PROGRAM
Robert Schumann: Songs of Dawn / Gesänge der Frühe (1853)
1. In a tranquil tempo
2. Animated, not too quick
3. Lively
4. Moving
5. First tranquil, then moving
Elizabeth Younan: Piano Sonata No. 2 (2024)
Alexander Scriabin: Piano Sonata No. 3 in F# Minor 'States of the Soul' (1897-98)
1. Drammatico
2. Allegretto
3. Andante
4. Presto con fuoco
PERFORMERS
Piano: Lee Dionne
Listening Guide
Pianist Lee Dionne brings together works by Schumann and Scriabin -- composers marked by their creative imaginations -- in a two-part series.
Of Robert Schumann's Gesänge der Frühe, Clara Schumann, his wife and lifelong creative partner, wrote in her private diary: "dawn-songs, very original as always but hard to understand, their tone is so very strange."
The pieces are certainly innovative, pushing Schumann's equal-parts poetic, evocative, and phantasmagorical style to the point of a near spiritual experience -- (wait: is this music actually life-changing or is it just hype? Listen to find out...) The quieter movements (1,2 & 5) sit like a Buddhist ko-an, cryptically simple. Extroverted movements (3 & 4) revel in resonance, conjuring sound castles like the vision of a gilded age.
Our listening expands in response to Schumann, leaving us space in which newer works can unfold: the sonatas of Lizzy Younan and Alexander Scriabin take us on journeys characterised by vivid externalisation of inner emotions. Lizzy's music perches above a crossroads of excitement, anxiety, neuroticism, and hope. The sonata depicts her move to New York and the ups and downs of moving one's life across the world. The verdict is essentially postive. We gradually escalate on a ride towards ecstatic joy... and its aftermath.
In the aftermath of all things comes Scriabin, clinically visionary with Messianic tendencies. We accept this when we hear the music. His expressively-4K Third Sonata charts the turbulence of a soul's journey over the course of its life as few works before or after have done. Intrepid performers are left a combination of spiritually fulfilled and physically and emotionally gutted by the work's end. We'll leave you to decide its effect on the listener.