Home · Contact Us

Classical Triumphs Program Notes
Paul Barnes, Piano Soloist

Praised by the New York Times for his “Lisztian thunder and deft fluidity,” and the San Francisco Chronicle as “ferociously virtuosic,” pianist Paul Barnes has electrified audiences with his intensely expressive playing and cutting-edge programming.  He has been featured four times on APM’s Performance Today and on the cover of Clavier Magazine. His recent performance at Lincoln Center was featured in the New Yorker Magazine.  He has performed in England, China, Korea, Austria, Russia, Greece, Serbia, Hungary and in all major cities throughout the United States.

Deeply inspired by the aesthetic challenge of minimalism, Dr. Barnes commissioned and gave the world premier performance of Philip Glass’s Piano Concerto No. 2 (After Lewis and Clark).  The Omaha World Herald praised Dr. Barnes playing for his “driving intensity and exhilaration.”  Nebraska Educational Telecommunications' production of "The Lewis and Clark Concerto," a documentary/performance of the concerto featuring Dr. Barnes, won an Emmy for Best Performance Production.  At a performance of the concerto in Boston, the Boston Globe praised Dr. Barnes for his "strong and sympathetic performance." Additional performances included collaborations with conductor Marin Alsop at the prestigious Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music and also the Northwest Chamber Orchestra where the Seattle Times called Dr. Barnes' performance "an impressive feat."  The world-premier recording with the NWCO was released by Orange Mountain Music.  Gramophone Magazine remarked that this recording is "certainly one of the most enjoyable recent releases of Glass's music. . . .  Paul Barnes is a shining soloist."

Dr. Barnes also serves as head chanter at Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church in Lincoln, Nebraska, where his fascination with Byzantine chant led to a commissioned piano concerto, Ancient Keys written by Victoria Bond, based on a Greek chant.  The world-premier recording of this concerto as well as Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue was released on Albany Records.

Dr. Barnes' unique lecture/recitals have received international acclaim.  “Liszt and the Cross: Music as Sacrament in the B Minor Sonata” explores the fascinating relationship between music, theology and the Orthodox icon.  Dr. Barnes' live recording of this lecture recital was recently released on the Liszt Digital label.  Paul Schoemaker of the British Society Newsletter reviewed the recording and wrote that Dr. Barnes was “a fine pianist and gives us a performance of resounding conviction.”  Janice Weber of Clavier Magazine wrote "It is a majestic, reverential performance that elevates listeners to the sacred experience Barnes so eloquently describes in the lecture."

Recently elected to the national board of the American Liszt Society, Dr. Barnes hosted the 2010 ALS festival at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln celebrating the bicentennial of the births of Chopin and Schumann.

Dr. Barnes is Hixson-Lied Professor of Piano at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln School of Music.  He teaches during the summer at the Vienna International Piano Academy and also coaches the students of Menahem Pressler, Dr. Barnes' own teacher, at Indiana University where Dr. Barnes received his doctorate in Piano Performance.  Dr. Barnes has served as convention artist at several state MTNA conventions and was recently named “Teacher of the Year” by the Nebraska Music Teachers Association.  Dr. Barnes performed and taught in China and at Seoul National University during a recent sabbatical leave.

Recent performances include the world-premier of Ivan Moody's piano quintet "Nocturne of Light" with the Chiara Quartet at Symphony Space in April of 2010.  During the Liszt bicentennial year in 2011, Dr. Barnes will be performing Liszt and the Cross throughout the US and Europe. Dr. Barnes also gave the world-premier performance of the winning piano work of the ALS Bicentennial Composition Competition in February 2011 at the ALS Bicentennial Festival at the University of Georgia.  His eleventh CD The American Virtuosofeaturing the music of Philip Glass, Samuel Barber and Joan Tower was released on Orange Mountain Music to much critical acclaim.  The American Record Guide wrote, "Another fine release from the amazing pianist Paul Barnes ... with a pianist like this, new American music is in good hands."

Gigues, from Images for Orchestra
Claude Debussy

Claude Achille Debussy was born in St. Germain-en-Laye, France in 1862 and died in Paris in 1918.  He originally composed this work for 2 pianos in 1909; it was largely orchestrated by André Caplet under the composer’s supervision.  The work was first performed in Paris in 1913 under the direction of Caplet.  The score calls for 4 flutes, piccolo, 3 oboes, English horn, oboe d’amore, 4 clarinets, bass clarinet, 4 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, percussion, 2 harps, celeste and strings.

Here we have a delicious Debussean paradox: a sad jig.

