Sep 18th 2019

Ivan Ilic : A ‘fantastic’ version of Haydn symphonies on solo piano

by Michael Johnson

Michael Johnson is a music critic with particular interest in piano. 

Johnson worked as a reporter and editor in New York, Moscow, Paris and London over his journalism career. He covered European technology for Business Week for five years, and served nine years as chief editor of International Management magazine and was chief editor of the French technology weekly 01 Informatique. He also spent four years as Moscow correspondent of The Associated Press. He is the author of five books.

Michael Johnson is based in Bordeaux. Besides English and French he is also fluent in Russian.

You can order Michael Johnson's most recent book, a bilingual book, French and English, with drawings by Johnson:

“Portraitures and caricatures:  Conductors, Pianist, Composers”

 here.

 

When pianist Ivan Ilic came across long-lost solo piano transcriptions of several Joseph Haydn symphonies, he recognized the importance of his discovery. Quickly sight-reading Symphony No. 44, Haydn’s “Trauer” (Mourning), in a Cologne piano shop, his instinct was confirmed. Ilic recalls the first hasty run-through “sounded fantastic on the piano”.

Ivan Ilic
Ivan Ilić, Wikipedia Commons

He went on to produce stunning performances of three transcriptions that now fit into the repertoire he is performing for European and U.S. audiences.

“Ivan Ilic Plays Haydn Symphonies” a new premiere recording of transcriptions of Nos. 44, 75 and 92, has now appeared, produced and distributed by Chandos (Chan 20142).

Ilic does justice to Karl David Stegmann (1751-1826), the composer/transcriber who produced these works, only to see them moulder in a closet in a private home in Cologne. Ilic recalls that so much dust had accumulated in the cartons of scores that he had to stop to wash his hands three times while sifting through the gems.

Ilic’s playing on the new CD is articulate and authoritative, resonating as if these pieces were originally composed for piano, not as condensed reworkings of an orchestral version, as some of the Liszt and Beethoven transcriptions seem. The power, dynamics, the arpeggios, phrasing, the virtuoso turns are all there. The original symphonic themes and dramatic passages will be recognizable to Haydn fans.

A sample demonstrates the appeal of this fresh material.

 

This is some of Ilic’s best work. A California native of Serbian extraction, he is emerging now as a major player in a crowded field. He has found a niche of “new music” from the 18th and 19th centuries that is rarely, if ever, heard in recitals or concert halls. A year ago he created a stir with the piano compositions of Anton Reicha, a friend of Beethoven whose original creations had been almost forgotten. Chandos has published two of Ilic’s Reicha collections and more are planned.

The choice of Haydn’s Symphony No. 44 is significant in the composer’s history. An essay in the CD booklet by Haydn scholar Marc Vignal calls it “one of the most beautiful jewels” from the era, typified by Haydn’s sensibility and dramaticism and by more frequent use than before or afterwards of the minor mode in symphonic writing. Adapting to the piano, Stegmann makes effective use of unison octaves reinforced by a further octave in the low register. The result is redolent of the full orchestra version.

Musicologist Vignal points out Indian references, popular at the time, in No. 75, revealing his talent as a “master of the synthesis of the erudite and the popular”.

And Symphony No. 92, the “Oxford”, written for his appearance there at a ceremony awarding him an honorary doctorate degree, offers its own originality. Vignal suggests listening to the “magnificent” adagio (renamed cantabile in the transcription) as high innovativel for the time. Haydn biographers take note of his creative development during his London years where he produced his most futuristic symphonies, of which the Oxford was a precursor.

Ilic molds this material into fascinating new repertoire for the adventurous pianist.

 

END

 

 


This article is brought to you by the author who owns the copyright to the text.

Should you want to support the author’s creative work you can use the PayPal “Donate” button below.

Your donation is a transaction between you and the author. The proceeds go directly to the author’s PayPal account in full less PayPal’s commission.

