Sergei Babayan Plays Mozart

Sergei Babayan is one of the leading pianists of our time. Hailed for his emotional intensity, bold energy and remarkable levels of color, Sergei Babayan brings a deep understanding and insight to an exceptionally diverse repertoire. Le Figaro has praised his “unequaled touch, perfectly harmonious phrasing and breathtaking virtuosity.” Le Devoir from Montreal put it simply: “Sergei Babayan is a genius. Period.”

Sergei Babayan has collaborated with such conductors as Sir Antonio Pappano, David Robertson, Neeme Järvi, Rafael Payare, Thomas Dausgaard, Tugan Sokhiev, and Dima Slobodeniouk. Over the years, Babayan has performed with Valery Gergiev numerous times to great critical acclaim, including appearances at the Barbican Centre with the London Symphony Orchestra, at the Théâtre des Champs-Elyseés in Paris, the Salzburg Festival, and at the Rotterdam Philharmonic-Gergiev Festival, where Babayan was artist-in-residence.

In recent seasons, Mr. Babayan’s schedule has included concert performances with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Mahler Chamber Orchestra, Toronto Symphony, Vancouver Symphony, and the Verbier Festival Orchestra, among others. Sergei Babayan regularly performs at many of the world’s most prestigious venues, including the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, Carnegie Hall, London’s Wigmore Hall, the Vienna Konzerthaus and Munich’s Prinzregententheater, Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, the Maison de la Radio in Paris, Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie, Alte Oper Frankfurt, and the Zurich Tonhalle. He has appeared at major festivals including La Roque d’Anthéron, Piano aux Jacobins in Toulouse, Gstaad Menuhin Festival, and Verbier Festival. At Konzerthaus Dortmund, Sergei Babayan was a Curating Artist. Mr. Babayan performs with the world’s foremost orchestras, including the London Symphony Orchestra, The Cleveland Orchestra, Warsaw Philharmonic, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre National de Lille, Detroit Symphony Orchestra and Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.

Sergei Babayan is a Deutsche Grammophon exclusive artist; his release Rachmaninoff (DG 2020) was hailed by the international press as a groundbreaking recording and received numerous awards including BBC Recording of the Month and CHOC Classica (“This musical journey, born out of a limitless imagination and thought in minute detail, is one big masterpiece.”) His previous DG release of his own transcriptions for two pianos of works by Sergei Prokofiev, with Martha Argerich as his partner (Prokofiev for Two; DG 2018), was praised by reviewers as “the CD one has waited for” (Le Devoir), an “electrifying duo that leaves the listener in consternation” (Pianiste). Mr. Babayan’s performances have been broadcast by Radio France, BBC-TV and BBC Radio 3, NHK Satellite Television and Medici TV.

Born in Armenia into a musical family, Babayan began his studies there with Georgy Saradjev and continued at the Moscow Conservatory with Mikhail Pletnev, Vera Gornostayeva and Lev Naumov. Following his first trip outside of the USSR in 1989, he won consecutive first prizes in several major international competitions including the Cleveland International Piano Competition, the Hamamatsu Piano Competition, and the Scottish International Piano Competition. An American citizen, he lives in New York City.

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
Flute Quartet in D Major, K. 285 (1777)

In 1777, growing tired of his position at the court of Salzburg and with a conviction that he could earn a more illustrious (and more remunerative) living elsewhere, Mozart, aged twenty-one, set off on a tour of the musical capitals of Europe in search of a new post. The grail, his ultimate destination, was Paris, still the continent’s leading musical capital. The Mozarts had already visited the royal palace at Versailles a decade prior on the family’s “grand tour,” when the young prodigy had been allowed to kiss the hand of the queen.

Mannheim was also on the itinerary. In those days, Mannheim was renowned for arguably the best orchestra in Germany, thriving under the lavish patronage of the Elector Palatine, Karl Theodor. While there, Mozart consorted with fellow visitors, including a certain Dutchman named Ferdinand De Jong. This “gentleman of means” (as Mozart would describe him), a surgeon with the Dutch East India company, was an amateur flutist, taking lessons from a Mannheim musician. He offered Mozart a generous sum in exchange for three short flute concertos and a few quartets for flute and strings. Mozart made the wise professional move and accepted the commission, even though it ultimately bored him and he languished over it. Writing to his father, he claimed, “You know that I become quite powerless whenever I am obliged to write for an instrument which I cannot bear” — a stray remark which has fed the (likely exaggerated) claim that Mozart possessed a strong aversion to the flute. Mozart nevertheless insisted on his own integrity, assuring his father that however onerous the task, he would invest his best efforts into any music bearing his name.

