For the September edition of our ongoing recital series blog, we invite Chuyun Hu to share her story and her meticulous study behind her performance at the C. Bechstein Centre Manchester.
About Chuyun
Chuyun Hu, a classical pianist, has completed both Bachelor of Music (with Honours) and Master of Music in Performance at the Royal Northern College of Music. In 2020, she passed the application for Erasmus + Exchange Studies Programme and became an exchange student at the Royal Irish Academy of Music from January to May 2021. She has studied with Richard Ormrod and Bingbing Li at the Royal Northern College of Music and continues to learn with Maria McGarry. Besides improving her piano skills and her understanding of chamber music at college, she has written essays in a variety of music topics, including a major dissertation that interprets the rhythms in J.S. Bach’s French Suites.
Chuyun Hu was awarded Shirley Catterall Award for Piano by the Royal Northern College of Music in 2015. She was commended by members of the audiences for her solo piano recitals as part of the annual Chorlton Arts Festival performed from 2021 to-date. While being enrolled at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, she obtained a first-class mark for her performance of Bruch’s 8 pieces for Piano, Viola, and Clarinet Opus 83. She also received positive feedback for her recitals at St. Ann’s Church in central Manchester in November 2016 as well as at Cross Street Chapel in October 2018. She got the invitation letters for 2 music masterclasses – International Holland Music Sessions in July 2022 and London Overseas Musicians’ League in July 2024.
Programme Notes
Chuyun has kindly shared with us her dedicated study of
Scriabin’s Piano Sonata No.2 (Sonate-Fantaisie) in G-sharp minor
The first movement ‘Andante’
Scriabin revised the first movement 7 times. According to the Preface to the Urtext edition by publisher G.Henle Verlag, the genesis of this sonata dates back to 1892, but it was not until October 1897 that Scriabin sent the engraver’s copy of the whole sonata to a publisher in Vienna. Scriabin’s hard work resulted in a wide range of tone colours and a strong association between phrases forged by the flow of harmonies and the recurrence of motives.
For example, during the transition period between the primary theme in G-sharp minor and the secondary theme in B major, chromaticism and a deceptive dominant-submediant progression cause the tone colour to go through a back-and-forth process of being brightened and darkened. When the secondary theme arrives, the opening sonority, an unconventional B major triad that comprises a suspension forming a perfect fourth instead of a major third with its root, is introducing a transparent sound, thus rendering this theme a gentle and feminine character as opposed to the masculine feel of the chordal primary theme.
The cadences of some phrases overlap the beginning of another phrase, producing a seamless flow of musical ideas, on the other hand, Scriabin terminated some sections using just a half cadence and directly began the next section in another key, which demonstrates individuality. Despite that, this movement is highly tonal because the harmonic language adheres to the conventions of harmonic practice, and this movement sees Scriabin being in the early development of his own musical language.
The second movement ‘Presto’
The second movement is also set in G-sharp minor and highly tonal. Scriabin once again ended a section with a half cadence and directly transposed the music to a new key in the next section. While the first movement reflects the traditions of harmonic practice, the second movement deploys more adventurous harmonic idioms that utilise non-harmonic notes or notes from another key – the way that these embellishing tones resolve is very flexible, which once again reflects that Scriabin was already a maverick among composers from the era of Romanticism.
While the exposition has G-sharp minor as the key, the development is set in the relative major key, B major. Thanks to B major, the contrast in sound quality between these two chapters of this movement was very conspicuous. The development reuses the theme of the exposition and shares the winding shape of the melodic figuration in the exposition, though the figuration of the development contains more harmonic tones that belong to the underlying harmony than the exposition.
Mozart Piano Sonata in B-flat major, K 333
The first movement ‘Allegro’
The tonal scheme of this movement is very typical of the classical sonata form, but instead of making the structures of the melodies also textbook-like, Mozart played with extensions to the 8-bar sentence or period that is often found in other sonatas written in the age of classicism – he often developed melodic elements that have appeared in past bars to a different contour and rhythm as the extensions. In spite of these variations, there is a pattern in the shape of melodies: If there have been notes making overall a downward movement, the melodies will soon walk its way to a higher pitch, and vice versa. This pattern imparts human qualities to the first movement, as if establishing a character who has the habit of nudging someone for things that he wants.
The second movement ‘Andante Cantabile’
The second movement bears the marking of ‘Cantabile’ , an Italian word that translates to English as ‘in a smooth singing style’ . The melody is indeed smooth because of the legato articulation called for by slurs over a group of notes, and the song-like quality of this middle movement is reinforced by the dominance of the melodies that the arpeggiated accompaniment for the left hand endows, besides, the chordal accompaniment imbues ambience to the melody, almost like the effect of the damper pedal of the modern piano.
The grouping of phrases in this second movement is as flexible as that in the first movement, but the tonality journey that this slow movement goes is clear and logical. It is set in E-flat major with the second half of the binary form making transient modulations at the outset, then the theme of the first half returns in the form of a slight variation, re-establishing E-flat major as the key.
