The French pianist Cédric Tiberghien makes his UKARIA debut with a program featuring a conversation between two composers: the Australian composer Lisa Illean’s 2024 Sonata in ten parts, and the work that inspired it, Beethoven’s monumental set of thirty-three Diabelli Variations. It is the kind of dynamic programming that, along with sensitive musicianship, has taken Tiberghien to performances with the Berlin Philharmoniker, London Philharmonic, Mahler Chamber Orchestra and the Boston Symphony. Tiberghien recently launched his Illean/Beethoven pairing at London’s Wigmore Hall – a venue with which he has had a long-standing association. This UKARIA performance is its Australian premiere.
Beethoven’s original challenge was to invent a set of variations using minimal fragments derived from a waltz theme by the publisher and composer Anton Diabelli. Two hundred years later, Lisa Illean responds imagistically and sensorially not simply to Beethoven’s sounds and ideas but also to touch, to the feeling of playing. Illean is feted for her ‘exquisitely quiet shadows’ (Sydney Morning Herald) and meticulously detailed scores: the Sonata – her first work for solo piano – is no different, the loudest written dynamic a mezzo forte. Illean describes being drawn to thematic fragments: ‘each of the ten parts making up this sonata’ beginning as ‘an improvisation on a pattern derived from a moment… of Beethoven’s 33 Variations… I was interested in transforming the patterns under my fingers, while also drawing disparate starting points into a common nocturnal atmosphere.’ Illean recounts her music in visceral language: the Sonata ‘cascades like sudden vistas of light,’ ‘patterns often reaching or grasping,’ each of the ten parts ‘belonging to and illuminating the others.’ Beneath this chiaroscuro, Beethoven lies in wait, to ‘surface like an iceberg’; but, for the most part, the original musical impetus is ‘partially dissolved, coiling and uncoiling, altering, aqueous, lightening.’
PROGRAM
Lisa Illean (b. 1983)
Sonata in ten parts (19')
Commissioned by Wigmore Hall, London
Australian premiere
INTERVAL
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827)
33 Variations on a Waltz by Anton Diabelli, Op. 120 (55')
Theme. Vivace
Variation 1. Alla marcia maestoso
Variation 2. Poco allegro
Variation 3. L’istesso tempo
Variation 4. Un poco più vivace
Variation 5. Allegro vivace
Variation 6. Allegro ma non troppo e serioso
Variation 7. Un poco più allegro
Variation 8. Poco vivace
Variation 9. Allegro pesante e risoluto
Variation 10. Presto
Variation 11. Allegretto
Variation 12. Un poco più moto
Variation 13. Vivace
Variation 14. Grave e maestoso
Variation 15. Presto scherzando
Variation 16. Allegro
Variation 17. Allegro
Variation 18. Poco moderato
Variation 19. Presto
Variation 20. Andante
Variation 21. Allegro con brio – Meno allegro
Variation 22. Allegro molto, alla ‘Notte e giorno faticar’ di Mozart
Variation 23. Allegro assai
Variation 24. Fughetta. Andante
Variation 25. Allegro
Variation 26. Piacevole
Variation 27. Vivace
Variation 28. Allegro
Variation 29. Adagio ma non troppo
Variation 30. Andante, sempre cantabile
Variation 31. Largo, molto espressivo
Variation 32. Fuga. Allegro
Variation 33. Tempo di Minuetto moderato