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presents…

2017 Naumburg Competition Winner

ALBERT CANO SMIT | Piano

Wednesday April 25, 2018 | 7:30pmHerbst Theatre

BACH The Art of Fugue, BWV 1080 Contrapunctus I       Contrapunctus IV       Contrapunctus II     Contrapunctus V    Contrapunctus IX 

FRANCK Prélude, Chorale and Fugue, FWV 21

INTERMISSION

LIGETI Two Études No.15 “White on White”                   No.13 “L’escalier du Diable”

SCHUMANN Humoreske in B-flat Major, Opus 20

The presentation of the Naumburg Competition winner is made possible through the generous support of George and Marie Hecksher and Roger and Satomi Miles.

Hamburg Steinway Model D, Pro Piano, San Francisco.

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THE WALTER M. NAUMBURG AWARDS

Walter W. Naumburg, a New York banker and life-long music lover born in 1867, con-ceived the Naumburg Awards in 1925. Be-lieving that young musicians needed New York reviews to launch their careers, he sponsored a series of auditions for prom-ising young pianists and violinists who would benefit from a recital in New York’s Town Hall. The Walter W. Naumburg Foundation was incorporated in 1926, its stated purpose being “to give public hear-ings for deserving music students.”

The first Naumburg competitions were for pianists and string players; singers were added in 1928. Subsequently compe-titions for flute, clarinet, classical guitar, composition and chamber music were added.  A distinguished array of ensem-

bles, including the Cavani, Emerson, Lark, Pacifica and Ying String Quartets; Eighth Blackbird; and the Peabody and Eroica Trios have all been winners of the Naum-burg Chamber Music Award.  Naumburg-commissioned composers have included Milton Babbitt, Richard Danielpour, Ma-rio Davidovsky, George Rochberg, Joseph Schwantner, Robert Sirota, George Tson-takis, among others.

Naumburg winners receive a cash award for career promotion, two New York recitals, and opportunities for residencies as well as other recitals and orchestral ap-pearances.

San Francisco Performances is proud to be associated with the Naumburg Founda-tion and to present its winners each sea-

son in this special concert. The tradition began in 1998, thanks to the generous sup-port of the Chiu family and continues to-day with sponsorship by George and Marie Hecksher and Roger and Satomi Miles.

Artists presented to date are: Axel Strauss, violin (1998); Stephen Salters, baritone (1999); Steven Osborne, piano (2000); Li-Wei Qin, cello (2001); Gilles Vonsattel, piano (2002); Frank Huang, violin (2003); Clancy Newman, cello (2004); Sari Gruber, soprano (2005); Da-vid Aaron Carpenter, viola (2006); Da-vid Requiro, cello (2008); Trio Cavatina (2009); Soyeon Lee, piano (2011); Tessa Lark, violin (2013); Julia Bullock, soprano (2015); Lev Sivkov, cello (2016); and The Telegraph Quartet (2017).

ARTIST PROFILE

San Francisco Performances presents the San Francisco recital debut of Albert Cano Smit.

Albert Cano Smit, 21 years old, is the First Prize Winner of the 2017 Walter W. Naumburg Piano Competition. He has per-formed as a soloist and chamber musician across Europe and America, and has been praised for playing “with the maturity of someone three times his age” (CBC Music), for his “dazzling technical and emotional dexterity” (DNA) and musicianship—“a superb musician has spoken” (Le Devoir).

His recital appearances have taken him to such prestigious venues as the Bozar’s Henry Le Boeuf Hall in Brussels, the Mai-son Symphonique in Montreal, the Palau de la Música in Barcelona, the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester, Royce Hall in Los An-geles, the Teatros del Canal in Madrid, the Palacio de Festivales in Santander, the En-ric Granados Auditorium in Lleida, and the Espai Ter in Torroella, among others. As a soloist he has performed with the Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal, the Manchester Camerata, the Blackburn Symphony Or-chestra, the Nottingham Youth Orchestra, and the American Youth Symphony.

In 2015, he gave a four-hand perfor-mance of the Schubert Fantasy with pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet at Zipper Hall in Los Angeles, followed by repeat performance in 2017 at the Wallis Annenberg Center in Beverly Hills. He has toured frequently with violinist Will Hagen, and is a pas-sionate chamber musician. He has collabo-rated with Andrej Bielow, Gary Hoffmann, the Cuarteto Casals, the Ebène Quartet, the Szymanowski Quartet, the Gerhard Quartet and Lev Sivkov.

