a lasting legacy in the world of Music through her work as a teacher, particularly being of strong influence to a group of American composers at the Conservatoire Américain at Fontainebleau.
A native Parisian, Boulanger thrived as a student at the Paris Conservatoire, wining first prizes in harmony, organ accompaniment and composition, of which she was a pupil of Gabriel Fauré, and took second prize in the famous Prix de Rome, which numbered Debussy and Berlioz as its laureates.
Written in 1915, the Three Pieces for cello and piano are transcriptions of works originally written for the organ. The first work looks back to the world of Debussy and Fauré and has the meditative character of a lullaby, making elaborate use of syncopations. The second makes references to the canonic style of the pre-Baroque masters, whilst the final one ventures into the music of Messiaen through its adventurous use of an altered, “personalised” oriental scale. The final piece has a prominent rhythmic impulse, divided by a more serene middle section. Shortly after the creation of this work, Boulanger brought her life as a composer to a halt in the 1920s and began chanelling her energies towards passing on her experience to more than a generation of composers such as Henri Dutilleux, Aaron Copland and Elliott Carter.
The music of the Argentinian composer Astor Piazzolla is appreciated in many quarters of music. He was, apart from being a composer, a virtuoso bandoneónist. Piazzolla regularly performed his own compositions with different ensembles.
樂曲介紹：王致仁 場刊中譯：黃家慧
Receiving a grant for compositional studies with Nadia Boulanger, who features earlier in this recital, he was encouraged by the great doyenne to look towards Argentinian tango for inspiration for his own music. On returning to Argentina, the young Piazzolla gradually furthered his style through his studies of tango, jazz and classical music. His composition work led to a new style termed “nuevo tango,” revitalising the dance form which was decaying into sentiment, and fusing it with elements of jazz and classical music. In his hands tango became an incredibly vibrant, rhythmic dance music once more: simultaneously passionate, intense, nostalgic and fiery. Le Grand Tango, which the composer had specifically scored for cello and piano, is a work that has found its way into the mainstream cello repertoire. A work of episodic nature, where moments of nostalgia are juxtaposed with impassioned bursts of energy, the work is brought to an arcane close with a virtuosic ascending glissando.
Programme notes by Chiyan Wong
阿雷西．奧格林卓克雙簧管獨奏會
Alexei Ogrintchouk Oboe Recital
9.3.2011
香港演藝學院
香港賽馬會演藝劇院
The Hong Kong Jockey Club Amphitheatre
Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts
演出長約1小時30分鐘，包括一節中場休息
Running time: approximately 1 hour and 30 minutes with one interval 簡歷
Alexei Ogrintchouk is a graduate of the Gnessin School of Music and the Paris Conservatoire, where he studied with Maurice Bourgue, Jacques Tys and Jean-Louis Capezzali.
Originally from Moscow, he was already performing all over Russia, Europe and Japan aged 13. He has won a number of international competitions including the prestigious CIEM International Competition in Geneva at the age of 19. Since August 2005 Ogrintchouk has been first solo oboist of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, with Mariss Jansons.
As a soloist he has performed concertos under the baton of conductors such as Gennady Rozhdestvensky and Sir Andrew Davis, and has played with the world’s greatest orchestras including all the Orchestras of the BBC. As a recitalist and chamber musician he has performed throughout the world including in the Theatre du Chatelet and Concertgebouw in Amsterdam.
Ogrintchouk has been a visiting professor at the Royal Academy of Music in London since 2001 and has given a number of masterclasses internationally. His recent CD of works by Bach was released on Bis label to exceptional reviews.
Nepomnyashchaya was born in 1986 in Moscow. At the age of four she began to study and play the piano in Moscow Gnesin Special Music School. In 2004 she became a student of Moscow Tchaikovsky State Conservatory (class of harpsichord and hammerklavier with Prof Olga Martynova and class of organ with Alexey Shmitov). She won first prize at the Austrian Baroque Academy Festival in 2005, first prize in the harpsichord competition in Saint-Petersburg in 2007, and third prize in the chamber music competition A Tre in Germany in 2009. She performs in Russia and abroad as a soloist and a chamber music player. She has taken part in the masterclasses of Trevor Pinnock, Bart van Asperen, David Morroni, Malcolm Bilson and Bart van Oort.
In February 2010 Alexandra won the First Prize at Volkonsky International Harpsichord Competition in Moscow. Her forthcoming plans include recitals in Moscow and Nizhniy Novgorod, Russia; and Versailles, France.
Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767)
Sonata in A minor
Siciliana
Spirituoso
Andante
Vivace
Antoine Forqueray (1671-1745)
arranged by Jean-Baptiste Forqueray (1699-1782)
Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998)
Suite No 1 in D minor
III La Bellmont
Avec gout et sans lenteur
IV La Portugaise
Marqué et d’aplomb
Suite No 2 in G
IV La Leclair
Tres vivement et d’atache
Suite in Old Style
Pastorale
Ballet
Minuet
Fugue
Pantomine
Interval
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714-1788)
Adagio from Easter Oratorio, BWV249
Sonata in B flat, Wq 48/2, H 25, Prussian Sonata No 2
Antoine Forqueray is reputed not to have been a particularly nice character. He had his son Jean-Baptiste thrown into Bicêtre gaol and later exiled for a time for supposed debauchery. And yet it is through JeanBaptiste that Antoine’s only extant 29 pieces have come down to us (from a reported 300 works), as he published them as Pièces de viole avec la basse continue (suite for viol and continuo) two years after his father’s death. He also provided a second volume of the pieces which he had transcribed for harpsichord, Pièces de viole mises en pieces de clavecin (suite for harpsichord). Divided into five suites which, like Bach’s solo sonatas and partitas, are collections of dances, they also include various musical portraits.
We hear three of the pieces; the first and last portraits of individuals: La Bellmont conjuring up the dark, deliberate sonorities of one of his fellow viola da gamba players while La Leclair portrays fellow French composer, Jean-Marie Leclair, with an evocation of his (obviously) strident violin playing. In between, La Portugaise is couched in the style of a fast sarabande, its fiery description of the Portuguese temperament reflecting the Moorish-influenced dance’s origins (as opposed to Bach’s slow examples).
Although born in Russia, both Schnittke’s German and Jewish origins and Viennese studies (where he discovered the avant garde Darmstadt school) set him on a musical trajectory in which he borrowed wildly, magpielike, from other composers and styles. Back in Soviet Russia he wrote more than 60 film scores, and used his ”polystylistic” techniques to create mercurial concert works.
In essence his Suite in Old Style is simpler in form, composed in 1972, originally for violin and keyboard, but arranged for various combinations. It is in the form of pastiche and Schnittke remains within Baroque-like confines, though with tinges of more modern harmonies. Three of the movements originally saw light of day in a film score for Elem Klimov’s The Adventures of a Dentist (1965), a satire about the dentist fraternity who are jealous of a young dentist with the magical power to extract teeth without pain.
Rather like Grieg’s Holberg Suite, Schnittke looks to the past, though not without some hints of the 20th century (there are modern rhythms in the fervent Fugue and modern harmonies that begin to take over, and quietly end, the slow Pantomime). The suite follows a slow-fast-slowfast-slow structure, with the oboe an even-more plaintive soloist than the original violin, suiting Schnittke’s pseudo-Baroque style.
Bach’s early organ posts at Arnstadt, Mühlhausen and Weimar were followed by his appointment in 1717 as Kapellmeister at Cöthen. Four years later he came — as we have seen — in second place for the position of Kantor at Leipzig’s Thomaskirche, which he eventually was offered after Telemann opted to stay in Hamburg.
Particularly known for his sacred as well as didactic works, Bach was well ensconced in his Leipzig position when, two years after finalising his Christmas Oratorio he composed (or, rather, collated) his Easter Oratorio, in 1736, from music originally composed for a birthday entertainment for Duke Christian of Weissenfels in 1725. The full work has 11 sections, following the story of Mary the mother of James, Mary Magdalene, Peter and John discovering the empty tomb on Easter morning, by way of a series of arias and recitative, prefaced by two instrumental movements.
In fact, these two movements and the first choral movement immediately following, Kommt, eilet und laufet (Come, hasten and run) emulate a typical fast-slow-fast concerto plan. We hear the rapt, still, central Adagio with the unison string writing in its slow utterance of a repeated accompanying rhythm supporting the plaintive oboe solo. It does not tax the imagination to picture the scene as the apostles and the two Marys gather at what was Jesus’ tomb.
C P E 巴赫
降 B 大調奏鳴曲，Wq 48 / 2， H 25，《第二普魯士奏鳴曲》
G 小調奏鳴曲，Wq
135，H 549
巴赫的次子 C P E 巴赫原本修讀 法律，最後還是跟從家族傳統， 在柏林為國王腓特烈二世當宮廷鍵琴 師近30年。可是，他時有離開宮廷 的念頭，當父親在1750年離世後， 他試圖繼承父親在萊比錫的職位， 卻未能如願，直到1768年才接了泰 利文在漢堡的棒（因此以他的作品 結束本場獨奏會再合適不過）。
Sonata in B flat, Wq 48/2, H 25, Prussian Sonata No 2
Sonata in G minor, Wq 135, H 549
Bach’s second son, Carl Philipp Emanuel originally studied law but then followed the family tradition and found employment for nearly 30 years as court keyboard player for Frederick II in Berlin. It is obvious that he had been itching to leave the court, trying unsuccessfully to succeed his father in Leipzig after Johann Sebastian’s death in 1750, but it was only in 1768 that he managed to get away, succeeding Telemann in Hamburg (hence bringing a circular completion to today’s recital).
