Live performance: April 22, 2023
First Presbyterian Church
Livermore, California
Benefit concert for Valley Concert Chorale
Sergei Eduardovich Bortkiewicz was born in the Ukrainian city of Kharkov on 28 February 1877 and died in Vienna, Austria in 1952. He is buried in Vienna’s famed Zentralfriedhof Cemetery, which also contains the remains of Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Schönberg, and many other luminaries. His background and musical training mirrors that of many of his contemporaries. His mother was an accomplished pianist (a situation so common with composers of the time that it now seems almost a cliché) and co-founder of the Kharkov Music School, affiliated to the Imperial Russian Music Society where Bortkiewicz was to have his early training. He studied piano there with Albert Bensch and early influences included Anton Rubinstein and Tchaikovsky, both of whom visited the school and took part in concerts there.
Bortkiewicz described himself as a romantic and a melodist, and he had an emphatic aversion of what he called modern, atonal and cacophonous music. Bortkiewicz’s built his musical style on the structures and sounds of Chopin and Liszt, with the unmistakeable influences of Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, early Scriabin and Blumenfeld. Like Medtner, the essential characteristics of his style were already present in his earliest compositions, from around 1906, although his compositions from around 1925 became more and more personal and nostalgic. Melody, harmony and structure were essential building blocks for his musical creations. His training with Van Ark, Liadov, Jadassohn, Piutti and Reisenauer ingrained a rigorous professionalism. His colourful and delicate imagination, his idiomatic pianowriting and sensitivity to his musical ideas, combined with his undisputed gift for melody, result in a style that is instantly recognizable, attractive and appealing to many listeners.
The Prelude in E-flat minor comes from an early set of Three Morceaux, Opus 6. It displays the influence of Chopin, Liszt and Rachmaninoff. Rachmaninoff’s Elegy in E-flat minor shares a similar somber mood, as well as the exotic key. The middle section bears a certain resemblance to Wagner in both its melodic outline and harmonic progressions.
14 окт 2024
