Description
The Romantic theme of the wanderer, the free spirit undertaking a journey into the self, runs through Seong-Jin Chos latest solo album. The globetrotting Korean pianists program includes two monuments of the 19th-century repertoire Schuberts Wanderer Fantasy and Liszts Piano Sonata in B minor. The Wanderer also contains Alban Bergs Piano Sonata Op. 1, a single-movement work of extraordinary intensity. All three compositions grow from a simple theme or melodic gesture which is then transformed in the course of a voyage of variation, development and discovery.
This music looks forwards and backwards at once, notes Seong-Jin Cho. What fascinates me is the composers ability to create great art from just a few elements. The way they develop the works entire fabric from a single motif is fascinating. What creativity! What imagination!
The Fantasie in C major D760, known as the Wanderer Fantasy because it quotes from the composers eponymous song Der Wanderer, dates from 1822. The four-movement works invention, emotional range and technical challenges make enormous demands on its performers. The emphasis should fall on the second word of the title, says Cho. The work deals above all with fantasy, with the imagination, and thus with artistic license.
Liszts B minor Sonata, completed in 1853 and dedicated to Robert Schumann, shocked many early audiences with its symphonic scale and revolutionary single-movement form. It deals with life, love and death, with Mephistopheles and Faust, Seong-Jin Cho comments. I see these thirty minutes of music as a life cycle, with the climax in the middle. Playing Liszt is like entering a state of ecstasy.
Bergs Piano Sonata, also in B minor, grew from sketches made while he was studying composition with Arnold Schoenberg and was finished in 1909. Cho first discovered the work as a teenager thanks to Glenn Goulds recording, and went on to study its form and content in depth. Every detail is magnificently worked out, he notes; there are echoes of Wagner, references to Beethovens manner, and even to French Impressionism.
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