Mark Markham: 4x3 with Scriabin, Debussy & Rachmaninoff

Who: Mark Markham, pianist
What: Four works each by Scriabin, Debussy, and Rachmaninoff on the first half; and Liszt's Piano Sonata in B Minor on the second
When: Wednesday (March 21st, 2018), at 8pm SNOW UPDATE: RESCHEDULED for THURSDAY (March 22nd) at 8pm at Whitaker
Where: Whitaker Center, 222 Market Street in downtown Harrisburg (parking available in the connecting Walnut Street Garage, between 3rd and 2nd Streets)
Tickets: $35, $30 seniors (65+); $5 college students, free admission for K-12 age students with $10 ticket for one accompanying adult.

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NOTE: It's one of those Central Pennsylvania Things-That-Happen -- you program Debussy's prelude "Footsteps in the Snow" on the first full day of Spring and you get your 4th Nor'Easter in 3 weeks, but this one's enough to cause us to RESCHEDULE THE CONCERT FOR THURSDAY (3-22-18) at 8pm at Whitaker...

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It's one of those Central Pennsylvania Residencies when Market Square Concerts joins with the Harrisburg Symphony to present one artist to appear on both their series – and to present a master class at Messiah College. This season, it's pianist Mark Markham who, in addition to being a piano soloist, has been a collaborative pianist (a better term than “accompanist”) with many vocalists like Jessye Norman and who has taught at Peabody School of Music as a vocal coach. So he'll play Ravel's G Major Concerto with the Harrisburg Symphony at the Forum this weekend – Saturday at 8pm, Sunday at 3pm – and offer two master classes: Monday's for vocalists at 5:00, and Tuesday's for pianists at 4:00, both in Messiah College's High Foundation Recital Hall. Then, the Market Square Concerts recital will be Wednesday at 8:00 at Whitaker Center. (I'm not sure why they call these “residencies” because usually the schedules are so jam-packed there's hardly any time to sit still...!)

The program for Wednesday's recital – the focus for these two posts – might look a bit lop-sided. On the first half, there are three composers with four works each (actually two pairs of works each) by Alexander Scriabin, Claude Debussy, and Sergei Rachmaninoff – so, a total of 12 relatively short works but arranged in such an order to present a lot of dramatic and emotional contrast.

Then, on the second half, there's only one piece... however, it's one of the giants, if not “monsters,” of the 19th Century, the Piano Sonata in B Minor by Franz Liszt, one of the towering pianists of the century who was also a trail-blazing composer both revered and reviled by his contemporaries. (You can read it in this subsequent post.)

You can hear some audio clips of Mark Markham's performances on his website, here. And there's an in-depth article about Mark and how he became a pianist, one who's worked for 20 years with soprano Jessye Norman, and studied with Ann Schein, here.

Have you ever wondered why an artist selects the music on the program? In something of a rarity, the program notes includes a commentary by the artist, which concludes with this telling observation:

“Today's program on paper looks very structured for obvious reasons,” Markham writes, “the titles of the works: preludes, etudes and a sonata. Of course, I tried to select pieces with contrasting moods, but the longer I worked on this combination of music, I realized that there was a common element that I had never consciously thought about, which was holding the program together. From the very first measure of the first Scriabin prelude to the very last note of the Liszt Sonata, it is there. Listen for them: Ringing. Tolling. Celebrating. Chiming. Exalting. Delicately. Proudly. Joyfully. Ominously. Mystically. Inviting us. Guiding us. Warning us. Uniting us. Penetrating our souls. They are everywhere, in all shapes, colors and sizes, just like us. Vibrating and resonating in harmony. Showing us the way.”

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Rather than post a video for each of the twelve pieces – a nice round number considering composers often wrote etudes and preludes in sets of 12 – I'm just going to give you a sample pair from each of Markham's three sets.

Scriabin in 1892

First up is a pair of preludes, then a pair of etudes by Russian composer, Alexander Scriabin, all composed between 1887 and 1895 when he was between the ages of 15 and 23! Initially inspired by the music of Chopin, his later music would strain against the traditional boundaries of tonality until eventually he was composing with chords that had no resemblance to what his audience was familiar with. These pieces, however, are full of an intense romanticism that became the bedrock of a Russian school of piano-playing and -writing that reached a more popular climax in the world of Rachmaninoff (coming up...).

Scriabin's Etude Op. 2/1 in C# minor – hard to imagine this is by a teenager – is played here by Vladimir Horowitz during his historic return to Moscow in 1986, telecast live when he was 82.

The emotion of the performance is striking enough, here – perhaps the emotion behind this performance, the pianist's first trip back to his homeland since leaving it when he was 22 – but sometimes it is just as telling to watch an audience listening to the music.

A more recent Russian pianist, Denis Matsuev, performed Scriabin's Etude in D-sharp Minor, Op. 8/12 in 2015 at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. Even at 22, you can already hear many of Scriabin's musical fingerprints including the sprawling left-hand arpeggios stretching across wide intervals.

