Music Chamber

JS Bach arr. Busoni: Organ Prelude and Fugue in D major

Chopin: Scherzo No 2 in B flat minor Op 31

Chopin:  Nocturne in E major Op 62/2

Prokofiev Sonata No 2 in D minor Op 14

 

Olga Stezhko was born in Minsk, Belarus. She started to play the piano at the age of five and entered the Republican Music. In 2002 she was awarded one of only a handful of scholarships to study at the United World College of the Adriatic in Italy, In 2004 she came to the Royal Academy of Music in London on a scholarship, graduating with 1st Class Honours in 2008. She completed an MMus at the RAM with distinction and all piano prizes in 2010, studying under Ian Fountain, supported by the RAM and some of the most prestigious UK scholarships such as the Myra Hess Award from the Musicians' Benevolent Fund and Philharmonia Orchestra/Martin Musical Scholarship Fund as well as Mr Massimo Prelz Oltramonti. Olga has won many international piano competitions, prizes and awards including the Grand Prix at the First European Piano Competition Halina Czerny-Stefanska In Memoriam in Poland and 1st Prize at the N. Rubinstein International Piano Competition. Recently she was chosen as one of the three winners of the Tillett Trust Young Artists' Platform scheme and made her debut in Wigmore Hall as part of The Monday Platform in September 2010. Olga was invited to participate in various masterclasses with such distinguished musicians as the late Halina Czerny-Stefanska, the late Alexander Satz, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Lilya Zilberstein, Garrick Ohlsson, Dmitry Bashkirov, Piers Lane, Fou Ts'ong, Howard Shelley, Bruno Canino and Richard Goode. The 2010-2011 season includes performances at Wigmore Hall and Barbican Hall in London, Salle Cortot in Paris, various British festivals and as a soloist with the Poznan Philharmonic.

 

Several of Chopin’s large works came in fours: Impromptus, Ballades, and the same number of Scherzos. The second, this B-flat minor, was composed in 1837 and bears the full imprint of the composer’s unique creative qualities. It is big and brawny, filled with magical harmonic coloration and huge pianistic flair; it is also a little wordy (redundancy is one of the small flaws of each of the Scherzos), but that is a small price to pay for the boldness of spirit portrayed. In the present piece, the very opening gesture informs us that a drama is about to unfold. Following a long-held B-flat, three soft and quick ascending notes lead to a longer note; this is immediately repeated. After a pause, a very loud B-flat is followed by a long-held chord and in turn by four emphatic chords. The opening four notes return (three-longs-and-a-short, a famous enough rhythmic combination by 1837), and they become a kind of key which throughout the piece opens the door to a floodgate of tension and drama, as well as some pulsating Chopin poetics. The extended opening section ends with a set of trills that act as a trajectory throwing the right hand up to the top of the keyboard for a swath of descending notes. Then there are some toss-away ascending and descending single notes that prepare for the first lyric idea. But there is still tension in this lyricism by way of the melody’s impetuosity and the accompaniment’s wonderfully buoyant cushion that provides a kind of breathless momentum. From this point on the musical incidents accumulate. The modulations are heady, the filigree and the passage work dazzling, and the intensity gripping, the latter particularly as Chopin sets the final pages ablaze with an unbridled passion that is the antithesis of the pale Chopin whose reputation is for some based on moon-drenched nocturnes and tender waltzes. This is brilliant, big-boned Chopin, muscular music handled with structural integrity.

 

Although the Two Nocturnes, Op 62 were composed three full years after the pair of Opus 55 works by the same title, the freedom of phrase design and thematic content in these, Frédéric Chopin's final two essays in the form (the posthumous Nocturne in E minor, Op 72 actually being a much earlier composition), indicate a compositional mindset very much drawing from and building upon the work he did on the second of the Op.55 pieces. The Opus 62 Nocturnes are so unique in every detail that it took musical Europe several decades to begin to appreciate just how important they really are: even as late as the early twentieth century it was common to dismiss these works as the products of a disease-weakened spirit, sickly, defeated, and sadly lacking in inspiration. Nothing could be further from the truth, as two such intimately expressive works as these-one is almost willing to assert that such musical privacy has no place in the public concert-hall-have rarely found their way onto paper. The Nocturne in E major, Op.62, No.2 was the last Nocturne published during Chopin's lifetime. A warm, sustained (and entirely unsentimental) melody fills the opening and concluding portions of the piece. The central section is, like so many earlier Nocturnes, more agitated in tone, though the effect is less worldly than in those previous examples, and more purely rhetorical. There is a kind of dialogue, containing many subtle melodic and intervallic imitations, between the two outer voices of the part- writing. During the coda Chopin seems reluctant to let go, almost as if, though a full three years from death, he guessed this to be his last entry in one of his most beloved genres.

 

This sonata was composed only a few years after the First sonata Op. 1.  During this short period of time, Prokofiev’s musical language had been further defined with the compositions of Suggestion diabolique Op.4, Toccata Op.11 and Piano concerto no.1 Op.10. Many of his themes in this sonata capture the stylistic traits from the aforementioned works.  Both the first and second themes of the first movement begins in a conventional Romantic way. The first movement starts as if it is a flower blossoming, by unfolding from the middle of the piano outwards. This is interspersed with sporadic sudden changes of mood. The second movement is very much like 2 earlier works he wrote, Suggestion diabolique and Toccata. It is a very short movement with a constant rhythmic drive in the middle voices with the crossing of hands which adds to the visual and visceral excitement of the movement. The middle section has a complete change of mood, and it is likened to a polka dance. One listener once told me that this second movement reminded me of a train chugging along the rail tracks! The third movement is a fairytale, a genre which Prokofiev frequently turned to in his compositions. There is an unhurried unfolding of the melody, a mysterious monotonous ‘drone’ and they all weave together to create a soothing story to tell. This story is so compelling that movement ends as if the narrator had gotten lost in his or her thoughts, forgetting to finish the tale. The last movement is particularly striking in its range of contrast. It starts off tarantella-like with a triplet pattern – very much like Saint-Saens’ piano Concerto no.2 that Prokofiev would have heard at the conservatory. The bridge sections sound like a light fanfare, which then goes back to the tarantella spirit. This Sonata finishes with the familiar cascading arpeggio and a few decisive chords bringing the sonata to a brilliant and charismatic end.