Nicholas ANGELICH – piano
Conductor Andris POGA
Programme:
Magnus LINDBERG – Chorale
Robert SCHUMANN – Concerto for piano and orchestra in A minor, Op. 54
Johannes BRAHMS – Symphony No. 4 in E minor, Op. 98
In Riga for the first time – the distinguished middle-generation pianist Nicholas Angelich. His father, a violinist, is Montenegrin; his mother, a pianist born in the USSR, is of Romanian and Slovak descent; his parents met in Serbia and emigrated to the USA, so Nicholas himself was born in Cincinnati. His first piano teacher was his mother, and in an interview on jejouedupiano.com Nicholas Angelich says that her systematic work with precisely defined tasks gave him a superb foundation for everything that followed. In his late teens Angelich came to the Paris Conservatoire to study with Aldo Ciccolini and Yvonne Loriod. Among his teachers he also singles out Leon Fleisher.
Nicholas Angelich is passionately devoted to Bach, whom he has played a great deal since his teenage years; he feels Brahms deeply and has recorded his concertos with Paavo Järvi and the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra; he admires Beethoven, whom he calls a ‘difficult composer’; he loves Schumann, and speaks warmly of Stockhausen and Boulez, who in brief meetings gave him a wealth of valuable insight to “feed on for years”. For several seasons Nicholas Angelich took part in the Lugano project “Martha Argerich and Friends”, playing chamber music by Brahms, Dohnányi and Schumann with the Capuçon brothers, Lily Maisky and Argerich herself. Nicholas’s chamber partners also include Maxim Vengerov, Gérard Caussé, Joshua Bell, the “Ysaÿe Quartet” and the “Ébène Quartet”; he has performed with Myung-Whun Chung, Colin Davis, Charles Dutoit, Valery Gergiev, Daniel Harding, Kurt Masur and Marc Minkowski.
In Riga Nicholas Angelich will be the soloist in Robert Schumann’s Piano Concerto, first performed on 1 January 1846 (Schumann was then 35) – the solo part was played by the composer’s wife Clara Schumann, while at the conductor’s desk, at the head of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, stood the composer, conductor and writer Ferdinand Hiller (1811–1885), a follower of Mendelssohn and at the time a highly esteemed and richly honoured musician, to whom Schumann dedicated his Piano Concerto.
Schumann is well matched by his close friend and, in a sense, pupil Johannes Brahms, whose symphonies are the particular focus of Andris Poga and the LNSO this season. At the concert on 13 November we will hear what is probably the most popular of Brahms’s symphonies – the Fourth, written at the age of 52 and, oddly enough, very nearly the last of Brahms’s large-scale orchestral works (leaving aside the Double Concerto). The Fourth Symphony was written in the summers of 1884 and 1885 in Styria, in the heart of Austria. Of this Alpine corner the composer wrote to Hans von Bülow that his new work (that is, the Fourth Symphony) tasted “like the weather here; the cherries never turn sweet, you wouldn’t eat them”. Cherries aside – this is one of the greatest examples of the symphony ever written; it can be analysed, and yet it will still be impossible to answer the question of what is really happening in this music! One can only listen and marvel.
Opening the concert – a wizard of modern orchestral sound, Magnus Lindberg , and his beautiful, majestic composition Chorale, built on a chorale melody by Johann Rudolph Ahle, a prolific writer of sacred songs in the 17th century, Es ist genug, which speaks of taking leave of this world. This distinctive melody, opening with three rising whole tones, was used by Johann Sebastian Bach at the close of his cantata BWV 60, and it is Bach’s harmonisation that Lindberg names as the source of inspiration for writing Chorale for orchestra.
Pre-concert talks at 18.00 in the White Hall of the Great Guild!