Liam Wooding Photo: Ruby Shirres
New Zealand pianist Liam Wooding gave this recital at The Piano in Otautahi/Christchurch as part of the venue's Sundays at Four one-hour recital series.
Liam Wooding (Atihaunui a Paparangi) is originally from Whanganui and is now based in Australia. He’s an award-winning pianist who’s been a Fulbright scholar in the United States where he studied with with Aleck Karis. Liam now teaches and coaches students, himself.
As a performer, Liam plays as a soloist, an accompanist and as a chamber music partner. He’s a founding member of the Morton Trio, who are being increasingly recognised for their engaging performances.
In this solo piano concert Liam plays Chopin’s vigorous Fantasy Op 49 as well as a couple of his nocturnes; Beethoven’s Sonata No 31 in Ab Major Op 110 – a work that’s been described as going ‘from the absolute depths of despair to utter euphoria’. And he closes this concert with a piano arrangement of Gershwin’s 'Embraceable You'.
The concert begins with Shostakovich's Preludes and Fugues Op 87 written in 1950 and 1951 while he was in Moscow. Despite being out of favour with the Communist Party, Shostakovich was still asked to be a musical ambassador at musical events. At a Bach competition Shostakovich was judging he heard a brilliant performance of after Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier and was inspired to write his set of 24 Preludes and Fugues. Liam Wooding performs two of them - No 2 in A minor and No 4 in E minor.
Written between 1845 and 1846, Frédéric Chopin’s Nocturnes Op 62 No 2 in E Major ended up being the final nocturnes he ever wrote. When they were first published, many critics dismissed them as products of a disease-weakened composer. By the twentieth century, however, they’d become considered among Chopin's most refined works. They display Chopin's late compositional style – a masterful use of counterpoint and new explorations in harmony and musical structure.
On the day he completed his Fantaisie in F minor Op 49, 31-year-old Chopin wrote a letter to a close friend saying, ‘Today I finished the Fantasy – and the sky is beautiful, there’s a sadness in my heart – but that’s alright. If it were otherwise, perhaps my existence would be worth nothing to anyone’ Composed in one single movement, Fantaisie is one of Chopin's longest works for solo piano, and is considered one of his greatest works. The Fantasy was composed on motives from one of Poland’s most popular insurrectionary songs - ‘Litwinka’ by Karol Kurpiński. A decade before Chopin used it in his Fantasie, ‘Litwinka’ was sung by the community of exiles who fled Poland in the wake of the November Uprising.
Chopin didn’t directly quote ‘Litwinka’ in his F minor Fantasy. He alluded to it discreetly, and if you know the tune, you have to listen closely to make it out. Improvising on national themes wasn’t new to Chopin. It’s something he’d been doing on the piano since he was a young boy at the boarding school run by his father.
Sonata No 31 in Ab Major Op 110 was the second to last piano sonata Beethoven wrote, despite living for half a decade after its completion. He started work on it in 1820, but delayed its progress due to work on his Missa Solemnis and health issues - rheumatism in the winter and jaundice in the summer.
In his review of an early performance of Beethoven's sonata, German music critic Adolf Bernhard Marx heaped praise upon it. He singled out the third movement's fugue, declaring it "must be studied along with the richest ones by Sebastian Bach and Händel." In a more recent review, pianist Jonathan Biss remarked that despite its relatively compact nature, the sonata “goes from the absolute depths of despair to utter euphoria”.
For an encore, Liam Wooding played Earl Wild's arrangement of Gershwin's 'Embraceable You'.
Producer: Darryl Stack
Sound Engineer: Alex Harmer
Technical Assistant: Bryony Lastivicka
Recorded 9 June 2024 at the The Piano, Otautahi/Christchurch by RNZ Concert