Debussy originally intended his Images (Pictures) for Orchestra to be a 2-piano sequel to his Images for solo piano but later decided to score them for the orchestra.  Each of the three “movements” (Gigues, Rondes de printemps and Iberia) was composed separately and meant to be performed alone as well as part of the set.  There are no real musical relationships among the three, but there is a commonality worth noting: each is meant to have a different national flavor, and each is based on authentic folk songs or Debussy’s imitations thereof.  Rondes de printemps is meant to evoke France, while Iberia is full of Spanish influence.  With Gigues, Debussy had England and Scotland in mind.

The original title Debussy gave to this work was Gigues tristes, or “sad jig”—a strange combination given that a jig is usually a high-spirited fast dance in triple meter.  As if to underline the point, Debussy’s jig is a slow non-dance in duple meter.  The reason Debussy seized upon the paradox is the source of the work’s main theme.  The tune itself is based on the Scottish jig “The Keel Row,” but Debussy knew it better by its French version, with words by his friend Charles Bordes, called Dansons la gigue (Let’s Dance the Jig):

Let’s dance a jig!
            I loved above all her pretty eyes,
            Brighter than the starry sky,
            I loved her malicious eyes.
Let’s dance a jig!
            She had a way about her
            To torture a poor lover,
            A really charming way!
Let’s dance a jig!
            But better still I find
            The kiss of her radiant lips
            Since she has died to my heart.
Let’s dance a jig!
            I remember, I remember
            Those long hours of our leisure,
            They’re the best of all my treasure.
Let’s dance a jig!

The sudden contrasts and startling juxtapositions of the words of the song are echoed in the music.  This was, perhaps, best explained by another friend of Debussy’s, composer-conductor André Caplet, who aided Debussy with the orchestration of Gigues due to the composer’s ill health: “Gigues . . . sad Gigues . . . tragic Gigues.  A portrait of a soul in pain, a soul that borrows the shawm of an oboe d’amore to breathe out its indolent languorous plaint!  A wounded soul, so reticent that it dreads and shuns all lyrical effusions and quickly hides its sob behind the mask and the angular gestures of a grotesque marionette.  Or else it may cloak itself suddenly in a mantel of the most phlegmatic indifference.  Underneath the convulsive shudderings, the sudden efforts at restraint, the pitiful grimaces, which serve as a kind of disguise, we recognize the spirit of sadness, infinite sadness.”

Im Sturmschritt! Polka Schnell, Op. 348
Johann Strauss, Jr.

Johann Strauss Jr., was born in Vienna in 1825 and died there in 1899.  He probably composed this polka in 1871; the details of its first performance are unknown.  The score calls for flute, piccolo, 2 oboes, clarinet in e-flat, 2 b-flat clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, percussion and strings.

Although he gave them their first lessons in music, Johann Strauss Sr. forbade his sons Johann Jr. and Josef from becoming professional musicians.  So, naturally enough, that’s just what they did.  Johann Jr. took advanced violin and composition lessons without his father’s knowledge, and before long was leading his own orchestra in competition with him.  By the time he had reached his mid-twenties, he was the toast of Vienna, touring the world and on his way to composing more than 150 waltzes.

He was the Waltz King, but dancers cannot live on waltzes alone.  Strauss composed hundreds of other dance tunes as well:  marches, galops, polkas, and more. When he composed Im Sturmschritt! (literally, “storm-step,” usually rendered as “At the Double”), he had begun branching out by composing operettas; his first, Indigo and the Forty Thieves, is the source for the melodies of Im Sturmschritt!  A “polka schnell” it is, sounding rather like the can-can that was sweeping Paris at the time.  A delightful confection.

Concerto for Piano & Orchestra No. 2 in A major
Franz Liszt

Franz Liszt was born in Raiding, Hungary, in 1811 and died in Beyreuth, Bavaria in 1886.  He composed this concerto in 1839 and revised the work repeatedly until his last revision in 1861.  Liszt led the first performance in Weimar in 1857 with Hans von Bronsart the soloist.  The score calls for solo piano, 3 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussio, and strings.

Franz Liszt was the pianistic rock star of his age; he left his audiences spellbound with astonishing piano pyrotechnics, previously unheard and scarcely imagined.  To this he added a stage presence and flair for showmanship that brought the violin virtuoso Paganini to mind.  To hear a Liszt performance—perhaps event would be a better word—was to be swept away by the power of his personality and dazzled by his nearly incomprehensible technique.

Like most virtuosi of his day, Liszt composed his own music to properly display his abilities.  Some of these pieces were potboilers that aspired to little else; with the exception of its poetic slow movement, Liszt’s First Piano Concerto answers this description admirably.  Yet Liszt could compose with the utmost depth and subtlety, too. For this we may look to his Second Piano Concerto which, although composed at the same time as the First, is worlds apart in its intent and effect.