Besides the Naumburg prize, Mr. Cano Smit was also a prizewinner of the Con-cours International de Montreal 2017 for piano and has been awarded multiple prizes. He won his first international pi-ano competition at age 14 at the 2011 In-ternational Chopin Festival in Mazovia, Poland. Since then he has won first prize at numerous competitions including the 2015 International Piano Competition “Eu-

genia Verdet” in Barcelona, Spain; the 2014 Beethoven Piano Society of Europe Junior Intercollegiate Competition; and the Cho-pin Prize at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, United Kingdom.

This season’s highlights include his New York debut  at Carnegie Hall, appearances at the Wissembourg Festival, Rheingau Musik-Festival, a recital tour of Spain fea-turing the world premiere of Miquel Oliu’s preludes, further collaborations with Will Hagen across Germany and the US, as well as his debut at L’Auditori de Barcelona.

Currently, Mr. Cano Smit studies with Ory Shihor at the Colburn School Conserva-tory of Music in Los Angeles, California. He is also under regular tutelage by Jean-Yves Thibaudet, and has benefited from major artistic advice by Andrei Gavrilov, Stephen Hough, Kevin Kenner, Ilya Itin, Christian Blackshaw, Sergei Babayan and Richard Goode. Previous teachers include Graham Caskie and Marta Karbownicka. He is an alumnus of the Verbier Festival Academy.

PROGRAM NOTES

The Art of Fugue, BWV1080

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACHBorn March 21, 1685, EisenachDied July 28, 1750, Leipzig

About 1740 Bach’s life underwent a quiet but profound change. While he retained his position as cantor at the Thomaskirche

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in Leipzig, his musical interests began to evolve. He had long before given up his initial responsibility to compose cantatas, passions, and other liturgical music, and in 1741 he relinquished the directorship of the Collegium Musicum, the small semi-pro-fessional orchestra he had led over the pre-vious decade. Now, at age 55 (and perhaps with the first indications of the eye trouble that would eventually leave him blind), Bach began to take stock of his career and redirect his energies. He put some of his ear-lier music in final form, and this involved the completion of the Mass in B minor and the ongoing publication of keyboard works. Perhaps this helped stimulate his already reawakening interest in keyboard music, and now he composed the second book of The Well-Tempered Clavier and the Goldberg Variations. And he felt a renewed interest in what had always been a consuming passion: contrapuntal music and its possibilities.

About 1740 Bach began a lengthy work consisting of a series of fugues and can-ons based on one theme. His work on this project continued across the decade, even during the years of his increasing blind-ness, and in fact the project would remain unfinished—at the time of his death on July 28, 1750, Bach was working on a triple fugue that was left incomplete. Bach had prepared the first eleven fugues for publi-cation, and after his death all of the pieces based on this one theme were gathered by his son Carl Philipp Emanuel and pub-lished in the fall of 1751 under the name The Art of Fugue, a title the composer prob-ably never heard or imagined.

In The Art of Fugue Bach preferred the title Contrapunctus—“counterpoint”—to Fugue, and he arranged the fugues in a sequence of increasing complexity. Bach’s fundamental theme seems simplicity itself: in D minor, it is only four measures long, and—even at its steady tempo—it gives the impres-sion of increasing speed, as the half notes of the opening measures give way to quar-ters in the third and to eighths in the final measure. The first group is of four relatively straightforward fugues. Contrapunctus I in-troduces Bach’s fundamental fugue subject in its simplest form, worked out here with-out countertheme. Contrapunctus IV has the subject in inversion, here developed with unusual harmonic freedom. Contrapunctus II is based on the same subject as Contra-punctus I, though Bach increases textural complexities by dotting the rhythms of the eighth notes.

Contrapunctus V–VII are stretto fugues, which introduce subsequent entries of the

fugue subject before the initial statement is complete. All three of these are mirror fugues as well, in which the subject and its inversion are treated simultaneously; Bach increases the contrapuntal complexity of each succes-sive fugue with different kinds of rhythmic elaboration. Contrapunctus V, which presents the fugue subject with its steps filled out with dotted rhythms and steady strands of eighths, offers the theme first in inversion, and the two forms—the original and the inversion—are developed simultaneously; subsequent entries of the fugue subject come after three bars rather than after the full four-bar theme is complete.

