中華表演藝術基金會 Chinese Performing Arts Foundation

Ya-Fei Chuang 莊雅斐, pianist

Acclaimed by critics in the United States and abroad for performances of stunning virtuosity, refinement and communicative power, Ya-Fei Chuang’s playing has been named the equal of Vladimir Ashkenazy, Garrick Ohlsson, and Idil Biret (The Boston Musical Intelligencer), and Alfred Brendel has praised her as "a pianist of extraordinary ability, intelligence, sensitivity and command . . . approaching the height of her powers." Commenting on her newly released (April 2019) Chopin/Liszt recording, he also stated "If you want to listen to Chopin and Liszt with different ears, Ya-Fei Chuang's ecstatic performances cannot leave you cold, and her pianism is staggering"; and Remy Franck wrote "... masterful ...thrilling ...phenomenal" (Journal about Classical Music, Luxembourg).

Ya-Fei Chuang’s international appearances include the symphony orchestras of Berlin, Boston, Birmingham, Israel, Malaysia, and Tokyo; and performances at the Berlin Philharmonie and Schauspielhaus, the Gewandhaus (Leipzig), Queen Elisabeth Hall (London), Boston Symphony Hall, National Concert Hall (Taipei), Suntory Hall (Tokyo) and, more recently, performances in New York, San Francisco, Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and at the International Grieg Piano Competition in Norway (where she also served as member of the competition jury several times), and the Grand Piano Series in Naples, Florida.

Festival appearances in recent seasons include Verbier, Ruhr Piano Festival (where she regularly performs), Oregon Bach, Mozartwoche (Salzburg), the Taiwan Maestro Piano Festival (where she also gave a two-week masterclass), the Mozart Festival (Romania), Beethoven Festival (Warsaw), Beethoven Festival (Krakow), European Music Festival (Stuttgart), Bach Festival (Leipzig), Taipei International Music Festival, and the festivals of Schleswig-Holstein, Gilmore, Ravinia, Rockport, Sarasota, and Tanglewood.

Performances on fortepiano include Boston Baroque, Handel & Haydn Society, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Philharmonia Baroque, and Concerto Köln.

Ya-Fei Chuang has recorded for ECM, Harmonia Mundi, Naxos, and New York Philomusica Records, and the Ruhr Festival has released several of her live recordings. Fanfare Magazine hailed her "delicacy and fluidity of touch" for her Mendelssohn G Minor Concerto live recording, and her recording of Hindemith chamber works was awarded a special prize by the International Record Review. Upcoming CD releases include recordings of the complete piano solo works by Ravel for Le Palais des Dégustateurs, to be released worldwide on Harmonia Mundi.

Ya-Fei Chuang’s mastery of the most challenging solo and chamber repertoire is complemented by her commitment to contemporary music. She has given the world premieres of works by John Harbison, Stanley Walden, Thomas Oboe Lee, and Yehudi Wyner.

She is on the faculty of the Boston Conservatory at Berklee and on the New England Conservatory Preparatory & Continuing Ed, where she teaches a piano performance seminar. She gives master classes throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia, and since 2008 an annual two-week master class at the International Summer Academy at Mozarteum in Salzburg.

Prizewinner in the Cologne Inter¬na¬tional Piano Competition at age 18, Ya-Fei Chuang first performed on television in her native Taiwan at the age of eight and gave her first public recital at age nine. She won first prize at the nationally televised ‘Genius vs. Genius’ Music Competition at age ten and first prize at the National Competition (Taiwan) at age eleven. The following year she received unprecedented fellowships and scholarships from several prestigious foundations in Germany and Taiwan that enabled her to pursue pre-college, under¬graduate, and masters-level studies at the Freiburg Conservatory (Musik¬hochschule) with Rosa Sabater and Robert Levin, completing the six-year course of study in four. During this time she was awarded numerous prizes, including the Basel-Colmar-Freiburg Arts Prize, the Mendelssohn Prize (Freiburg) and Parke-Davis Prize (Germany). She subsequently concluded her German studies with Pavel Gililov, receiving a concert diploma (final degree) at the Cologne Conservatory, and earned a graduate diploma at the New England Conservatory in Boston, USA, with Russell Sherman. Her master class teachers included Leon Fleischer, Gil Kalish, Elisabeth Leonskaja, John O'Conor, Meneham Pressler, Karl-Ulrich Schnabel. Her mentor Alfred Brendel has been working with her regularly in recent years.

