Peter Donohoe
Olivier Fleury/Festival International de Musique de Dinard
The complete Scriabin
piano sonatas
Sunday 23 April 2017 3.00pm
Milton Court Concert Hall
Part 1
Scriabin
Piano Sonata No 1
Piano Sonata No 4
Piano Sonata No 9, ‘Black Mass’
Piano Sonata No 5
interval 30 minutes
Part 2
Scriabin
Piano Sonata No 6
Piano Sonata No 7, ‘White Mass’
Piano Sonata No 8
interval 30 minutes
Part 3
Scriabin
Piano Sonata No 2, ‘Sonata-Fantasy’
Piano Sonata No 3
Piano Sonata No 10
Peter Donohoe piano
Gerard McBurney creative director
Mike Tutaj projection designer
Peter Donohoe’s recording of the complete Scriabin
sonatas will be available for purchase during the
intervals. He will be doing a signing in the foyer
following the concert.
Part of Barbican Presents 2016–17
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during the performance. Taking photographs,
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Welcome
Today we have a rare opportunity to explore
all 10 of Scriabin’s numbered piano sonatas
in a single concert. It’s a challenge that few
pianists could even contemplate, demanding
not only strength and stamina but also
the utmost finesse in order to convey the
heightened emotion of Scriabin’s musical
language. But in Peter Donohoe we have
just the artist to rise to such a challenge.
Scriabin was the first Russian composer
truly to make the piano sonata his own.
Over the course of a little over two
decades he took the genre from High
Romanticism to something altogether
more mysterious and disturbing.
Scriabin’s synaesthesia meant that to him
music was inextricably linked with colour
and so the purely aural experience is today
enriched by visuals and texts that have
been put together by Gerard McBurney,
a great authority on this era of musical
history, and projection designer Mike Tutaj.
Peter Donohoe has recently released a
highly acclaimed recording of the complete
Scriabin sonatas, and there will be the
opportunity not only to buy the set but also
to have them signed after the concert.
I hope you enjoy what promises to be an
extraordinary event.
Paul Keene
Classical Music Programmer
Barbican Classical Music Podcasts
2
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Available on iTunes, Soundcloud and the Barbican website
This was also a time of tremendous social,
political and spiritual upheaval, of murders
and assassinations, a disastrous war against
the Japanese, the brutal bloodshed of the 1905
Revolution, and – among many other selfappointed religious and mystical seers – the rise to
dominance at the glittering court of Nicholas and
Alexandra of the preposterous figure of Rasputin.
Amid this kaleidoscope of invention and confusion,
Scriabin – whose creative life began in the late
1880s and ended with his sudden death in 1915
– occupied a special place. For his detractors,
and there were quite a few, he was a horrifying
decadent, an outrageous egotist leading an
openly dissolute life (shamelessly abandoning his
wife and children for a younger lover by whom
he had further children) and writing music that
glorified eroticism and played fast and loose with
fantasies about its power to transform or even end
the world. But for his supporters and admirers, he
was a remarkable performer, a warm-hearted
and generous friend and the creator of a kind of
music never dreamed of before, the possessor
of an imagination opening vistas of new worlds
of light and freedom, no longer hemmed in by
materialism and selfishness, but liberated into
dimensions of time and space where, as Scriabin
himself told one of his pupils, ’the stars are singing’.
From the time of his very earliest compositions,
written when he was still a teenager, Scriabin was
convinced music should never be an object only
in itself and held apart from life, believing rather
that it was there to be intimately connected to all
human experience, to our sensual and our spiritual
existence, to great dramas and rituals, to words
and poetry (his own poetry sailed exuberantly on
the Symbolist flood that was the fashion of the time),
and to what he perceived, with his synaesthetic
gift, as the way that everything we hear and
everything we see are blended, joined, almost one
and the same. At different times, he wrote and
spoke of the colours of his music, of the constantly
changing shapes that chords and rhythms and
melodies could summon up, almost like a spiritualist
at a séance. His scores bristle with detailed
and evocative markings designed to help the
performers imagine what the listeners see and feel.
