Spivey Hall at Clayton State University

Jenny Lin, piano

Wednesday, April 1, 2009
7:30PM

FREE

Presented by the Clayton State University Department of Music

Jenny Lin is praised as "an exceptionally sensitive pianist" (Gramophone) and noted for her "spectacular technique" (Washington Post), "gift for melodic flow" (New York Times), adventurous programming, and charismatic stage presence.

She has performed extensively as recitalist and concerto soloist in the United States, Asia and Europe, in prestigious venues including Washington's Kennedy Center, New York's Museum of Modern Art and Columbia University's Miller Theater, as well as for the Brooklyn Academy of Music "Next Wave" and Spoleto festivals. In addition to her Spivey Hall debut recital, her performances this season include the National Gallery of Art in Washington, Maryland's Strathmore Center, Carnegie Hall's Weill Recital Hall, and a recital tour in China.

Jenny's extensive discography includes acclaimed recordings on Koch International Classics, Hänssler Classic, BIS Records, and Sunrise Records, embracing a diverse repertoire including works by Ernst Bloch, Gyorgy Ligeti, Valentin Silfestrov, Ruth Crawford Seeger, among many others. Her debut album of the Liszt Sonata in B minor and Schumann's Fantasie received "Best Performer" at the Golden Melody Award, the Asian Grammy. Two more releases are due in 2009: 24 Preludes and Fugues, Op. 87, by Dmitri Shostakovitch; and Federico Mompou's Musica Callada.

Jenny is the central figure in "Cooking for Jenny" by Elemental Films, a musical documentary portraying her journey to the north of Spain and meeting with composer Javier López de Guereña for the preparation of the world premier of his piano concerto ZAHARA.

A resident of New York City, Jenny was born in Taiwan and raised in Austria. She studied with Noel Flores at the Hochschule für Musik in Vienna, with Julian Martin at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, and with Dominique Weber in Geneva. She has also worked with Leon Fleisher, Richard Goode, and Blanca Uribe, and with Dimitri Bashkirov and Andreas Staier at the Fondazione Internazionale per il Pianoforte in Como, Italy.

A PROGRAM OF ETUDES:

DEBUSSY Etude No. 1 "pour les cinq doigts”,
Etude No. 6 "pour les huit doigts": Unsuk CHIN Etude No. 5 Toccata,
Etude No. 6 Grains; MESSIAEN Ile de Feu I (Quatre études de rythme no. 1), Ile de Feu II (Quatre études de rythme no. 4); Dai FUJIKURA Piano Study No. 1 “Frozen Heat”; LISZT Etude transcendante No. 12 “Chaisse-Neige”; LIGETI Etude No. 16 “Pour Irina”, Etude No. 17 “À bout de soufflé”, Etude No. 18 “Canon”; Gabriela ORTIZ Estudios entre preludios; Carlos SANCHEZ-GUTIERREZ Mano a Mano III. Ariles y más Ariles; Jason FREEMAN Piano Etudes; STRAVINSKY 4 Etudes Op. 7

This performance is sponsored by the American Composers Forum through its Encore Program, supporting repeat performances of new works.

Piano Etudes Program Notes

Pianist Jenny Lin has designed her recital to explore the wide-ranging and varied heritage of the piano étude. The étude -- French for "study" -- became established as a genre within the first generation of piano pedagogues such as Johann Baptist Cramer, Muzio Clementi and Ignaz Moscheles. Among them, Carl Czerny might be regarded as the "father" of the étude; he was regarded so by Franz Liszt, writing hundreds of these piece in a relatively severe style designed to exercise fingers towards some improvement of technique. The generation just behind Czerny and company – Lizst, of course, and Frederic Chopin – developed the "concert étude" – an étude enabled for use in public performance. The étude designed to elucidate compositional in addition to digital techniques, however, is a relatively modern development that likely begins with the set of 12 Études composed in 1915 by Claude Debussy. In “pour le cinq-doigts,” subtitled “d'aprés Monsieur Czerny,” Debussy opens his collection with a direct homage to the father of the étude. While the figurations belong to Czerny, Debussy’s expansive and exploratory sense of harmony does not. With “pour le huits doigts,” Debussy deprives the pianist of the thumbs, so important in changing gracefully from one octave to the next and presenting the player with an awkward challenge indeed.

