István Gulyás Piano Recital

Pianist István Gulyás, a professor at the Liszt Academy, will perform works by two of the Romantic era’s greatest composer-pianists. The first half of the program features compositions by Chopin. The genre of the nocturne, or “night music,” interested the Polish composer throughout his life. At this matinee concert, three of the twenty-one nocturnes will be performed: the B-flat minor from his youth, the C-minor from the composer’s final decade, and the C-sharp minor, published after Chopin’s death. These somewhat shorter pieces are followed by the Scherzo in B-flat minor. Schumann compared this piece, which demands virtuosity yet poetic delicacy, to the poetry of Byron. In the second half of the concert, István Gulyás invites his listeners on a journey—in the footsteps of Liszt. We will hear works from the volumes of Années de pèlerinage depicting Italy and Switzerland. The Sposalizio, which opens the Italian journey, evokes Raphael’s painting, the engagement of Virgin Mary is represented by a bell-like motif. This is followed by Petrarch’s 123rd sonnet, and finally the last one takes us to Switzerland. The Obermann-valley is based on an epistolary novel by the French Romantic Sénancour, in which a wanderer is searching for the meaning of life in the solitude of the Swiss mountains.