With Scriabin long dead, it would be pointless
to try and recreate literally his multi-sensual
dreams. But as for him all music was almost
simultaneously a drama, a poem and a moving
picture (intriguing that his life coincided with the
invention of cinema!), and as his 10 great sonatas
trace the whole course of his creative journey
from the barnstorming Romanticism of his youth
to the light-as-gossamer mysticism of his final
years, so it seemed appropriate on this occasion
to conjure up, through his own words and those of
his friends, and the gentlest projected backdrops,
a faint impression of some shadows of the world
and mind from which his music – always beautiful,
always mysterious – first sprang into life, more
than 100 years ago.
Introduction © Gerard McBurney
3
Even in his own short lifetime, Scriabin was
recognised by his contemporaries as one of
the most dazzling and controversial leaders
of what Russians proudly call their ’Silver Age’
(approximately the last three decades of the
Russian Empire, from around 1890 to the 1917
Revolution). This was a time of extraordinary
artistic richness in St Petersburg and Moscow,
with great poets such as Blok, Akhmatova,
Mandelstam and Mayakovsky, the visionary
novelist Andrey Bely, Chekhov’s plays and stories,
flocks of modernist architects, painters, jewellers
and designers, Roerich, Chagall, Vrubel, Serov
and Goncharova, Serge Diaghilev and his World
of Art and Ballets Russes, dancers such as Pavlova,
Nijinsky and Karsavina, the choreographer
Fokine, theatrical revolutionaries such as
Stanislavsky and Meyerhold, and pioneering early
colour photographers such as Prokudin-Gorsky
and Andreyev who documented on glass plates
in rainbow hues the fragile world shimmering
all around them. Music was no poor relation:
it was a period that began with Tchaikovsky’s
opera The Queen of Spades and his ‘Pathétique’
Symphony and ended with The Rite of Spring and
Rachmaninov’s Vespers; one that included the late
operas of Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky’s Firebird,
Petrushka and The Nightingale and the first two
piano concertos of Prokofiev.
Introduction
Scriabin: mystic or madman?
Alexander Scriabin (1872–1915)
Piano Sonata No 1 in F minor, Op 6 (1892)
1 Allegro con fuoco
2 [crotchet= 40]
3 Presto
4 Funèbre
Piano Sonata No 4 in F sharp major,
Op 30 (1903)
1 Andante –
2 Prestissimo volando
Piano Sonata No 9, Op 68, ‘Black Mass’
(1912–13)
Moderato quasi andante
Piano Sonata No 5, Op 53 (1907)
Allegro. Impetuoso. Con stravaganza – Languido – Presto con allegrezza
4
Peter Donohoe begins today’s odyssey with
Scriabin’s earliest numbered sonata (if we
discount the youthful Sonate-Fantaisie in G sharp
minor of 1886). It grew from the first major setback
of Scriabin’s life: he had just graduated from the
Moscow Conservatoire, where he had gained a
gold medal for his piano playing but had failed
to make the grade as a composer. He had also
had the misfortune to be in the same piano class
as one of the greatest of all virtuosos, Josef
Lhevinne. In attempting to compete with him,
Scriabin had overdone the studies and ended up
with what we would today probably diagnose as
repetitive strain injury in his right hand. Doctors
were gloomy, telling him he wouldn’t recover.
Scriabin was a great one for recording every
passing mood and his notebook at this time is
full of anguish and self-doubt mixed in with a fair
helping of anger. His First Sonata was, he wrote,
a cry ‘against fate, against God’. Perhaps it’s not
by chance that its opening is launched by the left
hand.
Scriabin’s graduaton recital had included
Beethoven’s Op 109 Sonata, a relatively
unorthodox choice but one whose use of trills,
particularly in the last movement, was to play
a more and more important role in the Russian
composer’s own sonatas, even though he claimed
to be influenced by no-one. This First Sonata,
along with the Third, was also exactly the kind
of multi-movement piece that you find not only
in Beethoven but also in Schumann, Chopin
and Brahms. The first movement is all about the
contrast between brute strength – its textures
sometimes becoming almost Brahmsian in their
richness – and the most delicate filigree.
