L. V. Beethoven: Sonata in C-sharp minor, Op. 27 No. 2, “Quasi una fantasia” (“Moonlight”)
Modest Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition
One of the Top 10 Classical Music Events of the Year:
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—San Francisco Chronicle
“In Familiar Music, a Pianist Shows What He Can Do, Mr. Yakushev can do just about anything he wants . . . superb.”
—New York Times
“Yakushev was little short of heroic.”
—New York Times
Pianist Ilya Yakushev, with many awards and honors to his credit, continues to astound and mesmerize audiences at major venues on three continents.
The American Record Guide wrote, “Yakushev is one of the very best young pianists before the public today, and it doesn’t seem to matter what repertoire he plays–it is all of the highest caliber.”
Ilya has performed in prestigious venues worldwide, including Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, Davies Symphony Hall, Sejong Performing Arts Center (Seoul), Great Philharmonic Hall (St. Petersburg), and Victoria Hall (Singapore). His performances with orchestra include those with the San Francisco Symphony, BBC Concert Orchestra, Boston Pops, Rochester Philharmonic, Utah Symphony, and many others.
In 2023-24, dozens of engagements bring Ilya from New York City to the West Coast for recitals, concertos, and—with members of the renowned St. Lawrence String Quartet—chamber music.
Winner of the 2005 World Piano Competition which took place in Cincinnati, OH, Mr. Yakushev received his first award at age 12 as a prizewinner of the Young Artists Concerto Competition in his native St. Petersburg. In 1997, he received the Mayor of St. Petersburg’s Young Talents award, and in both 1997 and 1998, he won First Prize at the Donostia Hiria International Piano Competition in San Sebastián, Spain. Mr. Yakushev was a recipient of the prestigious Gawon International Music Society’s Award in Seoul, Korea.
Ilya studied with legendary pianist Vladimir Feltsman at the Mannes College of Music in New York City.
He is a Yamaha artist.
Program notes
BEETHOVEN:
Admired particularly for its mysterious, gently arpeggiated, and seemingly improvised first movement, this sonata was completed in 1801, published the following year, and premiered by the composer himself at a time when his hearing was already deteriorating. The nickname “Moonlight Sonata” traces to Beethoven’s death, when the German Romantic poet Ludwig Rellstab published a review in which he likened the first movement of the piece to a boat floating in the moonlight on Switzerland’s Lake Lucerne. Beethoven dedicated the work to Countess Giulietta Guicciardi, a 16-year-old aristocrat who was briefly his student.
The Moonlight Sonata was structurally and stylistically remarkable in its day. Most sonatas of the late 17th and early 18th centuries consisted of a reasonably animated, thematically well-defined first movement, a more subdued second movement, and a vibrant final movement. The Moonlight, by contrast, offered a dreamy first movement, a somewhat more lively second movement, and a final movement that was outright tempestuous. Such was the furor of the Moonlight’s finale that several of the piano strings snapped and became entangled in the hammers during the work’s premiere. Indeed, as his hearing declined, Beethoven was known to play with a heavy hand, likely so that he could better hear the music.
The overall style of the Moonlight Sonata was also innovative, as indicated by the subtitle “Sonata quasi una fantasia” (“Sonata in the manner of a fantasia”), which was appended to the work by the composer himself. The subtitle reminds listeners that the piece, although technically a sonata, is suggestive of a free-flowing, improvised fantasia. Indeed, arpeggios—playing of the notes of a chord sequentially, which remains a common improvisational device in the 21st century—permeate all three movements of the Moonlight Sonata and ultimately generate the themes and motifs that form the foundation of the work.
—Betsy Schwarm
MUSSORGSKY:
Modeste Mussorgsky produced his Pictures at an Exhibition to perpetuate the memory of a friend. In the process, he created a monument far more massive and lasting than his subject.
Mussorgsky was an ardent Russian nationalist, but he was far more interested in folk art than in the grandiose ornamental designs of the aristocracy. Mussorgsky’s career began in the military, but he resigned from the life of a fastidious officer to study music and supported himself as a civil servant.
Yet, his soul was far less complacent than one would expect from a lifelong bureaucrat–he lived in a commune and the radical ideology he absorbed there infused his music, as he devoted himself to seeking truth in art by crafting a natural style without classical artifice.
Victor Hartmann was a close friend who shared Mussorgsky’s ideals in his field of architecture and painting. When Hartmann died in 1874, aged only 39, Mussorgsky was devastated. In abject bitterness, he wrote: “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat live on and creatures like Hartmann must die?” But soon his incomprehension took a more constructive tack. The following year saw a memorial exhibit of 400 Hartmann works, including sketches, watercolors, and costume designs produced mostly during the artist’s travels abroad. Locales include Poland, France, and Italy; the final movement depicts an architectural design for the capital city of Ukraine. Mussorgsky was deeply moved. Seized with inspiration, he quickly reacted to the exhibition by writing a suite of ten piano pieces dedicated to the organizer.
The work opens with a brilliant touch–a “promenade” theme that reemerges throughout as a transition amid the changing moods of the various pictures. By alternating 6/4 and 5/4 time, its regular metric “walking” pace is thrown off-balance and cleverly suggests the hesitant gait of an art lover strolling through a museum, attracted by upcoming pleasures but hesitant to leave the object at hand without a final glance at a telling detail.
The ten pictures Mussorgsky depicts are a gnome-shaped nutcracker; a troubadour plaintively singing outside an ancient castle; children vigorously playing and quarreling in a park; a lumbering wooden Polish ox-cart; a ballet of peeping chicks as they hatch from their shells; an argument between two Warsaw Jews, one haughty and vain, the other poor and garrulous; shrill women and vendors in a crowded marketplace; the eerie, echoing gloom of catacombs beneath Paris; the hut of a grotesque bone-chomping witch of Russian folk-lore; and a design for an entrance gate to Kyiv. Mussorgsky chose these subjects for the variety of moods they invoked and the opportunities they presented for a wide array of musical depictions.
Alcoholism and severe depression not only cut short Mussorgsky’s life but plagued his most creative years and prevented him from advocating his work, which succumbed to the dismissive attitude of the cultural gatekeepers. Fame came only after his early death at age 42 when well-meaning admirers indulgently undertook to edit his operas to correct what they perceived to be artistic flaws. Only in more recent times have the originals been revived to display their frank elemental power.
The Pictures at an Exhibition met a similar fate. The score remained unpublished until 1886, five years after Mussorgsky’s death. But then, almost immediately, an amazing phenomenon began–while the original version generated little interest among pianists, over two dozen composers were seized by a compulsion to orchestrate it, the most famous of which was Maurice Ravel.
And what about the piano version that started it all? Although there had been others, it was a recording of an extraordinary recital in Sofia, Bulgaria by Sviatoslav Richter in 1958 that refocused public attention on the original. This recording fully vindicated Mussorgsky’s work as a masterpiece in its own right, without the need for translation, embellishment, or improvement. Hartmann would have been proud of his friend’s work!
—Peter Gutmann