And yet Mozart’s focus was concentrated in another direction: while in Mannheim, he met the soprano Aloysia Weber, with whom he fell in love, and for whom composed an aria, apparently with greater enthusiasm than the flute pieces. In the end, Mozart completed two quartets for De Jong, of which this is the first, in addition to two concertos. His romance with Aloysia, on the other hand, came to an abrupt end when he disclosed it to his father — and in the end, Mozart would go on to marry her sister, Constanze.

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
String Quintet No. 4 in G Minor, K. 516 (1787)

The year 1787 was difficult for Mozart in several ways. By now he had settled in Vienna for several years; yet Mozart still struggled to find the steady and fulfilling position he sought within the city’s musical world. He had a few years of lucrative success as a composer-performer, premiering several piano concertos each season. However, from 1786-1787, he turned his attention to operatic collaborations, resulting in a sharp decline in income that could not adequately sustain his lavish lifestyle. Moreover, in April of 1787, Mozart learned that his father’s health had significantly worsened, which caused particular anguish as the younger Mozart was unable to take the time to visit Leopold in Salzburg.

These trying circumstances surrounded Mozart’s composition of two String Quintets, K. 515/516, often considered the summit of his chamber music writing. Observing the sharp contrasts between the two quintets, commentators frequently draw a comparison between these and Mozart’s Symphonies No. 40 and 41, composed the following year — a comparison bolstered by the respective key signatures of each pair (C Major and G Minor). The dark tone of this quintet is enhanced by Mozart’s choice of ensemble, a string quartet plus an additional viola. This dense instrumentation was nonstandard; and although, by force of these quintets, Mozart was the composer to popularize the genre, he was not without predecessors. Mozart was likely inspired by Michael Haydn (younger brother of Joseph), an old acquaintance from Salzburg who had published his own viola quintets over the preceding decades.

Mozart’s father died twelve days after Mozart completed the String Quintet No. 4. Mozart managed, despite his sorrow, to complete Don Giovanni later the same year, which received a spectacular premiere in Prague. And by the end of the year, Mozart at last obtained part-time royal patronage as “chamber composer” to Emperor Joseph II. It was not as grand of a post as Mozart may have hoped for, but it proved sufficient incentive for Mozart to remain in Vienna.

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-flat Major, K. 271 (1777)

Mozart’s Piano Concerto K. 271 takes us back to 1777, on the eve of the departure for his aforementioned tour across Europe. The numbering is somewhat misleading: although described as Mozart’s “ninth” piano concerto, the first four concertos were in fact pastiche arrangements of existing compositions by previous composers, and the seventh concerto was written for three pianos. Accordingly, K. 271 is more correctly Mozart’s fourth concerto for solo piano and orchestra; and it is widely considered the first of Mozart’s piano concertos to stage the dramatic interplay between piano solo and orchestral tutti that would become his trademark contribution to the piano concerto genre. Charles Rosen goes further still, describing the work as Mozart’s “first large-scale masterpiece in any form.”

The confrontational piano-orchestra relationship is articulated immediately in the opening bars: contrary to the convention of an orchestral ritornello prior to the pianist’s entry in which the concerto’s principal themes are introduced, here the piano makes an interjection in the second measure — a feature both unprecedented and unrepeated in Mozart’s œuvre. The dramatic dialogue is intensified in the Andantino, reminiscent of a tragic aria and perhaps inspired by Gluck (the movement is Mozart’s first concerto movement to be set in a minor key). The Rondo Finale, meanwhile, achieves new heights of pianistic virtuosity, its theme resembling a quasi perpetuum mobile. This Presto is interrupted, however, by a courtly Minuet — an unexpected detour allowing us to catch our breath and reset before a lively race to the finish.

Mozart dedicated this concerto to Louise-Victoire Jenamy (1749–1812), the daughter of the celebrated French ballet master Jean-Georges Noverre. Mozart had made Noverre’s acquaintance when the dancer visited Vienna in 1773 and his daughter performed an impressive keyboard recital for her father’s benefit. When Jenamy passed through Salzburg in 1777, on her way from Vienna to visit her father in Paris, the opportunistic Mozart seized the occasion to present her with the Concerto, perhaps in anticipation of his own upcoming trip to the French capital where he would reconnect with Novarre. Some have even suggested that the Minuet embedded in the Finale is a tribute to the dancer.

Program Notes by Peter Asimov