So, what’s a fortepiano, anyway? Well, it’s a piano. In Italian, fortepiano means “loud-soft,” and thus it was differentiated from its cousin, the harpsichord. Unlike the latter, the fortepiano is capable of varying tone intensities based upon the player’s touch (hence loud-soft), but today the term has acquired somewhat more specificity—reserved for keyboards of the mid-1800s or older. It’s thus no surprise that Milwaukee’s Early Music Now welcomes fortepianist Kristian Bezuidenhout into their midst for a concert of late-Baroque and early-Classical music.
Bezuidenhout is quite the globetrotter, touring recently in Switzerland, Germany, Austria and Chicago. “I first heard him play a Mozart program at the Boston Early Music Festival probably six years ago,” recalls Early Music Now’s Executive and Artistic Director Charles Sullivan, “and set my sights on bringing him to Milwaukee if the occasion ever arose.” Bezuidenhout’s musical résumé is formidable: After graduating from the Eastman School of Music he went on, at the age of 21, to win first prize (as well as the audience prize) at the Bruges Fortepiano Competition. Thereafter, he’s performed with numerous orchestras and chamber ensembles, including the English Concert, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Bavarian Radio Symphony and Chicago Symphony; notable collaborating artists include John Eliot Gardiner, Philippe Herreweghe, Trevor Pinnock and Christopher Hogwood. Since 2009, he’s had a recording contract with the Harmonia Mundi label.
“Bach is the father; we are the children,” Joseph Haydn once wrote of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (Johann Sebastian’s most gifted son). C.P.E. Bach was, in fact, the greatest keyboard composer of his generation, and a powerful influence upon not only Haydn, but also Wolfgang Mozart and the young Ludwig van Beethoven. By age 7, Carl could play all of his father’s technically demanding keyboard works by sight, later taking the elder Bach’s Baroque style and blended it into the Aufklärung of the coming Classical era.
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In this solo concert, Bezuidenhout performs two of C.P.E. Bach’s many piano pieces. The first is a sprightly Rondo in C Minor of 1785, described eloquently by Early Music Now’s Eric Bromberger as “short, pithy and varied [and] full of those unexpected pauses and instant changes of mood that characterize so much of Emanuel’s music for the keyboard.” Likewise there’s Bach’s Sonata in E Minor, one of nearly 200 sonatas he composed, as Bach himself explained, “für Kenner und Liebhaber” (“for connoisseurs and amateurs”).
But it is Mozart that dominates Bezuidenhout’s program. The keyboard was seminal to Mozart’s life from the very beginning; indeed, he had thoroughly learned the harpsichord by the age of 4, and within a year was composing his first music. The diminutive Austrian genius is best known for his bigger works—symphonies, concertos and operas—but he likewise excelled in smaller genres. Mozart voiced his opinion in a letter of 1778: “In Germany, we rather like length, but after all, it is better to be short and good.”
We find six different works of his on the program. The Suite in C Major, K. 399 is a bridge between the Baroque and Classical genres, consisting as it does of such old standbys as fugue, allemande, courante and sarabande. There is also the Menuet in D Major, K. 576b, a fairly serene little work that none other than Peter Tchaikovsky later chose for one of his orchestral suites. Also, we have Mozart’s Gigue in C Major, K. 574 which “dances agilely along [in] its 6/8 meter” (Bromberger). His Rondo in A Minor, K. 511 made a strong impression on Mozart scholar Alfred Einstein who wrote of the Rondo’s “whole depth of emotion [and] perfection of style.” Mozart’s Fantasy in C Minor, K. 475 is a more forward-looking work that sounds a bit like something by a young Beethoven. The biggest Mozart work on the program is also one of his longest and most demanding for the keyboard: Piano Sonata No. 13 in B-Flat Major, K. 333, designed no doubt as a concert vehicle for himself and, in its flowing Andante cantabile slow movement, a reminder that he was also one of the finest opera composers of all time.
Kristian Bezuidenhout performs at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, Nov. 21 at Wisconsin Lutheran College, 8815 W. Wisconsin Ave. For more information and tickets, visit earlymusicnow.org.
