To say that Aleksandar Serdar’s recital on November 13 will be a challenging one would be an understatement. He will need wrists of iron for this one. I wish him Kolay gelsin!
Aleksandar Serdar is a senior professor at the Belgrade Music Academy. Since 2016, he has also been a professor at the Ljubljana Academy of Music in Slovenia. Born in Belgrade in 1967, he graduated from the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad, Serbia, subsequently attending the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore, USA, where he studied with Leon Fleisher for five years. Aleksandar Serdar has served on the jury for a large number of international piano competitions.
His recital begins with two Beethoven sonatas: No 23 in F minor, Opus 57 (the ‘Appassionata’) and one that is described in the programme as ‘No. 2 Op. 27’, which I assume to be Opus 27 No 2 – the so-called Moonlight Sonata, No 14 in C sharp minor. Following this, he will play five of Domenico Scarlatti’s sonatas and Chopin’s Ballade No 4 in F minor.
Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No 23 in F minor, written between 1804 and 1805, is an extremely challenging one for the pianist. The composer himself considered it the most tempestuous one he had written – until he produced his Sonata No 29 in B flat major, the ‘Hammerklavier’, in 1818. The Appassionata is often said to reflect the composer’s feelings on having been obliged to accept his loss of hearing, which in 1803 he had come to realise was irreversible. Wikipedia tells us that the first movement ‘makes frequent use of the deep, dark tone of the lowest F on the piano, which was the lowest note available to Beethoven at the time.’
Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No 14 in C sharp minor, the ‘Moonlight’, meanwhile, was written in 1801. Like the ‘Appassionata’, it was not given its name by the composer himself, but came to be given it in the late 1830s. The fact that it does not follow the arrangement of movements (fast-slow-fast or fast-slow-fast-fast) that was traditional in the Classical period, but instead begins with a slow movement, has led to it being considered one of the earliest pieces of the Romantic era. After all, Beethoven himself – untypically – marked it ‘Sonata quasi una fantasia’. The relatively calm second movement, a conventional minuet in triple time that precedes the stormy finale, was described by Liszt as ‘a flower between two chasms’.
Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757), an Italian composer who wrote over 550 sonatas for the harpsichord and spent the latter years of his life in Portugal and Spain as harpsichord teacher to the Infanta Maria Barbara, was the son of the famous opera composer Alessandro Scarlatti. Wikipedia tells us the following about his sonatas: ‘They are mostly quite short pieces in one movement, often written in an early Classical style which influenced many future Classical composers. He had some unusual effects in his music such as the crossing of hands as they leap wildly from one end of the keyboard to another. He also liked crunchy chords which sound like the strumming of Spanish guitars.’
Chopin completed his Ballade No 4 in F minor, considered one of the masterpieces of the 19th-century piano repertoire, in Paris in 1842. The following year it was published with a dedication to Baroness Charlotte de Rothschild, who had become a pupil of Chopin’s the previous year and was not just a patroness of the arts but also a painter of note in her own right. It is unlikely that she was capable of playing this particular piece, however: it is seen as the most technically difficult of the four ballades, and is also the longest. The pianist John Ogdon described it as ‘the most exalted, intense and sublimely powerful of all Chopin’s compositions… It is unbelievable that it lasts only twelve minutes, for it contains the experience of a lifetime.’
Issue 66, December 2023
Turkey’s Centenary Issue
