Liszt and Beethoven - Two Soul Mates. Marcela Fiorillo. Wesley Music Centre, 20 National Circuit, Forrest. Saturday, June 16, 7pm. Tickets: $30-$45. marcelafiorillo.iwannaticket.com.au or at the door.
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Argentinian pianist Marcela Fiorillo says her next concert brings together works by two composers she thinks have a lot in common as musical innovators who expanded the techniques and resources of the piano.
"Both of them created a new way of understanding piano performance and the piano literature," she says.
Both men also had intense struggles as composers, she says: Beethoven was a freelancer, without the patronage of the church or the monarchy, and sometimes had to battle to open doors for commissions and to survive.
Liszt's virtuosity as a performer, she says, meant people came to expect that style from him in both playing and composition even when he wanted to explore other, deeper musical forms and he eventually retired from performance.
She relates an apocryphal story from an early Liszt biography that in 1823 the adolescent Liszt, then living in Vienna, invited Beethoven to a concert he was giving. Afterwards, Beethoven went to see Liszt and kissed him on the forehead.
"It was a kind of blessing to him."
The first half of the program is devoted to works by Liszt. It begins with Funérailles, one of the composer's religious pieces he wrote later in life. It has an invocation of the Virgin Mary and which is intended to be an elegy for people Liszt knew who were killed in the Hungarian revolution of 1849.
"It's an extremely powerful elegy of monumental stature."
Also on the program is the Soneto del Petrarca No. 104 which Fiorillo calls "The most passionate, agitated and poetic of the three Sonetos ... A wonderful lyric piece" and the Ballade No. 2 in B minor, "a big work in which you can feel the contrast between shadows and depth on the one side and lyricism on the other side".
The second half of the program is taken up by a single work, Beethoven's Piano Sonata op. 57, Nr.23, in F minor,
"Appassionata".
Fiorillo says, "I consider this piece a masterpiece. It was written during the same period as the Fourth Piano Concerto, the "Waldstein" Sonata and the Violin Concerto - all masterpieces."
She says it's a virtuosic piece but that there's more to it than that.
"It begins with unisons alternated with silences," she says.
"The desolation of the first movementbeats like a ticking bomb towards the powerful resolution at the end of the movement."
The sonata moves through various feelings and effects, from the solemn religious spirit in the second movement structured as a theme and four variations to a final movement that goes from ghostly horror to grandiloquent fury, she says.
Thie is Fiorillo's 13th year in Canberra. She says it's a great place to live and a peaceful environment for artists, particularly musicians.
"It's ideal for me to live here."
Listen to a sample of Fiorillo's talents - a performance of Franz Liszt - Sonetto N. 104 del Petrarca at La Usina del Arte, Buenos Aires, Argentina, November 201: https://youtu.be/adoynHCzG8U.
