On Monday, November 3 at 6 PM, in their headquarters in Palazzo Adami Lami (Lungarno Guicciardini, 17 – Florence) and in collaboration with the Matthiessen Foundation (London), the Lyceum International Club of Florence hosted the Italian début of the Polish pianist Dominika Mak, one of the rising talents from the Royal Academy of Music. Dominika herself introduces here her program notes: «Haydn’s Variations in F minor, Hob. XVII:6, were composed in 1793, shortly after his return from a triumphant London tour and during a mature, reflective phase of his life. The famous extended coda – added after the work’s first composition – reintroduces the F minor theme with chromaticism and disquiet. Many scholars link this addition to the sudden death of Maria Anna von Genzinger, Haydn’s close friend and confidante, in January 1793. Chopin’s Op. 59 Mazurkas blend the candour of Polish folk dance with an extraordinary sense of żal—the untranslatable Polish word expressing the longing for home and nation felt by the displaced. These dances are later contrasted by the Mephistophelian frenzy of Ravel’s Scarbo– a dream turned into a nightmare. Here I pair them with Szymanowski’s Mazurkas for Rubinstein, miniatures both conversational and colourfully chromatic, capturing a vision of far away pagan ritual, both echo and subversion of their graceful predecessors.
Messiaen’s Neumes rythmiques—a rarely performed gem from his Quatre études de rythme—has been known more as a concept than a piece of music. Messiaen alternates two refrains: one using additive durations, the other prime-numbered non-retrogradable rhythms, with strophes of chant-inspired rhythmic motives set to fixed dynamics and resonant colours. Though lacking narrative in the Romantic sense, its collage of intensities builds cumulative force through repetition and variation, producing a ritualistic, mantra-like state of being.
Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit is his only piano work which he didn’t orchestrate, intending them as transcriptions of imagined symphonic poems. In this triptych, the alluring meets cruel, dream meets the nightmare, and death wears the mask of sleep. The works take their names from a set of poems which Bertrand ascribed to a stranger who is later revealed to be the devil himself. First, we meet the shimmering whiles of Ondine, a water nymph who tries (and ultimately fails) to lure her subject to a watery grave. Then, the bell tolls, for the hanged man, the airless shadow of life taken reverberating emotionlessly, endlessly. As in the Fugue from Tombeau, Ravel’s humanitarian message is conveyed through what is left unsaid—through absence itself. And finally, we meet Scarbo—whose unpredictable movements, from scampering flights and pirouettes to his buzzing, creeping advances—terrorise both poet and composer alike. About Scarbo, Ravel said that: “I wanted to make a caricature of romanticism. Perhaps it got the better of me”».
The concert was supported also by Fondazione CR Firenze and by Centrica-Imagine more.
