Khrystyna Mykhailichenko

Performers

Notes on the performers

Khrystyna Mykhailichenko is a young Ukrainian pianist who was born in Crimea. She began to play the piano when she was four. Within six years, she was winning international piano competitions and was performing in concerts throughout Europe and in the USA. The venues include Salle Cortot in Paris, Bozar Hall in Brussels, the Music Academies of Bruges, Antwerp, Krakow, Bremen, Gariunu concert hall in Vilnius, the University of Miami and Broward Centre for the Performing Arts, the World Bank in Washington DC, the UN residence in New York and all the National Philharmonics of Ukraine.

Her repertoire includes major piano concertos by Rachmaninov, Beethoven, Brahms, Liszt and a wide variety of solo recital’s programme. At the outbreak of war in February 2022, she fled to Poland with her mother and sister before settling in the North East of the UK in June. As well as continuing to travel extensively for performances, she studied at the Junior RNCM under Graham Scott. She won a full scholarship from the Royal Academy of Music in London and has started her undergraduate course there in September 2023 under professor Joanna MacGregor.

Jonathan Freeman-Attwood, the Royal Academy’s principal, said: “Khrystyna Mykhailichenko is an extraordinary talent of rare maturity for her age. She came and played the Chopin Ballade No 1 to me recently and revealed what a serious artist she is, almost as if the burdens of a hard life were being channelled through her playing. This was well beyond the carefree virtuosity one hears in this piece so often. It also had real grip and originality.”

Programme

Programme notes

Schubert

Sonata In A Major D 959

1. Allegro
2. Andantino
3. Scherzo: Allegro vivace
4. Rondo: Allegretto

For the most part, the Sonata in A major, D. 959, is representative of late Schubert (1797-1828). It is dramatic, certainly; bucolic at times, definitely. But in its second movement, there is an episode of dread so implacable that one wonders how the music and the listener can even proceed.

Written in Schubert’s last year of life, a time haunted by illness and periods of poverty, the A-major Sonata seems to invite a biographical interpretation. But there is always a danger, apprehending the work of great artists, when we follow that path. Inevitably we hear the proximity of death in the second movement, but how can we explain the appearances of what seem to be uncomplicated happiness elsewhere in the Sonata, given the fraught months of its composition?

The Andantino has no equal in the sonata literature. Beginning as a dour, melancholy barcarolle, the movement continues with nothing less than a look into the abyss. Nowhere else do we hear music which seems so uncoupled from what came before, a deranged breakdown of sorts, played out as we listen, unforgiving and tragic. But Schubert pulls us back from this terror with the brief glow of a hopeful major key. Recovery is by necessity gradual and the movement ends as somberly as it began. And where Beethoven might seek a heroic almost celestial resolution of turmoil, Schubert’s healing remains humanely and gratefully earthbound.

Source: LA Phil

Franz Liszt

Les Harmonies poétiques et religieuses

1. Invocation
2. Ave Maria
3. Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude (‘The Blessing of God in Solitude’)
4. Pensée des morts (‘In Memory of the Dead’)
5. Pater Noster
6. Hymne de l’enfant à son réveil (‘The Awaking Child’s Hymn’)
7. Funérailles (‘Funeral’)
8. Miserere, d’après Palestrina (after Palestrina)
9. La lampe du temple (Andante lagrimoso)
10. Cantique d’amour (‘Hymn of Love’)

Harmonies poétiques et religieuses (Poetic and Religious Harmonies), S.173, is a cycle of piano pieces written by Franz Liszt at Woronińce (Voronivtsi, the Polish-Ukrainian country estate of Liszt’s mistress Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein) in 1847, and published in 1853. The pieces are inspired by the poetry of Alphonse de Lamartine, as was Liszt’s symphonic poem Les Préludes.

Source: Wikipedia