Tamara Stefanovich - Sonate Marathon I + II + III

Groundbreaking piano music from the 20th century and early Baroque in Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ. Pianist Tamara Stefanovich is not only a gifted virtuoso, she is above all a free-thinking musical thinker. She demonstrates this once again with this marathon around the classical piano genre par excellence, the sonata. No Beethoven, no iron repertoire and beaten paths: Stefanovich makes a passionate plea for groundbreaking works from the early Baroque and the 20th century.

Tamara Stefanovich - Sonate Marathon I + II + III

Location

Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ

Piet Heinkade 1

1019 BR Amsterdam

Show in Google Maps

Contact

visit website

Get tickets from €12.50

Sonata Marathon

In three parts of an hour each, Bach is heard alongside Busoni and Scarlatti alongside Scriabin, each time commented on by Stefanovich herself. She previously performed this programme with great success at the Southbank Centre in London and the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg.

Sonata Marathon I

In the first part of her Sonata Marathon, Stefanovich starts with the founding father of the keyboard repertoire, Johann Sebastian Bach. His son Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach also makes an appearance, as does his Italian counterpart Domenico Scarlatti – a great producer of piano sonatas. The Spanish composer Father Antonio Soler may have studied with Scarlatti. It is quite a leap to the early twentieth-century piano virtuoso Ferruccio Busoni and the idiosyncratic American Charles Ives, whose dissonant Three-Page Sonata nevertheless contains musical references to Bach.

Sonata Marathon II

In part two of the Sonata Marathon, the balance shifts to a few titans of the 20th century. Béla Bartók wrote his percussive Piano Sonata in his 'piano year' 1926 for an 'Imperial Bösendorfer', a grand piano with extra bass notes. Hanns Eisler's First Piano Sonata is clearly influenced by his teacher Schönberg, while Paul Hindemith composed his Third Piano Sonata in 1936, not long before he fled Nazi Germany. They are joined from earlier times by sonata grandmaster Domenico Scarlatti and the composing priest Antonio Soler.

Sonata Marathon III

The looming shadow of 20th-century horrors has become reality in part three of the Sonata Marathon. Galina Ustvolskaya's Piano Sonata No. 6 (1988) is an unprecedented outburst of violence; her mentor Dmitri Shostakovich's aggressive Piano Sonata No. 1 (1926) sounds retroactively like an ominous harbinger. Alexander Scriabin's 'Black Mass' sonata is an exercise in virtuoso chromaticism, and with his Piano Sonata 1.X.1905 Leoš Janáček wrote a furious denunciation of the murder of a demonstrator. Domenico Scarlatti and Antonio Soler at most soften the blow of expressiveness that Tamara Stefanovich delivers in the final part of her Marathon .