With its striking flights of fancy and bold harmonic shifts, the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue in D minor, BWV 903 of JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH (1685-1750) reveals the legendary improviser at work. Composed before 1717, the Fantasia is unpredictable and avoids formulas and standard baroque patterns, at times breaking into declamatory, recitative-like speech. The three-voice fugue, firmly in D minor, unfolds a long, chromatic subject with inexorable momentum and cumulative power. So admired was this beloved work in the 18th century that more manuscript copies of it survive than any other single work by Bach.

With his haunting score for Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, HANS ZIMMER (b. 1957) turned from spectacle to intimacy – using church organ, four pianos, strings, winds, chorus, and electronics to evoke awe, fragility, and connection.  “I wanted to go back to something very personal and very human,” he said. “Emotion had to be the anchor.”

Day one from Interstellar (2014) was written before Zimmer saw the script.  Nolan gave him only two script lines: “I’ll be back,” and “When?”  From this, Zimmer composed a “tiny, tiny little fragile piece” for piano and organ.  It was to be the starting point for Zimmer’s score.  Nolan called it the ‘heart’ of the score.  In 2022, asked to name his most personal score out of 150-plus titles, Zimmer chose Interstellar – a deeply human soundtrack for a story set among the stars.

Jeux d’eau (1901) by MAURICE RAVEL (1875-1937), inspired by Liszt and prefaced by a line from Henri de Régnier – “The river god, laughing at the water that tickles him” – captures water in motion, bubbling, sparkling, cascading, in glistening, high-register textures and fluid gestures.  “Jeux d’eau,” Ravel wrote, “is the source of all the pianistic innovations people have claimed to find in my music.”   Impressionistic in color, it unfolds in a sonata-like form full of light, color, and rhythmic fluidity – pointing a way forward for future French piano music.

The Nocturnes explore the intimate, lyrical side of Chopin’s musical personality.  Though modest in form, the late Nocturne in C minor, Op. 48 No. 1 (1841) reveals a rich and layered emotional landscape.  From its arresting opening, the piece builds with quiet intensity to a dark, orchestrally imagined climax – one of the most dramatic moments in all the Nocturnes.  The music then unwinds into an unexpected, introspective coda – a miniature study in contrast and control.

For HAYATO SUMINO (b.1995), composition springs from the keyboard.  “It always starts with a simple improvisation,” Sumino said in a recent interview.  “I try to record as much of it as possible and keep notes, then connect the good parts to form a piece.”  

Sumino’s Three Nocturnes – Pre Rain, After Dawn, and Once in a Blue Moon – first appeared on his début album Human Universe (2024).  Together they form a nocturnal suite shaped by skies and landscapes Sumino encountered during his travels.  “Pre Rain was composed in South Korea in winter,” he recalls.  “It was very cold, half-snowing, half-raining, so the piece is kind of like that.  After Dawn comes from my hometown in Japan, where I saw the sun rising while I was jet-lagged.  And I improvised Once in a Blue Moon in the South of France, in the deep countryside.”  Each piece evokes its setting with atmospheric colors, turning private impressions into music that shimmers between reflection and narrative.

The stand-alone Scherzos of FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN  (1810-1849) break from sonata tradition, packing bold contrasts within a single, compact form.  The Scherzo No. 1, in B minor, Op. 20 (c1835), written four years after his move to Paris, opens with declamatory chords and fleet-fingered runs – as a challenge to his Parisian rivals.  Then, in the midst of the storm, he offers a moment of peace with a gently singing melody drawn from a Polish Christmas carol, Lulajże Jezuniu, a poignant nod to his homeland.    

Sumino’s playful Big Cat Waltz (2020) is a whimsical homage to his feline companions – a piece that was “composed by me for my lovely cats,” he shared on Instagram.  One singularly impassive, “chubby but agile” house cat sparked his musical imagination.  Sumino – or ‘Cateen,’ as he is widely known online –describes the piece as “a little wink to Chopin and Viennese waltz style,” vividly reimagined through feline agility and sudden leaps.  The piece dances with light-footed elegance, with a buoyant 3/4 meter, jaunty rhythmic bounce, and sparkling melodic leaps that mimic a cat’s nimble bound.  It is a valse-scherzo in all but name. 

The title offers a vivid image: “It is the impression of an American visitor in Paris, as he strolls about the city and listens to various street noises and absorbs the French atmosphere,” GEORGE GERSHWIN (1898–1937) told Musical America in 1928, after returning from his fifth European visit.  Already well established – with Funny Face and Rosalie on Broadway and Oh Kay! running in London – Gershwin still sought artistic growth.  He met with Milhaud, Poulenc, Prokofiev, Stravinsky, and Ravel, who famously declined to teach him: “Why risk being a second-rate Ravel when you are already a first-rate Gershwin?”

In Paris, Gershwin began composing An American in Paris (1928), a tone poem he described as “really a rhapsodic ballet . . . written very freely and the most modern music I’ve yet attempted.” Like his earlier orchestral works, it offers no precise narrative: “The rhapsody is programmatic only in a general impressionistic way.”

Gershwin’s vitality and improvisational flair inspired pianist Hayato Sumino to arrange An American in Paris, I Got Rhythm, and Rhapsody in Blue.  “What he created had a great influence,” Hayato Sumino told NHK Radio, “fusing different genres – just as I try to in my own music.”

“I have written only one masterpiece and that is Boléro,” MAURICE RAVEL (1875–1937) sardonically told a fellow composer.  “Unfortunately, it contains no music.”  First composed as a ballet score for Ida Rubinstein’s troupe, Boléro, M. 81 (1928-9) builds entirely on one rhythm and a single melody, repeated over two sections.  Its vast orchestral crescendo evolves through gradually shifting timbres rather than traditional development.

The following year, Ravel created a transcription for two pianos – the version Hayato Sumino reimagines here, incorporating felt to dampen the resonance of the strings after the manner of John Cage’s prepared piano techniques.

“Boléro is an experiment in a very special and limited direction,” Ravel cautioned when the piece first gained popularity.  “The themes are impersonal – folk-tunes of the usual Spanish-Arabian kind.”  He originally conceived the staging as a street scene with a factory in the background.  As in Honegger’s locomotive-inspired Pacific 231, Boléro reflects the mechanized rhythms of early 20^th century life.  Its hypnotic repetitions, building tension without melodic development, make it one of the most instantly recognizable – and most debated – works in the orchestral repertoire.

Acknowledgements:

This performance is sponsored by:

Piano Series generously sponsored by Trine Sorensen and Michael Jacobson.