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Claude Debussy wrote two books of Preludes, each one inspired by a particular image or story and usually described as “impressionistic.” A few years later, his music became less “picturesque” and more abstract, and he composed two books of Etudes, each given a title about the technical difficulty each work presented for the performer.

The 24 Preludes, issued in two "books," were completed by 1910 when he was 47; the 24 Etudes, also published in two books, were completed in Paris in 1915, a year into the horrors of what we know as World War I. He was also already ill with cancer and would die before the end of the war in 1918. Next Sunday, in fact, March 25th, will mark the 100th Anniversary of his death.

The 7th Prelude from Book 1 is entitled “Ce qu'a vu le vent d'ouest” (or “What the west wind saw”) and was inspired by a Hans Christian Andersen tale, “The Garden of Paradise,” a rather grim story which ends with Death approaching a young prince and warning him to atone for his sins since one day he will come for him and "clap him in the black coffin".

In this performance, the pianist is Eloïse Bella Kohn.


While you may be familiar with some of the more gentle preludes like “The Girl with the Flaxen Hair” or “Des pas sur la neige” (“Footsteps in the snow') which opens the Debussy set on this program (just to remind us that snow is still possible even after the first day of Spring...), this prelude is dramatic and technically challenging – and perhaps unsettling, if you're thinking “oh, fairy tale, how cute is this going to be?” Debussy very carefully placed this prelude between the two easiest of this set of preludes – easier in the sense of technical demands as well as listening – no doubt for a greater emotional impact.

Debussy c.1912

Debussy is one of the most “visually-oriented” composers I know, practically everything intending to tell a tale or depict a scene whether it's a painting or some image, or a visually evocative description that can be as vague as “Sails” wafting in the winds. In that sense, his music can be called “impressionistic” whether it is a musical equivalent to the painters' style of the time or not.

But the Etudes are less well-known. Perhaps the reality of the war, so close to his home in Paris, changed his perspective, but in this last phase of his life, perhaps better described as a “mid-life style change” – he was only 55 when he died, by the way – he was becoming more interested in “classical forms,” writing sonatas and these “abstract” etudes focusing on technical demands rather than imagistic sonorities. About the Etudes, he wrote they were "a warning to pianists not to take up the musical profession unless they have remarkable hands."

Markham plays two of them – the one “for the octaves,” prefaced by this one, “pour les sonorités opposées (for opposing sonorities).” It may sound very much like one of the Preludes, full of those layers of lush “sonorities” which define so much of his earlier, more “impressionistic” works and which require skills of touch to balance the different layers. I've posted a recording of Walter Gieseking's with a score so you can see how the layers are written out sometimes on three rather than the traditional two staves for the piano. Or, at 0:52, how a staccato (separated) line in the middle has to be played against the legato (sustained) lines in the upper part of the same hand. Notice also how, initially, the left hand is playing above the right hand.

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Rachmaninoff in 1910

Along with Scriabin, Rachmaninoff is part of a great Romantic school of Russian Piano-Playing – both as performers as well as composers. World War I and, here more importantly the ensuing Bolshevik Revolution, had an impact, no doubt influencing Scriabin's more adventuresome (if not “experimental”) late style – who knows where his music might have ventured if he hadn't died in 1915? In Rachmaninoff's case, the Revolution prompted him, a son of the wealthy aristocratic class, to leave his homeland behind, a move that forever affected his ability to compose – well, that, and the need to become a full-time performer to earn money.

Still, the four works Markham closes the first half of the program with were all composed within a period of six years, around the same time Debussy was writing his four works on the program: the Preludes of Op.32 in 1910 and the Etudes-tableux in two sets between 1911 and 1916. At the time, Rachmaninoff was between his late-30s and early-40s. It is hard to imagine a composer of such great concertos – the famous Third was composed in 1909 – essentially giving up composing when he was in his mid-40s. The last work in this set – the impassioned Etude-tableaux Op. 39/9 in D Major of 1916 – was essentially the last work he completed before fleeing his homeland a year later.

Here is Rachmaninoff's Prelude in B Minor, Op. 32/10 recorded by David Fung in Brussels in 2013:


And here is Rachmaninoff's Etude-tableaux in D Major, Op. 39/9 with a young pianist I've not heard of before, but this performance impresses the hell out of me: Szymon Nehring, performing at a festival called “Chopin and his Europe” in Warsaw in 2016. Notice how both of these pieces are full of bell-like sounds. The Russians - not just Rachmaninoff - love their bells!

(With Liszt on the second half, I just have to include this link to Nehring's encore to that recital, one of Franz Liszt's more virtuosic bits, the 5th of the Transcendental Etudes, “Feux follets (Will o'the Wisps).”

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To keep this from becoming one of those book-length posts, I'll save Liszt's epic Sonata for the next installment which you can read here.

- Dick Strawser