The Fourth Sonata, the first to be written in the
new century, is arguably Scriabin’s earliest
out-and-out masterpiece in the genre. Though
there might seem to be an irony in this most
outlandish of mindsets conforming to something
as traditional as a sonata, in fact it’s the structural
underpinning that gives his music much of its
power. The year 1903 was one of considerable
upheaval in Scriabin’s life; it saw the death of
his patron, publisher and father-figure Mitrofan
Belaiev but also his increasing fascination with
the philosophies of Nietzsche and the theosophist
Madame Blavatsky. A hint of Scriabin’s mindset
can be grasped from his own programme for the
sonata, which involves a journey to a far-off star
though, as ever, a sense of the erotic is just below
the surface, as witness line such as:
‘O bring me to thee, far distant star!
Bathe me in trembling rays,
Sweet light!’
Fortunately Scriabin was a far greater composer
than he was a poet. But motifs recur: light, colour,
dance, flight, and the sense that the cosmos and
the ego are as one. There’s an unmistakable
aura of longing in the first movement (an effect
underlined by his references to Wagner’s ‘Tristan’
Prelude) but just as striking is the way that, by
suspending the harmonies, Scriabin imbues
the music with the most ravishing luminosity.
Programme notes
The second movement, which follows without
a break, demands real fleetness on the part of
the player not just physically but mentally too.
The musicologist Leonid Sabaneyev recalled
Scriabin demanding: ‘I want it as fast as possible,
on the verge of the possible … it must be a flight
at the speed of light, straight towards the sun.’
Scriabin’s jerkily skipping rhythms become ever
more airborne, culminating in vibrant repeated
chords in which the first movement’s main theme
reappears. The mood by the end is one of
tumultuous, sensuous joyfulness, the sensation not
only aural but also visual, as the pianist shows he
is master of the entire keyboard.
Extreme concision is the order of the day in
Scriabin’s Ninth Sonata, written nearly a decade
after the Fourth. But its impact is out of all
proportion to its scale. This is in part thanks to its
obsessive qualities, in this case the composer’s
fixation with the interval of a minor 9th – a
profoundly unstable interval – which shapes
and colours the sonata every bit as potently as
do the incessant trills, which the composer once
said represented ‘palpitation … trembling … the
vibration in the atmosphere’.
The title ‘Black Mass’ is not the composer’s own
(unlike ‘White Mass’, the name he gave his Seventh
Sonata): it was coined by Alexei Podgayetsky, a
pianist, theosophist and friend of the composer,
but it isn’t inappropriate for a piece every bit as
satanic as Ravel’s ‘Scarbo’ or Berlioz’s ‘Witches’
Sabbath’. One of the many paradoxes about this
megalomaniac of a character is that though he
rejected Classical forms (just as he denied any
influences on his music, despite audible echoes of
Liszt in this piece), his piano sonatas adhere to at
least some of the basic principles. And this holds
true even in the Ninth, for all its dissolution of
traditional harmony and tonality.
The work is generated essentially from just four
elements: the murmuring, chromatically falling
idea, repeated in the left hand; a dotted figure
that emerges stealthily from the accompaniment;
a repeated-note triplet, initially virtually inaudible;
and the aforementioned increasingly pervasive
trills. From these he fashions a work of frenzied
intensity, technical intricacy and a prismatic
range of sonority, with tonality pushed so far
you can sense its imminent disintegration. Even
the moments of lyricism have an edge to them,
such as the interlude over which the composer
writes avec une douceur de plus en plus
5
The slow second movement has a resigned
quality, calling to mind César Franck not only
in the chorale-like textures with which it opens
but also in the chromatically infused recitative
that follows. The fervent 12/8 Presto, powered
by left-hand octaves, sounds as if it could be a
finale but after acceleration towards a massive
climax it breaks off; then follows a series of short
phrases, pianissimo, the time signature now 9/8,
which foms a link to a funeral march (explicitly
marked Funèbre). It requires no great leap of
faith to interpret this as a funeral for Scriabin’s
hopes of pianistic greatness and fame. Within it
is a whispered passage, nearly two minutes in,
marked Quasi niente (‘almost inaudible’) that
offers balm in its simple chords. Even here, though,
dolour breaks in before the return to the chords.
