Matt Goodrich for Corvallis-OSU Piano International
The first sounds of our 2026–27 season are quiet ones: octaves, sounded softly again and again, stepping down into a floating line in a key not yet the piece’s own. After a pause, a halting melody comes forward in F minor, a slow waltz that seems to catch its breath at the end of every phrase. The composer marks it mezza voce, “in half voice.” This is the beginning of Frédéric Chopin’s Ballade No. 4 in F minor, and its story is the fate of this melody.
Chopin was the first composer to call a piano work a ballade, borrowing the word from narrative poetry, and he never told anyone what story any of his four ballades tells. He completed this, the last of them, in 1842, between Paris and George Sand’s country house at Nohant, during a year that took his first piano teacher and one of his oldest friends. He never said whether either loss found its way into the music.
Each time the waltz returns, it carries the weight of what has happened since: enriched by countermelodies; shadowed by a second voice that follows a step behind, singing the same line in canon; dissolving into the filigree of Chopin’s nocturnes. Between its appearances, a second theme in B-flat major rocks as gently as a cradle song.
Midway through, we hear the opening bars again, from a far-off key, like a memory surfacing at the wrong moment, and the music finds its way back to the waltz by a quiet, searching route. Near the end, the second theme swells from lullaby to full-throated climax in D-flat major, gathering into thunderous chords that stop dead. Five soft chords hang in the air like a held breath. Then the coda breaks loose in a maelstrom, driving the ballade to its final blows. The waltz never comes back.
* * *
In the autumn of 1896, Sergei Rachmaninoff was 23, four years out of the Moscow Conservatory, little known and broke. He had been robbed on a train of a large sum of money that wasn’t even his. So he wrote to order and admitted as much to his friend Alexander Zatayevich that December: Since October he had turned out twelve songs and “six children’s choruses (which, by the way, no child will ever sing),” and had to “write six piano pieces by the 20th of this month.” These became the Moments musicaux.
Rachmaninoff took the title from Schubert, whose own Moments musicaux are modest, intimate miniatures, and gave it a young virtuoso’s ambition. Each of the six takes a familiar kind of piano piece and fills it to bursting. Together, they travel from shadow to light: the pall deepens through four restless, elegiac pieces, lifts in the fifth, and gives way to a finale that ends in a blaze.
The first, the longest of the set, is a nocturne in B-flat minor: a plaintive melody over a rippling accompaniment. Rachmaninoff warms it in an episode in G-flat major and breaks in with a sudden flurry of cadenza, until at last it vanishes into its own ornaments.
The second is a torrent in E-flat minor. Rushing six-note figures pour through every bar, and a song caught somewhere within them surfaces and disappears as the current carries it along. This was the one Rachmaninoff could not leave behind. He seldom played the Moments himself, but kept this piece in his concert repertoire. In 1940, forty-four years later, he made it quicker and leaner and recorded it, the only one of the six he ever put on disc. Later generations of pianists brought the whole cycle into the concert hall to stay.
The third goes deepest, a lament in B minor whose melody moves in doubled, sorrowful lines over a slow bass. Gradually the bass paces out a procession, and the lament becomes a funeral cortège. The fourth, a presto in E minor, is the most ferocious of the six: The left hand churns without pause while an almost military call fights its way up above it. The fifth, a barcarolle in D-flat major, answers with the set’s only stillness. Its melody floats over an accompaniment that undulates, slow and unbroken, like water beneath a boatman’s song.
The cycle closes in a resplendent C major with a peal of bells: melody, cascading chords, and tolling bass layered so densely that two hands hardly seem enough. At its quieter center, the theme shadows itself, a distant echo of the Chopin, before the opening peal returns in full force.
Written against a deadline, for money, the set ends on the sound that would follow Rachmaninoff through his whole career: bells.
* * *
After intermission, Yekwon Sunwoo comes home to Liszt. As a middle-school student in Korea, he muscled his way through the Second Hungarian Rhapsody to prove he could, then left Liszt alone for most of his 20s. What changed his playing was a song cycle, Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin. Sunwoo now hears Liszt as the composer who takes Schubert’s inner voice and puts it onstage, and his new Liszt album is built around singing on the piano.
In the final act of Verdi’s Rigoletto, a storm brews over a disreputable tavern. Inside, the disguised Duke of Mantua woos Maddalena, who laughs him off without meaning a word of it. Outside in the dark, Gilda, whom the Duke seduced and abandoned, watches and weeps, while her father, the jester Rigoletto, broods on revenge. Verdi lets all four sing at once, each with a separate melody and separate truth.
In his Rigoletto Paraphrase of 1859, Liszt hands the entire scene to one pianist. He opens with only hints, fragments of the quartet tossed between the hands, before the scene comes into focus: the Duke’s caressing tune, Maddalena’s staccato laughter, Gilda’s sobbing phrases high above, and Rigoletto’s grim line below. At the climax, the Duke’s melody rings out from the middle of the piano through sweeping arpeggios, and the quartet scatters in showers of cadenzas.
Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 is the piece the teenage Sunwoo once fought his way through, and Corvallis heard it from Sofya Gulyak this past spring. “The same piece,” Sunwoo says, “feels different depending on the life you breathe into it.”
Liszt opens with the lassan, a brooding slow section like a lead violinist holding a crowd spellbound. Its melody moves in the snapping short-long rhythms of Hungarian dance, breaking off so a single flourish can ring out alone. The fast friska begins almost under its breath, then gathers speed and weight, brightening from minor to major until the instrument shimmers and clangs with hammered repeated notes, like the cimbalom of a Hungarian café band.
Just before the final whirlwind, everything falls still, and a theme from the slow opening drifts back. Liszt marks the spot cadenza ad libitum, an open door for the performer, and this afternoon Rachmaninoff walks through it. He recorded his cadenza in 1919, and it survives chiefly because the record does. Rachmaninoff takes Liszt’s themes and rehears them in his own harmonies. At one point he lays two of them over each other, so that melodies Liszt kept apart suddenly meet. Then the door slams, and Liszt’s stampede takes back the room.
For the Mephisto Waltz No. 1, Liszt draws his scene not from Goethe’s Faust but from Austrian poet Nikolaus Lenau’s, which he summarized at the head of the score. A village wedding is underway at a country inn, and the band is half asleep. Mephistopheles, dressed as a huntsman, peers through the window, likes what he sees, and brings Faust inside. He scolds the players for their drowsy bows and demands a violin.
The waltz begins with the devil tuning up: open fifths, the interval between a violin’s strings, rough and impatient, until they lock into a stamping dance that hurls itself across the piano in leaps no fiddler could manage. The Hungarian Rhapsody’s spellbinding violinist gives way to the devil himself.
Faust, meanwhile, notices a village girl. At the heart of the piece, the fiddle stops stamping and starts coaxing. A languorous melody, marked espressivo amoroso, sways in the middle of the keyboard, its syncopations dragging seductively against the beat. Each time it returns, it is more richly dressed and more insistent, until the two dancers whirl out the door and into the night woods.
The fiddle fades, softer and softer. And from the bushes, our afternoon’s last singer takes up the song, a nightingale trilling high in the treble and inflaming the lovers, as if, Lenau writes, it had been hired by the devil. Then the devil’s dance tears back for one last headlong rush and ends in a burst of flame. The song has already gone into the woods with the lovers.