Our two works are from his early career. His six Prussian Sonatas, dedicated to his employer, King of Prussia (hence the name), were composed between 1740 and 1742, with a further six sonatas (known as the Württemberg Sonatas) following in 1744. Here, in the first movements of these three-movement works, outwardly following Italian slow-fast-slow models, Carl Philipp Emanuel broke away from the Baroque ritornello style, to fashion quasi-sonata form structures, with three sections that begin to equate to the exposition (with subsidiary themes), development and recapitulation sections of the classical sonata. The B flat Sonata has more ruminatively contrasting material (utilising a two-note figure ending with a little ornamentation) to the jaunty opening gambit of a rapid descent followed by a demisemiquaver rise. The movement ends with the two-note figure and trill.
以利亞四重奏
Elias String Quartet
16.3.2011
香港演藝學院
香港賽馬會演藝劇院
The Hong Kong Jockey Club Amphitheatre
Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts
演出長約1小時30分鐘，包括一節中場休息
Running time: approximately 1 hour and 30 minutes with one interval
The Elias String Quartet take their name from Mendelssohn’s oratorio, Elijah (Elias in its German form). They formed in 1998 at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester where they worked closely with the late Dr Christopher Rowland. They also spent a year studying at the Hochschule in Cologne with the Alban Berg quartet.
During the Quartet’s 2009/10 season they performed a three concert Schubert series at Wigmore Hall; were selected on to BBC Radio 3’s prestigious New Generation Artists’ scheme; received a generous 2010 Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award; and won the 2010 BBC Music Magazine Newcomer Award for their recording of Mendelssohn, Mozart and Schubert on the Wigmore Hall Live label. Other highlights of the season included debut tours of Australia and Italy and a tour of the UK, Holland and Belgium with pianist Jonathan Biss.
The Quartet’s debut recording of Mendelssohn quartets for Sanctuary Classics received BBC Radio 3’s “Building a Library: First Choice Recommendation” for their performance of the Op 80 quartet. Their most recent release, Britten’s String Quartets Nos 2 and 3 and the Three Divertimenti , on the Sonimage label was selected as “Editor’s Choice” by both Gramophone and Classic FM magazines.
第一樂章作為引子的〈慢板〉， 充滿冥想似的半音，徘徊在各個調 性之間，《不協和音》之名由此 而來；樂曲的開始用上全套十 二音，隨後彌合為剔透、歡欣 的 C 大調快板。在其他樂章的關
節，例如小步舞曲的中段，都隱然 呼應較為灰暗的慢板，但整體樂曲 還是充滿大調的明快。
首樂章和終樂章採用標準的奏鳴 曲－快板曲式，F 大調〈如歌的 行板〉是簡略的奏鳴曲式，缺了發
展部；終曲的快板用C小調發展， 有一剎那似乎要重現開首〈慢板〉 的無調性，但簡潔明亮的尾奏明確 地用 C 大調結束了樂曲。
Franz Josef Haydn was the father of the string quartet, essentially inventing the form in the 1750s and writing a total of 68 string quartets over his lifetime. The combination of two violins, viola and cello was such a perfect balance of weight, timbre and range that it immediately took hold as the pre-eminent chamber music form in classical music. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed 23 string quartets, six of them as a set dedicated to Haydn. The socalled “Dissonance” quartet, written in 1785, is the last of this set.
The nickname “Dissonance” came to be applied because of the Adagio introduction to the first movement, an intensely chromatic meditation that wanders in search of a key. All twelve tones are employed in the opening, which then resolves in a cheerful Allegro in crystalline C major. At certain key points in the rest of the quartet such as the trio of the Minuet — allusions are made to the dark Adagio, though in general the work reflects its majorkey character.
The first and last movements are in standard sonata-allegro form, and the Andante cantabile, in F major, is cast in abbreviated sonata — lacking a development section. The final Allegro develops in C minor, and for a brief moment it seems the keyless world of the opening Adagio might even make a return. C major is definitively reaffirmed in a brief, bright coda.
Benjamin Britten is generally known more for vocal than for instrumental music. The core of Britten’s chamber music output is three numbered string quartets, of which the latter two have achieved repertoire status.
As a teenager, Britten sketched two unnumbered string quartets, finally completing String Quartet No 1 in 1941, followed by No 2 in 1945. Thirty years elapsed before Britten turned again to the form. By that time, he was gravely ill with heart disease, and String Quartet No 3 would be his final, completed work.
The Amadeus Quartet commissioned the score in 1975 for performances on tour the following year. In five movements, it is an intimate epic lasting nearly half an hour. In common with the Second Quartet, the Third culminates in a final movement more than a third the length of the total, based on a baroque form that allows variations over a repeated figure. The fifth movement, Recitative and Passacaglia, is the heart of the work, a meditation swelled with nostalgia and the palpable feeling of farewell. Leading up to it are studies in pure invention (Duets), frenetic and ribald playfulness (Ostinato and Burlesque) and serene lyricism (Solo).