When the opening march reappears we hear it
with fresh ears in the light of this glimmer of hope,
although it remains fervently in the minor to its very
close. It seems as if it’s going to die away softly,
but right at the end Scriabin hurls in an anguished,
brutal forte.
caressante et empoisonnée (with a sweetness
more and more caressing and poisonous). One
of the most remarkable aspects of this sonata
is Scriabin’s unerring pacing of it, both literally
and emotionally. Just as the initial marking of
Moderato quasi andante (which gives little hint of
the instability of the music) is finally abandoned for
faster and faster tempos, so the elements of the
piece are shredded, juxtaposed and reintegrated
with ever greater fervour. There’s one more
reminiscence of the opening before the work is
abruptly cut off.
If the Fourth Sonata was Scriabin’s first real
masterpiece, the Fifth pushes things much further.
It’s the first in the set with no key signature and
also the first to be cast in a single movement
(though with multiple tempo changes within its
span). All the five sonatas that follow use this
template.
The Fifth is a work that deals by turns with
sensuality, violence, vigour, light and darkness,
culminating in an explosion of shattering, surging
light and energy. In under 12 minutes, it mirrors
in its maniacal energy something of its speed
of composition, for Scriabin wrote it in mere
days as an offshoot of the contemporary Poem
of Ecstasy. And just as the orchestral work aims
to allow unconstrained action to overcome the
world, steeping it in ecstasy so to speak, so the
Fifth Sonata translates this concept onto the
keyboard. To call it daunting is an understatement:
the legendary Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter
regarded it as the most difficult piece in the entire
solo repertoire.
Scriabin’s lines of poetry at the head of the
sonata, which are extracted from the Poem of
Ecstasy, arguably offer more elucidation than any
analytical tome, and capture well the somewhat
hysterical bent of the composer:
‘I summon you to life, mysterious forces!
You, sunken in the obscure depths of creative spirit,
You timid embryos of life,
To you I bring audacity!’
What is striking in the Fifth Sonata is the way that
Scriabin seems to be pouring acid on tonality
itself, blurring its edges, dissolving it for whole
passages at a stretch. Yet he never leaves the
listener totally adrift – though he delights in
contrast, there’s still a clear sense of one idea
leading inexorably on to the next – an effect
compounded by his avoidance of anything as
mundane as a cadence. And you’re constantly
aware of the way he is pushing at the boundaries
of sonorities possible on a keyboard from a
mere two hands. Is it pure coincidence that just
a year later, in the same city of Paris, Ravel was
putting the finishing touches to another keyboard
work that both pushes at those boundaries and
reveals the darker side of the human imagination,
Gaspard de la nuit?
6
interval 30 minutes
Piano Sonata No 6, Op 62 (1911–12)
Modéré
Piano Sonata No 7, Op 64, ‘White Mass’
Programme notes
Alexander Scriabin
(1911–12)
Allegro
Piano Sonata No 8, Op 66 (1912–13)
Lento – Allegro agitato
Like the tempo indication of the Sixth, that for
the Seventh (Allegro) is a very plain direction for
something so heady. So it’s no surprise that this
was the contribution of his publisher (none other
than the great conductor Serge Koussevitzky).
Scriabin’s original intention had been to head the
movement ‘Prophétique’; his title for the work as
a whole, ‘White Mass’, did survive it into print and
he wrote of the piece depicting ‘mystic clouds’,
‘fountains of fire’ and ‘trumpets of archangels’. By
the time he composed it, just four years before his
death, his grasp on reality had become, shall we
say, tenuous, and he talked of writing a ‘Mystery’
through which mankind itself would gain a new
stage of awareness.
