Tuesday 28 September 2021, 19.30
CZECH-SLOVAK PIANO RECITAL Primate’s Palace – Hall of Mirrors (Primaciálne námestie 2,811 01, Bratislava, Slovakia)
Programme:
Ernő Dohnányi: Ruralia hungarica Eugen Suchoň: Sonata rustica Ferenc Liszt: Festive Polonaise – for four hands
INTERVAL
Claude Debussy: Pour le piano Béla Bartók: Fourteen Bagatelles
Performed by: Kristina Smetanova - piano Vojtek Jan - piano Mihály Berecz - piano
Ernő Dohnányi (1877–1960) was born in Bratislava (Pozsony, Pressburg), and one of his most frequently played works is the Ruralia hungarica, which he dedicated to his mother, and which was first performed by the composer in 1924 in Pécs. The piece attests to deep patriotism and uses folk songs from Transylvania. Dohnányi often played it on the piano later too, and he also conducted the particularly popular orchestral version (he made several transcriptions of the work). Eugen Suchoň (1908–1993) was one of the most important Slovak composers of the mid- and late 20th century, and composed the Sonata rustica for his wife, who was a pianist. The three-movement work well demonstrates what an important source of inspiration Slovak folk music was for the composer. Just as Dohnányi did with Ruralia hungarica, so Suchoň later transcribed Sonata rustica for orchestra, under the title Symfonietta rustica. The first half of the programme concludes with the splendid Festive Polonaise composed in 1876 for a princely wedding in Weimar by one of the most influential pianists and composers of the 19th century, Ferenc Liszt. In the second half, Mihály Berecz, one of the most talented young Hungarian pianists, plays a piece by a French master who was a fundamental influence on great Hungarian composers of the first half of the 20th century, such as Bartók, Kodály, and Lajtha. An excellent pianist himself, Claude Debussy also breathed new life into the language of music; his suite Pour le piano was written at the turn of the century and was first performed in 1902. Even the titles of the movements evoke the Baroque: Prélude, Sarabande and Toccata. The prelude is mostly characterized by a motoric rhythm, and the movement closes with a lengthy cadence in the style of a free improvisation. Slower in tempo, with an elegant, refined air, a Sarabande was almost always present in Baroque suites. (This movement by Debussy was orchestrated by his younger contemporary, Ravel.) The vivid, perpetuum mobile style Toccata has a central section of radiant lyricism, and is a late gem of this typically Baroque genre, which exploits the instrument’s capabilities. Bartók’s cycle Fourteen Bagatelles was written only a few years after Debussy’s piece, in 1908. It is characterized by daring innovations such as bitonality. Even the appearance of the score for the very first piece is quite shocking, for while the key signature for the upper part is four sharps, that for the lower has four flats, in other words the two parts are in two distant keys. Some pieces in the cycle are based on folk music, for instance the fourth uses a folk song Bartók collected in Tolna County, and the fifth a Slovak folk song collected in Gömör County. The thirteenth piece is like a funeral march, and carries the title Elle est morte (She is dead); in it Bartók evokes the split with his youthful sweetheart Stefi Geyer. The ironic tone of the closing piece is also a working through of the bitterness of this disappointment in love: Ma mie qui danse (My lover dances). This movement will perhaps be the most familiar to the audience, because Bartók orchestrated it as the second movement of his orchestral piece Two Portraits (the movements are titled: An Ideal, A Grotesque).
Performers
Kristína Smetanová started studying piano with her first teacher Róbert Kohútek. From an early age she was also interested in composition, her first steps were guided by well-known Slovak composers Víťazoslav Kubička and Ilja Zeljenka.
In the years 2008–2014, she studied piano in the class of Peter Čerman and composition with Stanislav Hochel. Her thesis for composition studies was the Symphony of Cursed Creatures. Other important compositions are Theory of String Quartet, Dorian String Quintet, The Forgotten Sonata for Cello and Piano, and The Blue Exhale of November Night for viola and piano. She has taken part in several masterclasses, such as Musica Arvenzis in Dolný Kubín (Viktor Derevianko), and TIHMS Summer Academy in the Netherlands, where she worked on her repertoire with professors Ewa Kupiec, Balász Szokolay, Jacques Rouvier, Bernd Goetzke, and Claudio Martínez Mehner.
