- This event has passed.
Anna Le Hair
24 April @ 12:45 pm – 1:45 pm
Tickets on the door (cash or card). Under 18s and carers go free
Doors open at 12:15 pm
Performers
Notes on the performers
Anna Le Hair
Piano
Anna Le Hair gained an honours degree in music at Edinburgh University, and her postgraduate studies were at the Royal College of Music, London. Anna has a busy and varied career as a performer, teacher, accompanist, ABRSM examiner, adjudicator and conductor. Engagements have included recitals, both solo and as chamber musician and accompanist, as well as soloist in several piano concertos, in many venues in London and around Britain and abroad. Anna currently teaches piano and accompanies at St Albans School, and she also has a thriving private teaching practice at her home in Tring. She is the founder of and runs the successful ‘Piano and more’ concert series at St Peter and St Paul church in Tring and is a founder member of the Icknield Ensemble. She completed her first international examining tour for ABRSM in summer 2019 to Malaysia.
Programme
Programme notes
J.S. Bach (1685 – 1750)
French Suite no. 5 in G BWV 816
- Allemande
- Courante
- Sarabande
- Gavotte
- Bourrée
- Loure
- Gigue
The French Suites, BWV 812–817, are six suites which Johann Sebastian Bach wrote for the clavier (harpsichord or clavichord) between the years of 1722 and 1725.
The suites were later given the name ‘French’ (first recorded usage by Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg in 1762). The name was popularised by Bach’s biographer Johann Nikolaus Forkel, who wrote in his 1802 biography of Bach, “One usually calls them French Suites because they are written in the French manner.” This claim, however, is inaccurate: like Bach’s other suites, they follow a largely Italian convention. There is no surviving definitive manuscript of these suites, and ornamentation varies both in type and in degree across manuscripts.
The first few bars of suite no.5 were written in 1722 for Bach’s second wife, but it was not completed until 1723. The Gigue, as often, is in fugal style, in binary form. The voices enter in descending order (Soprano-Alto-Bass), while in the second half of the piece the voices not only enter in opposite order but also an inversion of the 1st subject.
Source: Wikipedia
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Piano Sonata No. 12 in F major, K. 332 (300k)
- Allegro
- Adagio
- Allegro assai
Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 12 in F major, K. 332 (300k) was published in 1784 along with the Piano Sonata No. 10 in C major, K. 330, and Piano Sonata No. 11, K. 331. He wrote these sonatas either while visiting Munich in 1781, or during his first two years in Vienna. Some believe, however, that Mozart wrote this and the other sonatas during a summer 1783 visit to Salzburg made for the purpose of introducing his wife, Constanze to his father, Leopold. All three sonatas were published in Vienna in 1784 as Mozart’s Op. 6.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840 – 1893)
The Seasons Op. 37
- April
In 1875, Nikolay Matveyevich Bernard, the editor of the St. Petersburg music magazine Nouvellist, commissioned Tchaikovsky to write 12 short piano pieces, one for each month of the year. Bernard suggested a subtitle for each month’s piece. Tchaikovsky accepted the commission and all of Bernard’s subtitles, and in the December 1875 edition of the magazine, readers were promised a new Tchaikovsky piece each month throughout 1876.
Johannes Brahms (1883 – 1897)
Six Pieces for Piano, Op. 118
- Intermezzo in A major. Andante teneramente
Brahms’s Six Pieces for Piano, Op. 118, were completed in 1893 and published with a dedication to Clara Schumann. The set was the penultimate of Brahms’s published works. It was also his penultimate work for piano solo.
The pieces are frequently performed. Like Brahms’s other late keyboard works, Op. 118 is more introspective than his earlier piano pieces, which tend to be more virtuosic in character.
Source: Wikipedia
Claude Debussy
Footsteps in the Snow from Preludes Book 1
Des pas sur la neige is a musical composition by French composer Claude Debussy. It is the sixth piece in the composer’s first book of Préludes, written between late 1909 and early 1910. The title is in French and translates to “Footprints in the Snow” The piece is 36 measures long and takes approximately three and a half to four and a half minutes to play. It is in the key of D minor. The prelude was, along with Danseuses de Delphes, one of the preludes Debussy believed should be played “entre quatre-z-yeux” (literally “between four eyes”) meaning intimately, as if privately.
Source: Wikipedia
La Soiree dans Grenade from Estampes
Estampes (Prints), L. 100, is a composition for solo piano by Claude Debussy. It was finished in 1903. The first performance of the work was given by Ricardo Viñes at the Salle Érard of the Société nationale de musique in Paris on 9 January 1904.
La soirée dans Grenade uses the Arabic scale and mimics guitar strumming to evoke images of Granada, Spain. At the time of its writing, Debussy’s only personal experience with the country was a few hours spent in San Sebastián de los Reyes near Madrid. Despite this, the Spanish composer Manuel de Falla said of the movement: “There is not even one measure of this music borrowed from the Spanish folklore, and yet the entire composition in its most minute details, conveys admirably Spain.”
Source: Wikipedia
Samuel Barber
Excursions, Op. 20
- Blues
Excursions, Op. 20, is the first published solo piano piece by Samuel Barber. Barber himself explains: “These are ‘Excursions’ in small classical forms into regional American idioms. Their rhythmic characteristics, as well as their source in folk material and their scoring, reminiscent of local instruments are easily recognized.” This is typical of neo-Romantic composers such as Barber.
The second movement, entitled ‘In slow blues tempo,’ encapsulates the popular American idiom, a “rich and elegant blues.” Barber uses “conventional harmonic progressions and melodic and rhythmic features associated with blues” to continue the overarching idea of the American idiom within classic form.
Source: Wikipedia
George Gershwin
4 Songs arranged for solo piano
- Stairway to Paradise
- Do it again
- ‘S Wonderful
- I got Rhythm
Stairway to Paradise is a song composed in 1922 by George Gershwin with lyrics by Ira Gershwin and Buddy DeSylva for the Broadway revue George White’s Scandals.
Do It Again is an American popular song by composer George Gershwin and lyricist Buddy DeSylva. The song premiered in the 1922 Broadway show The French Doll, as performed by actress Irène Bordoni.
‘S Wonderful is a 1927 popular song composed by George Gershwin, with lyrics written by Ira Gershwin. It was introduced in the Broadway musical Funny Face (1927) by Adele Astaire and Allen Kearns.
I Got Rhythm is a piece composed by George Gershwin with lyrics by Ira Gershwin and published in 1930, which became a jazz standard. Its chord progression, known as the “rhythm changes”, is the foundation for many other popular jazz tunes such as Charlie Parker’s and Dizzy Gillespie’s bebop standard “Anthropology (Thrivin’ on a Riff)”.