Scriabin launches this extraordinary piece with
clanging fanfares and a refulgent texture that
is instantly recognisable. Out of this grows a
second idea, suffused with bells, which is followed
by an arpeggio-shaped theme that plays an
Tonality is by now a distant memory and, from
important part in the development section (despite
the opening chord onwards, we’re in a world
his mystical tendencies, Scriabin was a master
in which chromatic harmonies and phrases that
builder when it came to structure, as we’ve heard
avoid conventional resolution take the place of
time and again today) where it is contrasted with
traditional harmony and melody. The textures
the opening idea. A new theme appears, which
are sufficiently complex as to need three staves in
sparkles as if infused with pure light. After the
places. We’re also in the world of the impossible,
expected recapitulation, Scriabin adds another
with Scriabin including a top D near the close of
development, in which the ‘light’ theme becomes
the piece that is beyond the range of most pianos. more and more prominent. The final bars –
Fervour contrasts with dramatic trills and writing of sounding prescient of Messiaen – reach a huge
the most iridescent fragility; strikingly, this dreamclimax before dying away with that favourite
haunted piece comes to rest on a chord that offers Scriabin device, the trill.
no real resolution.
7
The indication modéré hardly gives a clue as
to what’s in store for pianist and listener in the
Sixth Sonata, a work Scriabin never performed
in public as he thought it altogether too dark
and dangerous. That sense of danger is there at
the start, opening as the work does on a highly
unstable chord in which the tritone (made up of
three whole tones, a sound so antagonistic as to
have led to its being dubbed diabolus in musica –
the devil in music –by early theorists) is prominent.
Like the Fifth Sonata, this is a condensed, singlemovement work, though this one lacks the tempo
fluctuations of the Fifth. Scriabin suffuses it with
colourful markings, ranging from the general
(mystérieux) to the specific, such as l’épouvante
surgit (‘terror looms’) and tout devient charme et
douceur (‘all becomes charm and sweetness’);
Scriabin had recently completed the tone-poem
Prometheus and its heady atmosphere is evident
here too, though the effect is altogether darker.
Scriabin’s last three sonatas, Nos 8–10, are,
like those of Schubert and Beethoven, closely
related chronologically, having all been written
in 1912–13. It is striking in that, while utterly
mystical and seemingly occupying an alternative
reality, the Eighth lacks the angst of the Sixth and
Ninth Sonatas and at times can seem almost
playful. This difference of mood is partly a
result of its harmonic thinking, which is distinctly
less dissonant than was the norm by this point
in Scriabin’s output. It is also strikingly devoid
of the kind of mood markings that Scriabin so
likes – though one, Tragique, is used tellingly
(around the 10-minute mark) at the point where
a theme reaches upwards before sinking down,
exhausted, the mood gone in an instant as the
trills return. A final dance scoops up the disparate
elements, the speed quickening until the music,
now marked doux, languissant, dissolves, ebbing
away and coming to rest on a chord of surprising
consonance.
The work itself has been the subject of intense
discussion as to its meaning – if it has one at
all. Simon Nicholls has written: ‘The themes are
said by Leonid Sabaneyev [a great authority
on Scriabin, nine years his junior] to represent
the elements. It is easy to hear the lightness and
mobility of the air in the recurring cascades of
fourths, contrasting with the solidity of earth at the
beginning, and a later development of the Allegro
theme ebbs and flows like the waves of the sea.’
interval 30 minutes
Alexander Scriabin
Piano Sonata No 2 in G sharp minor,
Op 19, ‘Sonata-Fantasy’ (1892–7)
1 Andante
2 Presto
Piano Sonata No 3 in F sharp minor,
Op 23 (1897–8)
1 Drammatico
2 Allegretto
3 Andante –
4 Presto con fuoco
Piano Sonata No 10, Op 70 (1912–13)
Moderato – Allegro
8
For the last part of today’s great Scriabin
adventure, Peter Donohoe emphasises how
far the composer himself journeyed, taking us
from the late Romantic Second Sonata to the
visionary 10th.
