““ONE OF THE TOP 20 MUSIC FESTIVALS AROUND THE WORLD TO ATTEND THROUGH THE REST OF THE SUMMER” ”
The San Francisco International Piano Festival is supported, in part, by a grant from the Ross McKee Foundation.
Romantic Exaltation
Welcome to the 6th annual San Francisco International Piano Festival, celebrating the multifaceted traditions of Romanticism in repertoire and performance. After 5 seasons of eclecticism, world premieres, and major works of the 18th and 20th centuries, the festival presents a journey through a definitive era in the piano’s history and development- the 19th century. Join us for a deep dive into Romanticism, a celebration of the solo piano recital, and a rich cross-section of pianism from rising stars to seasoned artists.
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“Music was born free; and to win freedom is its destiny…
For the musical art-work exists, before its tones resound and after they die away, complete and intact. “
-Ferrucio Busoni (1866-1924) from Sketch of a New Esthetic for Music (1907)
Busoni’s characteristically paradoxical statement quoted above points to an objective essence behind each composition, an audacious suggestion of absolutism in music. How can we distinguish between the essential and the idiomatic? Where are the governing principles that outline a hierarchy of musical values? The very idea that such clarity could be defined by an individual reveals the crux of the matter: the Romantic generation did not see individuality and interpretive fidelity as mutually exclusive. In fact, the Artist was entrusted with transmitting a work’s spiritual core rather than reproducing its “transcription” in the form of notation. Liszt referred to the Pontius Pilate syndrome whenever a performer tried to eschew personal conviction. The notion of allowing the music to “speak for itself’ is reflective of a modern aesthetic in which the text of a score has superseded its meaning. For this reason, Dinu Lipatti advocated for the Urspirit of a work and not only its Urtext. The journey of balancing these elements of fidelity, scholarship, and personal expression are the work of a lifetime. Too inflexible and the music cannot breathe; too free and the structure is lost. Many avant-garde paintings still have a frame.
It is this dichotomy that the piano festival explores this season, celebrating the Romantic generation and its search for the essence of a work. We are incredibly fortunate that the dawn of acoustic recordings overlaps with many of these composers and their students, giving us a wealth of information and inspiration upon which to draw.
We celebrate Sergei Rachmaninoff’s 150th year, not only honoring his compositions but his artistic philosophy and milieu. Rachmaninoff maintained a style of pianism and composition that was firmly rooted in the 19th century, though the influence of his more progressive colleagues and Jazz can be heard in his later compositions. It was and is a decidedly unpopular perspective in our modern world, and yet it was shared by other great composers like Fauré, Saint-Saens, Medtner, Richard Strauss, and others. We are certainly the beneficiaries of these composers’ steadfastness and authenticity amidst a changing world.
-Jeffrey LaDeur
“The new kind of music seems to create not from the heart but from the head. Its composers think rather than feel. They have not the capacity to make their works exalt - they meditate, protest, analyze, reason, calculate and brood, but they do not exalt.”
- Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943)