Facts & Arts neither receives information about you, nor of your donation, nor does Facts & Arts receive a commission.

Facts & Arts does not pay the author, nor takes paid by the author, for the posting of the author's material on Facts & Arts. Facts & Arts finances its operations by selling advertising space.

 

 

Browse articles by author

More Music Reviews

Sep 25th 2014

Think of your favourite piece of music. Do you get shivers when the music swells or the chorus kicks in? Or are the opening few bars enough to make you feel tingly?

Despite having no obvious survival value, listening to music can be a highly rewarding activity.

Aug 18th 2014

Pianist Mordecai Shehori’s prodigious output of CDs over the past few years must be setting some kind of record. Almost every piece of the piano repertoire he has studied throughout his long career is being preserved for posterity, now amounting to 31 CDs.

Aug 14th 2014

The past may be a foreign country, but in terms of war, they do not do things differently there; death is death at any time and in any language.

No other work in the Classical repertoire could be more topical or appropriate in commemorating the centenary of the Great War than Benjamin Brit

Jul 19th 2014

An interview by Ivan Ilic. 

Jul 17th 2014

Chinese pianist Ernest So’s eclectic tastes set him apart from the current run of young Asian keyboard superstars now filling concert halls around the world. He has the technical brilliance of the best of them but more importantly he is a discerning student of the repertoire.

Jul 13th 2014

Gregg Lehrman is a composer and entrepreneur who has helped score music for a number of big TV shows and films.

Jun 9th 2014

The Bach suites for solo cello can leave you suffused, body and soul, with their plangent resonances if you allow them to. These six intimate pieces seem conceived to exploit the sensual nature of the cello.

Jun 5th 2014

When British music lecturer Julia Winterson offered composer John Cage a cup of coffee, he just looked at her. Ms. Winterson, recalling the 1989 encounter, said she thought maybe he hadn’t heard her or didn’t understand her Yorkshire accent.

Jun 1st 2014

A new CD from Ivan Ilic, the Serbian-American pianist based in France, offers a most refreshing change of pace from the current crop of young keyboard speedsters and clavier hammerers.

May 25th 2014

Frederic Rzewski's The People United Will Never be Defeated is one of those pieces that seems to have popped or plopped out whole and near perfect.

May 23rd 2014

With a selection of three rarely recorded piano pieces, the great neglected American composer Frederic Rzewski surges back into view this spring on a new CD from the Naxos “American Classics” series.  Where has he been these past few years?

May 21st 2014

Robert Beaser is one of our very strongest composers.

May 19th 2014

John Adams is one of the most frequently performed of American composers and justly so.

May 16th 2014
As an arts snob, I had never paid much attention to Irish traditional music but here, in a new CD called “Sleepsongs” (Heresy 014, U.S. distribution by Naxos), the lovely Irish singer Caitriona O’Leary’s calming voice overwhelms from the first track onward.
May 13th 2014

Of the perhaps inappropriately named New York School, I find Earle Brown's the most musically rich and articulate. Sign Sounds is for a small chamber orchestra.

May 9th 2014

My friend Stephen Albert once said that he couldn't imagine writing a string quartet after those of Bartok.

Apr 18th 2014

The $10,000 Music Pulitzer Prize went this year to Alaskan composer John Luther Adams, launching a heated debate in the music world over who was – or wasn’t – most deserving of this perpetually controversial award.

Apr 15th 2014

Contrary to many keyboard artists, pianist William Grant Naboré seems perfectly at home with Beethoven’s daunting Diabelli Variations.

Mar 11th 2014
The expatriate young pianist Mauro Bertoli, now artist in residence at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, brings his feathery Italian touch to a new CD, Italian Memories, featuring his personal collection of little-known Italian keyboard works.

His timeline stretches

Mar 3rd 2014

Every few years, music lovers should try to attend a live performance of Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalila Symphonie. Not just to clean one’s pipes but to be reminded what a composer’s volcanic imagination can do with an orchestra.