Despite Scriabin’s claim that he was influenced
by no-one, Beethoven again leaves a ghostly
imprint on the Second Sonata, with its interlinked
two-movement structure. Unusually, Scriabin
provided a programme for this work, completed
The sea was a novel experience for the composer:
he began the sonata after a trip to Latvia in which
he encountered it for the very first time. And, as
pianist Yevgeny Sudbin has observed, the work
‘portrays the sea more vividly than the real thing,
manipulating your senses; you can actually smell
the sea air, taste the salt water and often feel the
fresh breeze change directions’.
The sonata opens pensively, dominated by
the rhythmic motif that is to pervade the entire
movement, Scriabin teasing us with mere
fragments of a theme. As a more complete
melody emerges, there is still hesitancy in its
phrasing. This relatively subdued mood contrasts
with a B major idea (a couple of minutes in), in
which a luxuriant theme is heard, initially in the
middle register, offset by flickering figuration.
This gives way to a return of the opening idea,
developed and driven through a dark range of
keys before eventually emerging into the E major
that the composer mentions and which now
clothes the tentative melody that grew from the
opening bars. With writing of the most transparent
filigree and delicacy the opening movement
reaches its close, the final bars recalling once
more the pervasive rhythmic motif of the opening.
The finale is in the greatest contrast, a whirling
moto perpetuo from which gradually emerges
a long-limbed melody. It climbs ever higher,
struggling to make itself heard above the turbulent
morass of notes. Scriabin only finally reveals
the entire melody on its last appearance (rather
as Beethoven does in the second theme of the
opening movement of the ‘Appassionata’). The
Presto’s almost manic energy is abruptly quelled
with two emphatic chords.
Like No 1, the Third falls into four movements.
Some years after its composition, it was given a
programme, though this may not have been by
Scriabin himself but by his second wife Tatyana
Schloezer, who was arguably even more prone
1: The free and untamed soul throws itself into a
whirlpool of pain and struggle.
2: The soul finds momentary, illusory peace; tired
of suffering, it wants to forget, to sing and flourish,
despite everything. But the light rhythm and
fragrant harmonies are but a veil, through which
the uneasy, wounded soul gleams.
Programme notes
‘The first part evokes the calm of a southern night
on the seashore; the development is the sombre
agitation of the deep, deep sea. The E major
section represents the tender moonlight that
comes after the first dark of the night. The second
movement, Presto, represents the stormy agitation
of the vast expanse of ocean.’
to purple prose than the composer. Under the
heading ‘States of the Soul’ come the following
descriptions for each movement:
3: The soul floats on a sea of gentle and
melancholy emotions: love, sorrow, vague desires,
indefinable thoughts of a fragile, vague allure.
4: The soul struggles in the uproar of the
unfettered elements. From the depths of being
rises the mighty voice of the demigod, whose song
of victory echoes triumphantly. But too weak yet to
reach the summit, he plunges, defeated, into the
abyss of nothingness.
While the descriptions may read like dated
hyperbole, the music remains immediate and
visceral. What’s particularly striking about this
sonata is how closely Scriabin links the material
within its four movements, with the main themes of
each one clearly interlinked.
The sonata’s opening, featuring dramatic chords,
is a ringing call to arms and immediately pulls
us into a world of turmoil and drama. Its dotted
rhythm proves to be very important, not only in
driving the music forward but also as a basis for
development.
The brief Allegretto does, as per the description,
contain some fantastically fragile writing (vaguely
reminiscent of Debussy in his Arabesques), which
contrasts beautifully with the strong profile of its
opening idea.
The slow movement opens in a mood of utter
self-absorption, strikingly high-lying compared to
much of the rest of the sonata. This leads directly
into the finale, a falling chromatic line set against
driving accompaniment – this chromaticism
colours much of what follows and shows Scriabin
further loosening the shackles of tonality. We hear
a poignant reminiscence of the theme of the slow
movement before the emotional temperature rises
once more. Time and again in this sonata you
feel as if Scriabin is thinking beyond the keyboard
itself to a whole orchestra of colour and texture,
9
in the year of his marriage to the pianist Vera
Isakovich:
a quality that is to become more and more
pervasive as his piano sonatas progress.