The Second Concerto’s prime musical mover is a technique Liszt first observed in Schubert and later brought to fulfillment: thematic metamorphosis.  In a blend of traditional variation and development, a single theme undergoes continuous transformation throughout the work; because each new variant is derived from the previous one and all share common ancestry with the original theme, a powerful sense of unity obtains.  The form is unusual as well.  The Concerto is cast in a single movement, with more-or-less distinct inner sections—first movement, scherzo, slow movement, finale.  At the same time, this single movement also constitutes a recognizable sonata-allegro form.

A handful of winds give us the theme of the work straight away.  This melody is simple and tender, but Liszt gives it harmonic underpinnings that are nearly outrageous—in no time at all the music already has a strong motivation to become something else.  This theme is developed in the orchestra while the piano accompanies—a recurring feature of this work that takes it beyond what we expect from a virtuosic showpiece.  After a brief cadenza the metamorphosis begins.  The music proceeds as a series of episodes, each distinct yet all related to one another via their relationship to the opening theme.  Near the end of the work the theme has transformed itself into a stirring—some have said vulgar—march tune for the full orchestra.  Another composer might have found this to be an apt point to place his period, but for Liszt and his listeners, the best is yet to come.

Symphony No. 5 in D minor, Op. 47
Dmitri Shostakovich

Dmitri Shostakovich was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia in 1906 and died in Moscow in 1975.  He composed his Fifth Symphony in three months in 1937, and it was first performed the same year by the Leningrad Philharmonic under the direction of Yevgeny Mravinsky.  The score calls for 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, E-flat clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, 2 harps, piano, celeste and strings.

We who live where artistic freedom is taken for granted may have a hard time imagining the sort of life Shostakovich led.  In a country where the wrong artistic choice might prove fatal, he was a man who had seen countless colleagues and acquaintances shot or sent to the gulag, and who came to within a hair’s breadth of the same.  He lived his life knowing his very survival depended solely on the whims of a monstrously deranged man:  Joseph Stalin.  Shostakovich was so sure he would be arrested one day he actually kept a small suitcase packed and ready by the door.

By January 28, 1936, Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District had played for some two years to critical and popular approval.  Yet on that day an article appeared in Pravda entitled “Muddle Instead of Music.”  The article thoroughly condemned the opera and its composer; it also contained the ominous note that all of this “could end very badly.”  The language of the article didn’t sound like that of a music critic—Shostakovich and others believed it came from the pen of Stalin himself.

Shostakovich considered himself a doomed man, as did others around him; even his friends began to keep their distance.  A newspaper announcement read: “Today there is a concert by Enemy of the People Shostakovich.”  Fearful it would be the last straw, Shostakovich withdrew his just-completed Fourth Symphony, an intense and often harsh-sounding work.  The piece would languish in a desk drawer for twenty-five years.

Shostakovich decided to make his Fifth Symphony a vehicle for his artistic and political rehabilitation.  In a masterful stroke of public-relations acumen, he called it “A Soviet artist’s reply to just criticism” and gave it an outlandish but politically correct program.  Its premiere performance was greeted with popular, critical, and—most importantly—political acclaim.

But for Shostakovich himself, the Fifth Symphony was the musical metaphor of his artistic dilemma: how to integrate the free-spirit of the artist within the constraints of Stalinist repression.  His struggle, and its ambivalent outcome, are expressed in all the movements, but most directly by the eloquent Largo.  This heart-wrenching piece gives voice to the composer’s profound anxiety and the unfairness of his predicament.  He dared not speak his mind, but his passion—and futility—can be heard in every bar.

The Finale was received by the political coterie as a work of triumph and joy, and a celebration of Socialist Realism.  But we now know that the Finale is not heroic, joyful or triumphant.  In the composer’s own words, “the rejoicing is forced, created under threat . . . it’s as if someone were beating you with a stick, saying, ‘Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing,’ and you rise, shaky, and go marching off, muttering, ‘Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.’”

It’s hard to miss the striking spatial metaphor in these closing pages.  As the winds and brass blare “Our business is rejoicing,” the strings hammer away at a unison A-natural—insistent, hard, and cold.  It is as if the string section, arrayed as it is across the front of the orchestra, represents the steel bars of a huge prison cell, behind which the cowering masses “rejoice.”

The Fifth Symphony was a gamble, and Shostakovich was fortunate: those who held his life in their hands heard only the “triumph” in the music.  That he accomplished this with a piece that is really about repression is something beyond ironic.

                                                                                    —Mark Rohr
                                                                                    Questions or comments?
                                                                                    mrohr@comcast.net