Biography

The international career of Spanish pianist Javier Perianes has taken him to the most prestigious concert halls to perform with the world’s most renowned conductors and top orchestras, including the Vienna Philharmonic, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, the Czech Philharmonic, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, and the orchestras of Montreal, Chicago, Boston, Cleveland, and San Francisco, among many others. He has also participated in many of Spain’s most important festivals. In 2012 he was awarded the National Music Prize by the Ministry of Culture of Spain and in 2019 was named International Classical Music Awards (ICMA) Artist of the Year. Perianes records exclusively for the Harmonia Mundi label. His diverse discography ranges from Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Schubert to Blasco de Nebra, Mompou, and Turina. His Debussy program won a Gramophone Award in 2019. In July 2021 Perianes released his latest album containing Chopin’s Sonatas Nos. 2 and 3 interspersed with the three Mazurkas Op. 63. LMMC debut.

https://javierperianes.com

Notes

The lives of Johannes Brahms, Robert Schumann and Clara Schumann were closely intertwined both musically and socially. Brahms first met the husband and wife pair in September of 1853 when he was twenty. When Robert attempted suicide by throwing himself into the Rhine, Brahms offered great comfort to Clara, in part through the set of variations he wrote to one of Robert’s themes (Op. 9 on today’s program). The source of this theme is a passage from Schumann’s Bunte Blätter. Brahms presents the theme exactly as Schumann wrote it, in F-sharp minor, then follows it with sixteen variations. Connoisseurs of both Brahms’s and Schumann’s piano music will delight in discovering how two great musical minds interact, how one musical genius pays tribute to his colleague.

Clara herself used the same theme for a set of variations, which she composed for her husband’s 43rd birthday (her Op. 20 on today’s program); it was to be one of her last compositions before abandoning composition for a distinguished career solely as a concert pianist (one of the first women to do so). Brahms was in attendance when Clara first performed the work a few days later.

One of Robert Schumann’s several musical tributes to Clara took the form of still another set of variations, those that eventually became the third movement of his Third Piano Sonata Op. 14, subtitled “Concerto without Orchestra.” When Schumann wrote the first version of this sonata in 1835, the 25-year-old composer was already in love with Clara Wieck, nine years his junior. (The variations movement, fashioned from Clara’s never-published Andantino came later.) Brahms gave the first public performance of the final version of the sonata in Vienna in 1862.

Enrique Granados was one of the first important Spanish nationalist composers. Goyescas, (1911), usually translated as “Scenes from Goya” or “Pieces after Goya,” was directly inspired by paintings Granados had seen in Madrid’s famous Prado museum, each of which described some aspect of eighteenth-century Madrid. Elements of Spanish folk music combine with poetic suggestion and technical brilliance to produce some of the finest keyboard music ever to come out of Spain. To critic Ernest Newman, in playing this music “one has the voluptuous sense of passing the fingers through masses of richly colored jewels.”

Robert Markow