NOTES ON THE PROGRAM
By Dr. Jannie Burdeti

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)
Prélude (2’)

Ravel composed his Prélude—which lasts a mere twenty-seven measures—in 1913 for the sight-reading portion of the women’s piano competition at the Paris Conservatoire. According to one of the major music journals of the time (Le Menestrel: Journal de musique, July 5, 1913), out of the thirty-one contestants, Jeanne Leleu captured best the essence of the work at sight, earning herself not only a first prize but also Ravel’s admiration. (To be clear, there were eight first places given, and ten second places.) The composer, who was on the jury, dedicated the work to her, later writing her a personal letter expressing how he was "sincerely touched" by her performance. In this ephemeral miniature, one can hear echoes from Chopin’s Prélude, Op. 45, Ravel’s Trois poèmes de Mallarmé, and Debussy’s two books of Préludes.

Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849)
Sonata No. 3 in B Minor, Op. 58 (27’)
Allegro maestoso
Scherzo: Molto vivace
Largo
Finale: Presto non tanto

Chopin experienced the full range of life’s vicissitudes in the year 1844: the sorrow of his father’s death; the elation of his sister, Ludwika, visiting him for the first time in fourteen years; his health taking a turn for the worse at his young age of thirty-four (he would die five years later); and the deterioration of his relationship with his partner, Baroness Aurore Dudevant, known by her pen name, George Sand. Throughout these events, Chopin worked diligently on his Third Piano Sonata. Despite a negative initial reception by critics, the sonata remains one of the most important pieces of the nineteenth century, with its confluence of styles, rich palette of emotions, and large-scale craftsmanship.

The key of choice of B minor was unprecedented at the time for a large-scale piano sonata, and it likely motivated Liszt’s decision to cast his famous sonata for piano in the same key a few years later. The first movement of Chopin’s sonata begins with a bold declaration, containing a half-step motive that will inform the entire work. Lyricism abounds in the second subject, with its long, singing melody above a gossamer left hand. The development section demonstrates Chopin’s mastery of contrapuntal techniques, the product of a lifetime of studying Bach’s music. (It has been recorded that the only work that Chopin took with him during his summer retreats was Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier.)

A clear departure from the gravitas of the opening, the second movement, marked Scherzo, is fleeting in character and filled with sparkling finger-work. Charles Rosen makes the argument that the middle trio section not only makes "one melodic line out of many voices" but "project[s] a single line to distant regions of the musical space." While Chopin emulates Bach in the layered writing, he simultaneously makes the music entirely his own.

The third movement is a breathtakingly beautiful nocturne. An arpeggiated middle section spins out a hypnotic meditation where time seemingly stops. After a return of the opening material, with subtle echoes of Chopin’s recently completed Berceuse, the coda concludes the work with a moving synthesis of both sections.

Compared to the abundance of material in the first movement, the finale is almost bare in its use of themes. We hear a rather angular theme combined with dazzling runs. The movement’s inexorable momentum practically gallops into a roof-raising close.

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714-1788)
Rondo in E Minor, Wq 66
"Farewell to my Silbermann Clavichord" (5’)
Poco andante, e sostenuto

"Play from the soul, not like a trained bird," wrote Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach in his seminal treatise, Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments. CPE Bach, the second surviving son of Johann Sebastian Bach and godson of George Philipp Telemann, influenced generations of keyboard players, not only through this treatise, but through his keyboard compositions, which are unfortunately often neglected today. The term Empfindsamkeit, now deeply associated with CPE Bach, characterizes the composer’s understanding of expression. Its meaning most closely resembles the word sensibility as used by Jane Austin in the novel Sense and Sensibility. In essence, while CPE’s father, Johann Sebastian, would often create a single emotion throughout one piece, intending it to be constant and meditated upon, for CPE and also his older brother, Wilhelm Friedemann, the focus was on depicting the ephemeral nature of emotion and its quick changes.

While CPE Bach favored various keyboard instruments depending on the musical situation at hand, based on his treatise and his musical output, it is clear that the clavichord—an instrument that dates from the 1400s—took a central place in his practicing and teaching. The clavichord is a small, rectangular stringed keyboard instrument, with brass blades that strike the string when played. Unlike the harpsichord or fortepiano (both of which Bach was familiar with), the clavichord allowed its player to create vibrato by varying the pressure on the key, a technique called Bebung. CPE Bach believed that playing the clavichord allowed one to develop a sensitive touch and musical finesse.

