Panorama

A panorama of styles and eras; a panorama of forms; and finally, a panorama of the most diverse emotional landscapes and states of mind.

The concert begins with two piano sonatas that could hardly be more different. Joseph Haydn’s Sonata was composed in the 1770s, at a time when the classical three- or four-movement sonata could still be considered a relatively young form. Alban Berg composed his Op. 1 at the beginning of the twentieth century in Vienna – a place and a time of fundamental transformation, poised between beginning and end.

Haydn allows his music to speak, declaim and sing to us in wonderfully varied ways – at once witty and humorous. His richly textured opening movement gives way to music in the “old” style, before the sonata comes to a sparkling close with a Rondo in Presto.

Berg initially intended his Op. 1 to become a multi-movement sonata as well, before, through his exchanges with his teacher Arnold Schoenberg, he came to realise that he had already created an entire work within this single movement.

The insight underlying this transformation – that musical form can become deeply personal – provides the framework for Chopin’s music. In his Nocturnes op. 27, music acquires an almost unprecedented intimacy, while the Polonaise héroïque provides the cue for the second half of the programme: pathos and heroism.

“I have tried to give the pathetic, if there is any of it in the piece, different colours,” the young Robert Schumann wrote of his Symphonic Études Op. 13. The nuances of this music are infinite as it makes its way through sixteen variations towards the Finale: from grief to defiance, from melancholy to euphoria, the music forges its path towards a climax in which one hero becomes many.

United in a collective march – shoulder to shoulder with performer and audience alike – the work ends in ecstatic jubilation!