Late works by the great Romantics – full of references and sometimes even reckonings with the past – will be performed during a recital by Piotr Anderszewski, adored by Warsaw audiences.
Franz Schubert’s Piano Sonata in C minor, written in the last months of the composer’s life, is famous for its references to the works of Ludwig van Beethoven – both thematic (as exemplified by the quotation from the theme of the 32 Variations in C minor, which appears at the beginning of the work) and more distant, mood-related, for example in the lyrical Adagio. However, these references remain only a backdrop – or rather a distant memory – to a series of formal, motivic and harmonic ideas that are nowhere to be found in the work of the master from Bonn. It is these ideas that make up Schubert’s original, mature musical language, which was only fully appreciated after his death.
After the four movements of Schubert’s sonata, Piotr Anderszewski will perform Johannes Brahms’s last four opus piano cycles. They were written in just two years, after a long break from composing works for solo piano. The subsequent sets included miniatures with titles such as fantasy, capriccio, intermezzo, romance and ballade. These pieces can be lyrical and melancholic, but also turbulent – even tragic in character. Brahms consulted some of them with his private ‘editor’, friend and muse, Clara Schumann.
Bartłomiej Gembicki