There was one clavichord constructed by Gottfried Silbermann that CPE Bach was particularly fond of. The instrument boasted a beautiful singing tone, stayed in tune, and allowed for a large range of dynamics. In fact, it remained close to Bach’s heart for thirty-five years, indirectly shaping his keyboard idiom and allowing him to develop the freedom of expressivity that is evident in his later works for solo keyboard. When, in 1781, he finally parted with his prized instrument, selling it to one of his students, Ewald von Grotthuss, the occasion prompted him to write his "Farewell to My Silbermann Clavichord." According to Walter Georgii, part of his impetus for composing this affecting work was to demonstrate "that it [was] possible to write sad rondos."

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)
Gaspard de la nuit (23')
Ondine
Le gibet
Scarbo

When asked who his teachers were, Maurice Ravel would consistently cite the American poet Edgar Allan Poe as his third composition teacher. Not only did Poe’s essay "Philosophy of Composition" profoundly influence Ravel’s methodology, but the eerie writings of Poe captured Ravel’s imagination. Almost Poe’s exact contemporary was French poet Aloysius Bertrand. Ricardo Viñes, Ravel’s good friend and a champion of his music, introduced Ravel to Bertrand’s collection of short poems in prose form, Gaspard de la nuit: Fantasies in the Manner of Rembrandt and Callot. In 1908, Ravel was to choose three poems and compose a piano suite that would push what were then the very limits of technique and musical imagination.

The name Gaspard translates to English as Jasper or Casper and means "keeper of treasures." The title Gaspard de la nuit would thus imply the "keeper of nocturnal treasures"—perhaps the keeper of that which is dark and mysterious. For the poet Bertrand, Gaspard is both a devilish figure and the author of the poetry. Indeed, in each of Ravel’s three movements, the music evokes half-dimmed hallucinations, unearthly creatures, and ghoulish sentiments.

The first movement, Ondine, commences with a shimmering halo of sound, after which the story of a seductive water nymph begins in the left hand. As the music grows, one hears the increasing tension between the water nymph and the human that she is trying to bring below. The man tells her he already loves another, after which she sheds some tears "and with a burst of laughter disappear[s] in a shower of drops that [fall] in pale streams."

Following the enchantment of Ondine, Le Gibet (The Gibbet) is the ghastly depiction of a "bell that tolls from the walls of a city, under the horizon, and the corpse of the hanged one that is reddened by the setting sun." A B-flat is heard as an obsessive ostinato more than two hundred times throughout the movement. Angela Hewitt writes, "In 52 bars he manages to create an odor of death through sounds." Ravel wrote, "‘Le Gibet’ . . . [is] terrifying by its even simplicity."

Taking place in the night once again, Scarbo depicts a small goblin—his laughter, his fingernails against the curtains, his dancing, and his sudden appearance and disappearance. The music is nothing short of terrifying, both emotionally and technically. Ravel wrote to his friend and student Maurice Delage about his goal of "transcendental virtuosity" in this movement (a reference to Liszt’s Transcendental Études) and his desire to write something more difficult than Balakirev’s famously difficult Islamey.

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)
Menuet sur le nom d’Haydn
(Minuet on the name of Haydn) (2')

For the occasion of the centenary of Joseph Haydn’s death, the music journal Revue musicale sent invitations to several eminent French composers to compose a tombeau, or tribute, to Haydn. Six composers were commissioned, including Ravel, Debussy, and Dukas. According to the editors of the journal, H=B, A=A, Y=D, D=D, N=G, based on the idea that when ascending the keyboard, using the entire alphabet, Y ends up on the key D, and N ends up on the key G; H is borrowed from German musical notation.

Enthused by this project, in 1909 Ravel composed this charming miniature, which contains the name right side up, upside down, and backwards. The piece’s duration is about a minute and a half—only fifty-four measures. Ravel scholar Roger Nichols writes, "The Menuet shares its lemon-flavoured semitonal clashes with its counterparts in the Sonatine and Le tombeau de Couperin."

Franz Liszt (1811-1886)
Reminiscences of Don Juan (Mozart) S.418 (17’)

Liszt wrote Reminiscences of Don Juan in 1841, at the height of his career as a traveling virtuoso. While all of Liszt’s opera paraphrases are dazzling displays of virtuosity, Don Juan (along with Norma and Les Huguenots) goes far beyond pyrotechnics and delighting the listeners. According to Charles Rosen, "[it] is a synoptic view of the opera, in which the different moments of the drama exist simultaneously: what Liszt reveals is the way they are interrelated." Based on Liszt’s restructuring and reinterpretation of the opera, Rosen argues that Liszt’s Reminiscences is in fact a self-portrait of himself as Don Juan.