The brief Contrapunctus IX is a spirited double fugue on a new theme; as it pro-gresses it incorporates as its second subject the original fugue theme, combined at the interval of a twelfth, hence its nickname alla Duodecima.

Prelude, Chorale, and Fugue, FWV21CÉSAR FRANCKBorn December 10, 1822, LiègeDied November 8, 1890, Paris

In 1884 César Franck set out to compose a piano work inspired by Bach. Specifical-ly, Franck chose Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier as his model and planned at first to compose a Prelude and Fugue. But as he worked, Franck came to feel that the mu-sic needed a transition between these two parts, and eventually this “transition” turned into a movement of its own, the Chorale. Franck was one of the great or-ganists of the nineteenth century, yet he resisted the temptation to try to make the piano sound like an organ here. Instead, the Prelude, Chorale, and Fugue remains pi-ano music throughout, conceived specifi-cally for that sound and never reaching for a sonority beyond its capability. Franck’s former pupil Camille Saint-Saëns gave the first performance at a concert of the Socié-té Nationale in Paris on January 24, 1885.

As completed, the Prelude, Chorale, and Fugue falls into the three-part form that Franck favored in these years (other three-section works from this period include the Piano Quintet, Symphony in D minor, and the Prelude, Aria, and Finale). It is based on a thematic technique Franck had learned from Liszt, who in turn had adapted it from Schubert: the work is in a cyclic form in which certain germinal themes will reap-pear in modified form throughout. Here the method is particularly ingenious because

the themes of the Prelude and Chorale be-gin to evolve as soon as they are stated, and—at the climax of the Fugue—Franck recalls and weaves together all his themes in some impressive contrapuntal writing.

The Prelude has an improvisatory air: the arpeggiated opening measures give way to a falling figure Franck marks a ca-priccio, and he will alternate and extend both these elements across the span of this opening section. The pace slows slightly at the Chorale, where Franck does not present his principal theme immediately: a rather free introduction (marked molto cantabile, non troppo dolce) leads to the chorale melo-dy, presented in richly-arpeggiated chords that roll upward across four octaves. The structure is once again episodic, as Franck alternates the free beginning with the solemn chorale tune. As the movement proceeds, we begin to hear a foreshadow-ing of the fugue subject, and suddenly the music rushes into the Fugue. This is the longest section, and Franck puts his fugue subject through complex treatment. When Saint-Saëns, who was no admirer of Franck’s music, complained that this was not really a fugue, he was referring to the fact that some of the interludes here are not contrapuntal at all—they consist of a main line and its accompaniment. But in fact Franck’s fugue, sectional as it may be, is quite complex, treating the subject in in-version and in various rhythmic displace-ments. Near the end comes the high point of all this contrapuntal complexity: Franck recalls elements of the Prelude and then—through shimmering textures—combines the Chorale and Fugue themes and presents them simultaneously. The music drives to a sonorous climax, and Franck rounds matters off with a surprisingly “virtuosic” coda based on the Chorale theme.

Two Études No. 15 “White on White” No. 13 “L’escalier du Diable”

GYÖRGY LIGETIBorn May 28, 1923, Dicsőszentmárton, Hungary (now in Romania)Died June 12, 2006, Vienna

György Ligeti studied the piano as a young man but never became a virtuoso performer, or even a particularly accom-plished pianist. But he always longed to be a good pianist, and he made a point of play-ing the piano every day: staying in physical contact with the keyboard brought a par-ticular kind of reality and a special inspi-

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ration. In a liner note to a recording of his Études for Piano Ligeti spoke of the physical impact of the piano on him as a composer:

“I lay ten fingers on the keyboard and imagine music. My fingers copy this men-tal image as I press the keys, but this copy is very inexact: a feedback emerges between ideas and tactile/motor execution. This feedback loop repeats itself many times, enriched by provisional sketches…The re-sult sounds completely different from my initial conceptions: the anatomical real-ity of my hands and the configuration of the piano keyboard have transformed my imaginary constructs…A well-formed pia-no work produces physical pleasure.”

