Pianist Anton Kuerti at the Niagara International Chamber Music Festival

Pianist Anton Kuerti at the Niagara International Chamber Music Festival

The 10th season of the Niagara International Chamber Music Festival got off to a strong start last week in Niagara-on-the Lake. The full house at the gala opening night in St. Mark’s Anglican Church heard the Festival Stings along with the Gould String Quartet and the Philharmonic Quartet in an eclectic selection of music, ranging from Vivaldi to contemporary Canadian composer Peter Tiefenbach and the Russian Igor Raykhelson, a leading composer of the contemporary Neo Romantic Movement. Tiefenbach’s witty comments on his Night Music for String Quartet were almost as enjoyable as the music itself, not surprising from the longtime CBC radio host.

The evening ended with the Gould Sting Quartet joining with the Philharmonic Quartet, made up of BPO musicians Diana Sachs, Alan Ross, violins, Natasha Piskorsky, viola and Feng Hew, cello, for a memorable performance of the Mendelssohn Octet. The festival also crossed the border for the first time ever, to present a program in the Alumni Chapel of Niagara University titled, appropriately enough, “Musical Bridges.” Festival Music Director Atis Bankas, who is a violinist with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, joined pianist Heather Conner and BPO principal cellist Roman Mekinulov for a highly energized performance of piano trios by Mozart and Dvorak that were irresistible.

Keyboard virtuoso

The festival continues through August 16, in a variety of venues, all in Niagara-on-the-Lake. One of the upcoming highlights is a recital by the great Canadian pianist Anton Kuerti, at 7:30pm on Saturday, August 9, in St. Mark’s Anglican Church. Born in Austria in 1938, Kuerti grew up in the United States, moved to Canada in 1965 and became a Canadian citizen in 1984. Something of a child prodigy, he asked his pre-school teacher to give him piano lessons on his own, and at the age of 11, he played the Grieg Concerto with the Boston Pops under Arthur Fiedler. Kuerti went on to study at the Cleveland Institute of Music and the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, and his teachers included Arthur Loesser, Rudolf Serkin, and the great Polish pianist Mieczyslaw Horszowski. While still a student in 1957, Kuerti won the Philadelphia Orchestra Youth Prize, as well as the coveted Leventritt Award, which includes engagements with major US orchestras, gaining him appearances with the Cleveland Orchestra, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. Kuerti rapidly gained a strong international reputation, performing in over 40 countries, and developing a huge repertoire of over 50 concertos, including one that he composed himself.

Kuerti taught for 25 years at the University of Toronto, and is now a visiting professor at McGill University and the University of Ottawa. Sonny Wong, one of his talented protégés, is well known to Buffalo area audiences, having appeared on the Buffalo Chamber Music Society’s Gift to the Community series concerts a couple of years ago. This past March, Kuerti performed Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, replacing at the last minute Leon Fleischer, the dean of American concert pianists, who was suffering from the ill effects of a stomach virus. What made the event additionally special was that Anton Kuerti’s son, BSO assistant conductor Julian Kuerti, was making his official debut with the orchestra. The reviewer from the Boston Globe noted in a favorable review “With no chance for rehearsal, rough edges were inevitable. But emphasizing spontaneity over smoothness, inquiry over indulgence, father and son showed why some warhorses deserve their status—how, with enough intelligence and daring, even familiar music can seem new.”

Kuerti and Beethoven

In a 2004 interview, Kuerti noted that, “I am fairly conservative and am fortunate that I have been able to play only the music I love. That is mainly the late 18th, 19th and some of the early 20th century repertoire, especially the German repertoire. My favorites are Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Schubert, Chopin, Brahms, Wagner, and then going to some of the early 20th century music.” When asked to pick three favorite composers, Kuerti replied, “Just in terms of what music I feel closest to, I would say Schumann, Beethoven and Schubert.”

Kuerti has recorded the complete Beethoven piano sonatas, a recording that won the Juno Award, the Canadian equivalent of a Grammy Award, as well as all the Beethoven piano concertos.

Kuerti’s all Beethoven recital on August 9 consists of two works, the Sonata in E flat major, op.81A (Les Adieux) and the monumental 33 Variations in C major on a Waltz by Anton Diabelli, op.120. Composed by Beethoven in 1810, the Les Adieux sonata memorializes the departure from Vienna of the Archduke Rudolf, one of Beethoven’s most generous patrons, because of the 1809 French invasion led by Napoleon. The programmatic nature of the piece is evident from the horn call of the brief, opening adagio, where Beethoven had written the three syllables of the German word lebewohl—“adieux” or farewell—over the first three chords. The middle andante movement effectively conveys the “l’absence” while the final movement, marked vivacissimamente, the joyous return.

The Diabelli Variations is the last great work that Beethoven composed for the instrument that he began his musical career on as a virtuoso, and arguably the greatest work that he wrote for the piano, if not one of the greatest of all his compositions. The traditional story of the works genesis relied heavily on Anton Schindler, described by the current dean of American Beethoven studies Maynard Solomon as “Beethoven’s notoriously unreliable biographer.” The Viennese publisher Anton Diabelli sent a simple waltz tune to 51 leading composers in the Austrian Empire and asked each one to write one variation on it for a joint publication for charitable purposes. According to Schindler, Beethoven regarded the theme as trivial or even ludicrous, and refused to participate. Later, also according to Schindler, Beethoven asked him to find out how much Diabelli would pay for a full set of variations. When Schindler reported that Diabelli would pay top dollar— or rather top ducat—for the set Beethoven agreed, eager to show what he could do with an ordinary waltz, and a legend was born that persisted to very recently. In his 2003 book Late Beethoven Solomon has gone back to the source material to show that Schindler got the amount of money wrong, and misstated the planned number of variations and both the place and the time of composition by four years. According to Solomon, Schindler “had no first-hand knowledge of the work’s genesis, so his unsupported claim that Beethoven viewed the theme with contempt may safely be written off as an invention.”

Instead, what Beethoven accomplished was to use a waltz, also known as “Ein Deutsche,” or “Deutscher Tanz,” a simple product of German soil to demonstrate, according to Solomon, “how one thing can be radically transformed into another—or split into many—without itself being annihilated; it is an essay on creative metamorphosis and a promise of endurance.” The magnificent result is a true masterpiece that is not always easy to perform successfully. Anton Kuerti has demonstrated his strong affinity for the Diabelli Variations in the past, and this performance is not one to miss.

For more info visit niagaramusicfest.com.