Korea's Emerging Stars:
Pianists Dasol Kim and Tae Hyung Kim

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) – Franz Liszt (1811–1886)
Prelude and Fugue in A minor, BWV 543
Franz Liszt found it easy to perform the score of an opera or symphony with which he was unfamiliar on the piano, however complex it might be. In his innumerable transcriptions he easily found room for voices and instruments in two piano staves, in passing adding new performing challenges. His legacy is dominated by transcriptions of the most popular romantic operas of the time, and among these his interpretations of Johann Sebastian Bach’s preludes and fugues stand apart.

Liszt had been acquainted with the organ, “the king of all instruments”, since his childhood. As he was with Bach’s music. Settling in Weimar in 1848 (Bach lived there at the beginning of the prevoius century), Liszt took an interest in old organs, of which there were a great many in the surrounding churches. At home he had a monstrous instrument – a specially built hybrid of the organ and the piano.

Liszt worked on transcriptions of Bach’s organ music between 1842 and 1850. Playing his music on the organ, he preferred to give it a brilliant registration, although this did not hinder his attempts to transfer all the richness of the organ timbres to the sound of the piano. And thus two great virtuosos of different centuries came together – an organist and a pianist – and this time Liszt did not try to invent new problems. It was enough that the pianist’s left hand also had to perform the role of the organ pedal, and, what is more, doubling in octaves.

Franz Liszt’s grandiose piano cycle Années de pèlerinage was written over the course of almost fifty years and heralded different stages of the composer’s stylistic as well as his spiritual evolution: the cycle’s first volume, Suisse, is filled with images of nature in sound, the second, Italie, reflects artistic associations connected with the contemplation of works of applied art as well as literary subjects and the third volume (though it has no geographic title it was written in Rome) is dedicated to the religious thoughts of Liszt, who at that time had then already accepted holy orders. The word “pèlerinage” in the title of the cycle refers to a pilgrimage — the intense search for spiritual truth, symbolically reflected in the number of volumes themselves. Liszt’s first work in the sonata genre — the grand one-part fantasia quasi sonata Après une lecture de Dante — is based on the ideas of Italian humanism drawn by the composer from La divina commedia which were surprisingly in keeping with his own spiritual world: the struggle of heroic willpower against the destructive forces of chaos, the passing through the gloomy circles of Hell and the attainment of the higher values of love and spiritual enlightenment.

Frédéric Chopin’s Twenty-Four Preludes, Op. 28 appeared in 1838–1839, at the same time as such monumental works as the Second Sonata, ballades, scherzos and études. The composer concluded the cycle of preludes on Majorca, where he had taken Bach’s two-volume Well-Tempered Clavier, which he had known from his childhood years. Chopin responded to Bach’s grandiose idea – to compose a series of preludes and fugues in all extant major and minor tonalities – in terms that were the exact opposite. His works include preludes, very short ones, such as the Prelude in A Major (No 7) which lasts just sixteen bars. And if Bach arranged his preludes and fugues across the chromatic scale, Chopin arranged his preludes according to the circle of fifths, underlining the relationship between the neighbouring tonalities as much as possible. This means that the twenty-four preludes should preferably be performed together and not individually.

The cycle of twenty-four preludes forms a condensed encyclopaedia of Chopin’s style. Here there are brilliant examples of cantilena (for example, Preludes No 4 in E Minor, No 6 in B Minor, No 15 in D Flat Major), there is a piece close to Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words, a chorale and even a funeral march. Almost half are dazzling virtuoso pieces in which the extremely complex piano figurations do not destroy the lightness and elegance inherent in miniature works.