Shortly after his 60th birthday, Ligeti began composing a series of études for pia-no. He collected these as Book 1 (six études, published in 1985), Book 2 (eight études, 1994), and Book 3 (four études, 2001). The term étude of course means “study,” and over the last several centuries various composers—including Chopin, Debussy, and Scriabin—have written études that manage to pose technical challenges for the pianist and to offer appealing music in the process. Chopin, Debussy, and Scri-abin were all great pianists, and they wrote with a profound knowledge of the possibil-ities (and limits) of the instrument. Ligeti was not, by his own admission, a great pia-nist, but he wrote for the instrument with extraordinary skill and insight. His études pose extremely complex problems for the performer, particularly in matters of rhythm: he will often write several layers of rhythm at once, and many of his études are written on multiple staves (one of the études has the right hand playing only the white keys, the left only the black). Irregu-lar meters, rapid ostinatos, overlapping rhythms are all part of these challenges. Beyond this, Ligeti was (like Debussy) par-ticularly tuned to the variety of sounds the piano can produce, and his scores are scru-pulously notated to get the exact sonori-ties he wants. Yet these études do not exist simply as mental or digital challenges—this music varies between the luminously beautiful and the violent, between ex-treme complexity and extreme simplicity, between drama and subtle humor.

All Ligeti’s études have evocative titles, but (again like Debussy) Ligeti would often write the music first and then think of the title after the piece had been composed. On this recital Mr. Smit offers two of Ligeti’s final études. White on White (from Book 3) is in two parts at quite different tempos. Ligeti describes this music as “diatonic (al-

most exclusively on white keys) and yet not tonal.” The Andante con tenerezza (“tender-ness”) opening is built on a steady progres-sion of half notes; this music is without bar lines or metric marking, though the pat-tern here falls into the extremely unusual meter of 8/2. This quiet, almost soothing, progression of chords reaches a moment of silence, then rips forward at a furious pace, restrained only at the quiet close.

L’escalier du diable (“The Devil’s Stair-case”) is from Book 1. It is marked Presto legato ma leggiero and is set in 12/8, though Ligeti groups the eighth notes so asym-metrically that any sense of a steady pulse is lost. Their pulsing, tumbling rush forms an ominous vamp over which bits of theme, marked capriccioso, are heard. The music grows to a great climax marked minaccioso e maestoso (“threatening and majestic”), which is to be played with such ferocity that Ligeti marks it octuple forte. Quiet in-terludes break into this violence before the music makes a long fade into silence. Ligeti stresses that the final measure should be si-lenzio assoluto: “absolute silence.”

Humoreske in B-flat Major, Opus 20

ROBERT SCHUMANNBorn June 10, 1810, ZwickauDied July 29, 1856, Endenich

Like so many other young composers, Schumann felt the lure of Vienna, and he moved there during the winter of 1838–39, sizing up the city and the opportunities for him there. But unlike Haydn, Mo-zart, Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, and Mahler, Schumann was not captivated by the charm of that fabled city. He was un-happy in Vienna, disliked the people he

met, and came to realize that he would have to make his career somewhere else. His months there were not wasted, howev-er. He visited the brother of Franz Schubert and among that composer’s dusty papers found the manuscript for the “Great” C-Major Symphony, which he immediately sent to Mendelssohn, who performed it in March 1839.

During his brief and lonely visit to Vi-enna, Schumann composed a great deal of music for solo piano. Among these works was the Humoreske, completed in Febru-ary 1839. One should be careful of that title. It has come to mean a spirited and capricious piece of music, but Schumann’s use of that title is more elusive—it here suggests music of sharply unpredictable character. His Humoreske is long (over 25 minutes) and made up of a collection of brief sections meant to fuse into one var-ied tapestry. The mood shifts in Humor-eske are especially striking—this is mer-curial music, by turns playful, wistful, spirited, dark. Schumann’s performance markings suggest the range of emotional content here—among his instructions to the pianist are “Very fast and light,” “Simple and tender,” “Inward,” and “Very lively.” Humoreske is also quite varied from a technical standpoint, ranging from straightforward chordal lyricism to brilliant virtuoso passages (one section is written in three staves).

Aware of Schumann’s fondness for cryp-tic titles and musical games, scholars have searched for a unifying concept behind this multifaceted music, but that may be a fruitless task. Rather than trying to im-pose a unity that may not be there, it is far better to enjoy this music precisely for its wildly varied character.

—Program notes by Eric Bromberger

Season Announcement Wednesday, April 11

Season details available online Wednesday, April 18

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2018–19 Season