Jump ahead to the twenty-first century and one encounters Korean-born German composer Unsuk Chin, a one-time student of György Ligeti widely recognized as an heir to the mantle of composers such as Olivier Messiaen and Pierre Boulez. Chin’s Étude No. 5 “Toccata” goes directly to the sense of touch indicated in the title, beginning on a single line of music with fragmentary figures that eventually unfold into a dense torrent of notes. Étude No. 6 “Grain,” which is dedicated to Boulez, is likewise figurative after a fashion, perhaps recalling grain as sifted through a mill with its various densities and textures, contrasted with a single, stubbornly repeating pitch. Chin’s approach is foreshadowed to some extent by the “Quatre Études de rhythme” of Olivier Messiaen that includes the two etudes entitled “Ile de feu” (Isle of Fire). Inspired by the volcanic ecosystem of Papua/New Guinea, Messiaen’s unchanged central figure is chased around by various other anthropological details such as birdcalls and ceremonial drumming. Dai Fujikura is a Japanese composer in his early thirties; his Piano Concerto was premiered at London’s South Bank in January 2009. His Piano Study No. 1 “Frozen Heat” also exists in a version for chamber ensemble, and is toccata-like in a formal sense, except that Fujikura approaches the piano much like a percussion instrument with strings – this is an entirely different kind of “touch” from Chin. With the twelfth work drawn from Franz Liszt’s Transcendental Études, “Chasse neige” (Racing Snow), we return to the original, nineteenth-century milieu of the concert étude to discover that, even when they were not overtly intellectual kinds of creations, the étude was often programmatic.

In the second half of the program, Jenny Lin turns from études that challenge the internal act of composing and playing to others where the external activity of listening is involved. György Ligeti only turned to the étude late in life, and was not previously known for writing much piano music; the eighteen études he produced from 1985 forward are now recognized as key piano works. “Pour Irina,” “À bout de souffle” and “Canon” are the last three in the series; “Pour Irina” is so peaceful and calm that one is unaware of the wide spaces between notes that the fingers must find a way to negotiate. “À bout de souffle” (Breathless) is exactly that; the piano races on hurriedly without stopping for two-and-a-half minutes; “Canon” is more enigmatic, traversing through several of Ligeti’s characteristic gestures before stopping short. Mexican composer Gabriela Ortíz has conceived the first of the études in her “Estudios entre Preludios” as homage to Ligeti; this work has an interesting structure – two études framed by two preludes that precede them. The preludes are meant as homage to Debussy and Toru Takemitsu respectively, and the remaining étude is inspired by Bela Bartók. Ortíz has written, “The main challenge for the pianist [in this work] is to achieve completely independent phrasing in order for the listeners to identify the polyrhythmic counterpoint.”

Ortiz is joined by compatriot Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez, born in Mexico City in 1964 and now lives in the Rochester, New York, where he teaches composition at the Eastman School of Music. “Ariles y más Ariles” is the third from the series “Mano a Mano” for solo piano. Despite the lack of the word "Etude" in the titles, several pieces from Mano a Mano are indeed studies, not only pianistically but compositionally as well. They are highly virtuosic, intense, and extremely demanding miniatures, exploring some aspect of Mexican folk music. Jason Freeman teaches at Georgia Tech and his work is concerned with interactivity and, to some extent, the World Wide Web; his Piano Etudes are like flow charts consisting of musical fragments based on a combination of structures that can performed in these three ways: the pianist’s decisions prior to a performance, the pianist’s decisions during the performance, or versions made by visitors to a companion web site. The web site will enable users to explore, hear, and manipulate the musical structure of the work through an intuitive visual interface. The audience is given the option to shape the outcome and the result will be different performances from one evening to the next. The virtuosity lies in the pianist’s ability to make decisions about how to traverse the score in real-time, to take the piece in a new direction each night. From 1908 comes Igor Stravinsky’s early Four Études, which have their roots partly in Chopin and partly in Alexander Scriabin; they date from a time when Stravinsky was deeply absorbed in his studies with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. With these étude, considered highly advanced for their time in their sense of rhythmic flexibility, Jenny Lin returns and concludes close to the Debussy, demonstrating that the étude is more than just an exercise for fingers; it has served as a platform for multi-faceted projection of pianistic concepts, experiments and expressions in its two-hundred years, and continues to thrive today.

-- Uncle Dave Lewis

www.jennylin.net