In 2019 she was accepted for doctoral studies at the Academy of Performing Arts, in the class of Ida Černecká. During her studies, she has won several prizes, such as the first prize at the international competition in Citta di Barletta, Italy, the Grand Prix at the international competition in Vienna on The 21st Century Art, and the first prize at the Yamaha Scholarship Award. As a soloist she has performed with the Slovak Philharmonic in J. S. Bach’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 1 in D minor BWV 1052. In chamber music, she is active mainly in the Devanas piano duo with the pianist Júlia Novosedlíková.
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Jan Vojtek Pianist Jan Vojtek was born in Brno in 1995. He graduated with an MA degree from the Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, where he studied with Attila Némethy and Balázs Réti. He has successfully participated in several competitions, such as the Prague Junior Note (2003), the International Virtuosi per Musica di Pianoforte Competition (2007), the Kaunas Sonorum International Competition (2011), the Prague Talent Competition (2012) and the Euregio Piano Award International Piano Competition (2018). During his studies, he participated in a one-month study programme at the Tokyo College of Music and in the Tel-Hai International Piano Masterclass in Israel, where he was awarded the Marina Bondarenko Prize as the best student of the Masterclass. In the 2017/18 season, Jan Vojtek was one of the laureates of the L´Europe du piano project, and has recently made his debut at the Piano aux Jacobins and Piano en Valois festivals in France, as well as solo and chamber music concerts in Portugal and Germany. He regularly performs with orchestras such as the Brno Philharmonic, the Győr Philharmonic and the Olomouc Moravian Philharmonic. He is currently working with his Trio Bohémo, which has performed in Lithuania, the Netherlands, Italy, Hungary, Belgium and Switzerland, and has been invited to give debut concerts at the Musikverein in Vienna and Wigmore Hall in London. In 2021, he is one of the recipients of the Annie Fischer scholarship
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One of the most outstanding personalities of the young generation of Hungarian pianists is Mihály Berecz, who in 2013 debuted at the age of 16 with Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G major at the Béla Bartók National Concert Hall in Budapest conducted by Zoltán Kocsis. The highly successful concert was followed by several invitations in which Mihály Berecz played under conductors such as Tamás Vásáry (with whom he performed Liszt’s Hungarian Fantasy at the Hungarian State Opera House), or András Keller (with whom he performed Debussy's Fantasy and Beethoven's Piano Concerto in G major). He has also worked with Kálmán Záborszky, György Vashegyi, Tamás Gál and Gergely Ménesi, as well as with Concerto Budapest, the National Philharmonic Orchestra, the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra, the Miskolc Symphony Orchestra, the Zugló Philharmonic Orchestra and the State Philharmonic Orchestra Košice. Among Mihály Berecz's several prestigious foreign guest appearances, of particular note was his German debut at the Konzerthaus in Berlin in 2013, where he played Liszt's Hungarian Fantasy, and then in 2017 his performance at the Berlin Philharmonie with Beethoven's Piano Concerto in C minor. In 2018, he won first prize at the 2nd Manhattan International Music Competition, and won the Harriet Cohen Prize at the Royal Academy of Music in London in the same year. In 2020 he was awarded the Junior Prima Prize, and in 2021 he won the Liszt-Bartók Prize at the Géza Anda International Competition in Zurich. Mihály Berecz began studying music at the age of seven, first playing the violin and then two years later starting the piano under the direction of Edit Major. Erzsébet Belák was his teacher at the King Saint Stephen Secondary School of Music, and since 2016 he has been pursuing his university studies in London, where he is currently studying at Christopher Elton’s class at the Royal Academy of Music. He has participated in several international master classes, where he has worked with artists such as Arie Vardi, Tamás Vásáry, Pascal Devoyon, Imogen Cooper and Malcolm Bilson.
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