The work opens in the midst of drama, depicting the curse of hell. Music from the Commendatore, who represents righteousness, is heard. What follows is a flashback to the well-known love duet between Don Giovanni and Zerlina, "La ci darem, la mano" ("Give me your hand"), followed by two virtuosic variations. The third section references the "Champagne aria," a celebration of Don Giovanni’s pursuit of hedonism—and in Liszt’s version, the music of hedonism enjoys a wild triumph. Rosen writes, "[Liszt] did almost nothing to discourage his international reputation as a Don Juan. Every performance of his fantasy must have been understood by his audience as an ironic image of the composer-performer."

新聞稿 for 01-29-2022 (postponed to 10-01-2022 due to weather condition)

中華表演藝術基金會第33屆音樂季第三場音樂會,將於10月1日週六晚8時,繼續在新英格蘭音樂學院喬頓廳 (Jordan Hall) 舉行。由鋼琴家莊雅斐擔任演出鋼琴獨奏會。曲目包括拉威爾,蕭邦,巴赫,李斯特等作品。90分鐘演出沒有中場休息。座位有限。觀眾皆須戴口罩。須出示打過疫苗或測試陰性證明方可入場。票價為 $15 (7-13歲)、$30、$50。提供學生免費票 (14歲以上),及非學生贈送卷。需事前預訂。6歲以下兒童請勿入場。詳情請查官網。

鋼琴家莊雅斐精湛的琴藝,受到樂評家的驚嘆及好評。已在國際舞台贏得肯定與讚賞。她的恩師 Alfred Brendel 讚美她『是一位具有特殊才華,智慧,精細敏感,並富駕馭能力的鋼琴家』

莊雅斐出生台灣,從小音樂天份即被發掘。之後遠渡德國學習再到美國深造,在德國弗萊堡 (Freiburg) 音樂學院,以四年時間完成六年的課業,從大學預科,本科,及碩士學位,還得到了榮譽藝術家文憑。在科隆 (Cologne) 音樂學院完成了獨奏家最高文憑。並獲得多項國際競賽大獎。還在新英格蘭音樂學院取得了研究生文憑。

莊雅斐經常在世界各大音樂廳表演。與著名指揮家及樂團合作。她曾出現在眾多國際音樂節,包括華沙貝多芬,歐洲Musikfest Stuttgart,德國Leipzig,巴哈,Ruhr, Schleswig-Holstein,美國Gilmore, Sarasota和Tanglewood 等。她是挪威國際格里格 (Grieg) 鋼琴比賽及維也納貝多芬鋼琴比賽的評審。

德國ECM,法國Harmonia Mundi, 瑞典Naxos,和紐約Philomusica等唱片公司都曾為她錄音。德國魯爾Ruhr音樂節發行了許多她的現場錄音,包括一張她的個人專輯。這張專輯在福諾論壇 (Fono Forum) 雜誌以頭版登出。雜誌稱讚她:"恬淡流動性的琴藝, 雅緻且細膩."她所錄製Hindem室內樂作品受到國際唱片評論 (International Record Review) 授予特殊的獎項。「音樂樂迷雜誌」(Fanfare Magazine) 將她的孟德爾頌 (Mendelssohn) 第一號鋼琴協奏曲的現場錄音列入與 Perahia, Rudolf Serkin, John Ogdon等齊名的等級中。

莊雅斐的雙鋼琴演奏合作對象包括Noah Bendix-Balgley, Martin Chalifour等世界級大師,並與Steven Isserlis 和Robert Levin 二人定期合作演出。莊雅斐詮釋了許多最具挑戰性的現代獨奏和室內樂曲。她為作曲家 John Harbison, Stanley Walden和Thomas Oboe Lee 的作品做了世界首演。

莊雅斐目前任教於波士頓音樂學院和新英格蘭音樂學院預科。她極受歡迎的大師班遍及美國,歐洲和亞洲,並每年定期在歐洲薩爾茨堡 (Salzburg) 的Mozarteum 開班教授。

當晚曲目有:
拉威爾: 序曲Prélude
蕭邦: B小調第三奏鳴曲,作品 58 Sonata No. 3 in B Minor, Op. 58
CPE 巴赫: E小調迴旋曲 Wq 66 『告別我的西爾伯曼古鋼琴 "Rondo in E Minor, Wq 66 "Farewell to my Silbermann Clavichord"
拉威爾: 夜晚的加斯帕 Gaspard de la nuit
拉威爾: 海頓名字的小步舞曲 Menuet sur le nom d'Haydn
李斯特: 唐璜的回憶 Reminiscences of Don Juan (Mozart) S. 418