As Peter Donohoe reaches the final sonata in this
extraordinary journey it’s time to take stock. Over
a period of just 21 years Scriabin has taken us
from the late Romanticism of his First, cast in four
movements, to the 10th, written on the eve of the
First World War. What might have come next, had
the composer not succumbed to septicaemia just
two years later?
10
The 10th’s sinuous Moderato opens with a
striking little phrase that buries itself in your brain.
Some of the harmonies of this first section are
positively Schoenbergian but always infused with
a gentleness that softens the effect. As we come
to the Allegro, Scriabin writes Avec émotion, as if
there were any other way of interpreting his music.
Trills give it a glinting, ethereal quality as if it’s no
Programme produced by Harriet Smith;
printed by Mandatum Ink; advertising by
Cabbell (tel. 020 3603 7930)
longer of this world, and indeed the instructions –
joyeuse, ravissement, volupté douloureuse, radieux
and so on – underline that quality. The composer
himself wrote: ‘My 10th Sonata is a sonata of
insects. Insects are born from the sun, they are the
kisses of the sun.’ For Scriabin insects were also
manifestations of human emotion. But no matter
how heady the effect, underpinning everything is
Scriabin the master builder and the main ideas
appear and reappear, not only the striking first
idea but an equally characteristic upward-leaping
second theme, ensuring the listener never gets lost,
no matter how much time signature, rhythm or
harmony may fluctuate. As we dance towards the
very final barline the music returns to a Moderato
tempo and the sonata ends with a brief echo
of that opening motif, bringing to a close the
most enthralling cycle of sonatas since those of
Beethoven himself.
Programme notes © Harriet Smith
Peter Donohoe
Peter Donohoe piano
Peter Donohoe was born in Manchester in 1953.
He studied at Chetham’s School of Music, Leeds
University, the Royal Northern College of Music
and in Paris with Olivier Messiaen and Yvonne
Loriod. He is acclaimed for his musicianship,
stylistic versatility and commanding technique.
In recent seasons he has appeared with the
BBC, Cape Town, Dresden and Russian State
Philharmonic orchestras, BBC Concert Orchestra,
St Petersburg Philharmonia and the Belarusian,
City of Birmingham and RTÉ National Symphony
orchestras, as well as having given concerts
in South America, Europe, Hong Kong, South
Korea, Russia and the USA. Other engagements
include performances of all three of Sir James
MacMillan’s piano concertos with the BBC
Scottish Symphony Orchestra, a series of concerts
for the Ravel and Rachmaninov Festival at the
Bridgewater Hall alongside Noriko Ogawa and
numerous performances with The Orchestra
of the Swan. He is also in high demand as an
adjudicator at piano competitions around the
world.
Recent discs include a new recording of
Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes and Fugues; the
complete Scriabin piano sonatas; Witold
Maliszewski’s Piano Concerto in B flat minor with
the Royal Scottish National Orchestra conducted
Peter Donohoe has performed with all the
major London orchestras, as well as orchestras
from across the world, including the Royal
Concertgebouw, Leipzig Gewandhaus, the Czech
and Munich Philharmonic orchestras, Swedish
Radio and Vienna Symphony orchestras and
the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France.
He also played with the Berlin Philharmonic in
Sir Simon Rattle’s opening concerts as Music
Director. He made his 22nd appearance at the
BBC Proms in 2012 and has performed at many
other festivals, including six consecutive visits to
the Edinburgh Festival, La Roque d’Anthéron in
France, and at the Ruhr and Schleswig-Holstein
Festivals in Germany. In the United States he has
appeared with the Cleveland Orchestra, Los
Angeles Philharmonic and the Boston, Chicago,
Detroit and Pittsburgh Symphony orchestras,
among others.
He also gives numerous recitals internationally
and continues to work with his longstanding duo
partner Martin Roscoe, as well as more recent
collaborations with artists such as Raphael
Wallfisch, Elizabeth Watts and Noriko Ogawa.