Third movement ‘Allegretto grazioso’
The third movement naturally sounds very vigorous because the melodies often do the grouping of only 2 notes (in other words, a slur that indicates legato effect covers 2 notes) each time. The movement is in classical sonata form, but since the primary theme is repeated too many times, it also sounds like a Rondo.
After the primary theme and the secondary theme appear in the recapitulation, a 2-bar cadenza brings the music to a tender, compact version of the primary theme – the accompaniment is now changed to Alberti bass, and a lot of materials from the original primary theme is abandoned with only the first musical idea ( F - D - B flat - B flat - E flat – G – A ) being presented here - immediately after that comes the a melancholy version of the primary theme thanks to Mozart switching the mode to the parallel minor. Mozart was not yet satisfied with the degree of the change in colour, he initiated a series of tone colour switch from a bright shade to a dim hue until the end of the second cadenza, which makes this sonata sound like a person with a complete range of emotions.
‘Warsaw Concerto’ from the film ‘Dangerous Moonlight’
arranged by Henry Geehl for piano solo from the original score.
‘Warsaw Concerto’ is composed by English film composer Richard Addinsell and orchestrated by Roy Douglas for the 1941 film entitled ‘Dangerous Moonlight’. Set in the second world war, the film revolves around the Nazi invasion of Poland and the romance between the 2 protagonists, a polish male airman and an American female journalist, and another predominant subject matter in the plot is the polish pilot’s marvellous skills for composing music and playing the piano. Film excerpts found on YouTube suggest that the polish airman was pondering melodies and harmonies for a new work on a grand piano left within the remain of a building, and these musical materials that he conceived are the themes that the film composer Richard Addinsell penned for the film.
To match the great musical talents of the male protagonist, Richard Addinsell brought about some demanding piano techniques, especially in the primary theme sections of both the exposition as well as the recapitulation, which embody overwhelming, nerve-racking harmonies as a reflection of the war. Then the indulgent, at times nostalgic but overall heart-warming sections in B major and E-flat major enter as a depiction the love between the 2 main characters in the film with its Rachmaninoff type of sounds - harmonic progressions that deploy chords borrowed from another key and that features chromaticism.
Debussy’s ‘Clair de Lune’
The title of this piece means ‘moonlight’ in English, and this piece of work is part of ‘Suite Bergamasque’. According to the performance notes written by Christopher Harding on publisher G. Schirmer’s performance edition, the term ‘Bergamasque’ refers to a dance that originates in the region of Bergamo in Italy and that does not look elegant enough. The connotation of the awkwardness of the dance can be perceived in the uneven rhythms during the first 2 sections as well as when the opening theme recurs – in these areas, triple divisions of the beats alternate with duple divisions of the beats, and quavers are often followed by a much longer note, such as a dotted minim. Despite the uneasy rhythms, grace is imbued in the sounds that Debussy produced in most parts of the work.
The first chapter of the work constantly switches from a warm tone colour to a dull tone colour, painting a sky at night where clouds float before the moon and then move past it. As the music progresses, the sense of beats becomes clear, and the melodies are given more attributes of regular dance with the aid of the arpeggiated accompaniment, which may suggest that the composer was thinking of the scintillation of moonlight on water. When the dynamics is increased to Forte, the music seems to indicate that a current of wind occurs, stirring the mirrored image of the moon, and after the water is settled, the composer used a 2-bar arpeggiation passage to lead the music back to the opening theme.
Selected music from film ‘The Legend of 1900’
‘The Crave’
‘The Legend of 1900’ is an epic fictional film that tells the life of a virtuoso pianist called 1900, who never leaves the ocean liner since the day when he was born in it. ‘The Crave’ is the music used in the competition scene of the film, where 1900 and a famed jazz pianist are contending for championship in piano performance and music composition on the ferry and in the presence of journalists and passengers. Having heard 1900 making up a jazzy piece of music from scratch on the grand piano, the famous jazz pianist elaborates the same piece by slightly modifying the harmonies and the rhythms, which gives us the version to be presented in this solo piano recital.
A Mozart Reincarnated
This is a short piece of music appearing in a scene during 1900’s early childhood, where he is playing his own work on the grand piano aboard the ocean liner and attracting a lot of attention from the ship crew, one of whom proclaimed at the scene that 1900 is a reincarnation of Mozart. This work from the film does not actually resemble the compositional style of Mozart, but it does emulate the simple beauty in and the naive quality in the sound world of the major-key piano sonatas that Mozart composed, and the piece does end with a cadence that was also used by Mozart to conclude sections of his piano sonatas: 2 notes of the dominant chord are superimposed on the tonic tone (scale degree 1) to further sustain the dominant chord during the cadence, creating double 2-4 suspensions (the members of the dominant chord form a major second and a perfect fourth with the tonic tone) before resolving to the tonic chord. Therefore, the extra-musical idea of this soundtrack is to match the age of the protagonist 1900 in this specific scene of the film and to correspond to the carefree impression that 1900 is making when he is playing the piano with his feet dangling from the piano stool.
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