He has worked with many of the world’s greatest
conductors, including Christoph Eschenbach,
Neeme Järvi, Lorin Maazel, Kurt Masur,
Sir Andrew Davis and Yevgeny Svetlanov. More
recently he has appeared as soloist with the
younger generation of leading conductors,
among them Gustavo Dudamel, Robin Ticciati
and Daniel Harding.
Peter Donohoe holds honorary doctorates from
seven UK universities, and was awarded a CBE in
the 2010 New Year’s Honours List.
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Sussie Ahlburg
by Martin Yates; and three discs of Prokofiev
piano sonatas. Other recordings include Cyril
Scott’s Piano Concerto with the BBC Concert
Orchestra and Arnold’s Fantasy on a Theme
of John Field with the Royal Scottish National
Orchestra, both under Yates.
About the performers
About the performers
Todd Rosenberg
Sage Gateshead released The Little Nut Tree,
a CD of traditional British nursery rhymes
in arrangements designed to interest small
children in the instruments of the orchestra.
Gerard McBurney
Gerard McBurney creative director
Gerard McBurney is a composer, writer and
broadcaster, with a specialist interest in Russian
and Soviet music and culture.
For two years in the mid-1980s he was a graduate
student at the Moscow Conservatoire, and during
that time the conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky
asked him to make a performing orchestration
of fragments from Shostakovich’s forgotten
1931 music-hall entertainment Hypothetically
Murdered , Op 31. This led to encouragement
from Irina Antonovna Shostakovich, the
composer’s widow, to make further arrangements
and reconstructions, including a dance-band
version of the 1950s musical comedy Moscow,
Cheryomushki, Op 105; a performing score
of the lost Jazz Suite No 2 for big band from
1938; and most recently an orchestration of
the Prologue to the uncompleted 1932 satirical
opera Orango. This last was first performed and
then recorded by the Los Angeles Philharmonic
Orchestra, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, as
well as being given at last year’s BBC Proms.
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His own music sometimes reflects Russian interests,
with White Nights (1992), after Dostoevsky
and Mussorgsky, for the choreographer Kim
Brandstrup and the English National Ballet; Out
of a house walked a man (1994), inspired by
the life and works of the Leningrad Absurdist
Daniil Kharms, for his brother, the director
Simon McBurney, and the National Theatre;
and another Kharms setting, Letter to Paradise,
for voice and orchestra, for the 1998 Proms.
Recent pieces include Sweit Rose (2012), to a
recently rediscovered lyric by the Scots poet
William Dunbar; and a piano cycle, Cherry
Cottage (2013), memorialising family connections
to Stockbridge, Massachusetts. In 2014, The
From 2006 to 2016 Gerard McBurney was
Creative Director of the Chicago Symphony
Orchestra’s innovative series ‘Beyond the Score’,
creating 30 shows, each about a different
composer. His recent celebration of the life
and work of Pierre Boulez, A Pierre Dream,
designed by the architect Frank Gehry, was
first staged in Chicago in November 2014
and then at the Ojai, Holland and Aldeburgh
festivals. In 2015 he curated a Shostakovich
Day here at Milton Court Concert Hall.
Mike Tutaj
Mike Tutaj projection designer
Mike Tutaj is based in Chicago, where his designs
have been seen and heard on the stages of the
Goodman and Steppenwolf theatres, Chicago
Symphony Center, Chicago Shakespeare Theater,
The Second City, Victory Gardens, Lookingglass
Theatre, Writers’ Theatre, Court Theatre, TimeLine,
American Theater Company, Paramount Theatre,
The Hypocrites, and many more. Off-Broadway
credits include MCC Theater, p73, EnGarde Arts,
and The York Theatre. Regional credits include
Indiana Repertory Theatre, the Alliance Theatre,
Philadelphia Theatre Company, South Coast Rep,
Center Stage, Syracuse Stage, Virginia Stage,
Children’s Theatre Company (Minneapolis),
City Theatre Company (Pittsburgh) and Theatre
Squared.
Mike Tutaj has taught Projection Design in the
Theatre Department of Columbia College
Chicago. He is an artistic associate with TimeLine
Theatre, and a member of United Scenic Artists.