In Act City Hamamatsu Concert Hall, a place that holds wonderful memories, I undertook the first recording I have ever made. These are the expressive and moving works that I performed in the Hamamatsu International Piano Competition, including the Schubert Sonata D 894, a work that changed my life. I am very happy to present a miraculously beautiful musical world that is extremely important to me.
I am thankful to have had the opportunity to make this recording in such a splendid setting. It is my sincere hope that the music will touch the hearts of many people.

Manami Suzuki

This is a programme that powerfully demonstrates the musical potential of the small. Whilst none of the pieces before us are technically miniatures, all are quite modest in their length: from descriptive piano pieces to short movements, to a sonata that wasn’t even billed as a sonata, so peculiar did its constituent parts appear. And yet in all cases, we hear more than the sum of these modest parts, thanks to the brilliance and imagination of their creators.

We begin with a Prelude and Fugue from that mighty collection by Johann Sebastian Bach, created ‘for the use and profit of the musical youth desirous of learning and for the pastime of those already skilled in this study’. The first volume of Das wohltemperierte Clavier was completed by about 1722, modelled on an earlier chromatic sequence of pieces in the same form by fellow German composer Johann Caspar Ferdinand Fischer – though Bach’s preludes and fugues were both more expansive and took in every single key. The second volume, from which we hear the Prelude and Fugue in B flat minor BWV 891, was finished around 1742. And a key as laden with accidentals as this one would have been a particular novelty, since it was only with recent developments in ‘tempering’ (which is to say tuning) that it was possible to play in such unusual tonalities without the music descending into a series of unpleasant ‘wolf’ notes, crunching and grinding in a way that was best avoided. The keyboard was ‘well-tempered’ because it allowed for each interval between notes to be almost the same ‘size’, rather than the previous method of sweetening certain intervals for the most-used keys… and thus creating distinctly sour intervals elsewhere. The Prelude begins with a drooping right-hand figure, a falling scale which quickly permeates the texture of Bach’s writing, imitations and echoes everywhere. But there is balance too: the subject of the proceeding Fugue is one of upward movement, austere and chromatic, admitting of the occasional gentler moment in which major harmonies – and the lilt of its six beats in a bar – are allowed to shine through.

More than 150 years separate Bach’s contrapuntal keyboard explorations from our next work. The Ukraine-born Polish composer Karel Szymanowski was twenty-nine when he travelled to Italy and Sicily in 1911, and already held the firm belief that modern art could be renewed most effectively through a return to the ideas and stories of ancient Greek art. In Palermo, he was particularly struck by a sequence of metopes (the term refers to panels of stone within a classical frieze that were sometimes decorated with characters or scenes from narratives) which had been taken from a temple in the Sicilian coastal area known as Selinunte.

Debussy’s Estampes – ‘Engravings’ – for solo piano were eight years old, and as a composer much interested in French musical developments, it is possible that Szymanowski was drawn to the idea of creating his own musical bas-reliefs thanks to Debussy’s example. His three piano Metopy Op. 29 are not, in fact, based on the specific scenes of Selinunte metopes, but instead take their cues from Homer’s Odyssey. ‘Isle of the Sirens’ is mysterious and threatening, the Sirens themselves (half-women, half-birds, who sang and played the lyre and lured sailors to their deaths) calling and fluttering with equal beauty and danger. Szymanowski sends the pianist’s hands cascading up and down lyre-like figurations, but always with unnerving extras, as if catching a tiny threatening movement out of the corner of an eye. ‘Calypso’ belongs to the depths of the sea, and delays Odysseus on his journey home. Her music rocks and floats, the harmonies and figurations reminiscent of Ravel’s fiendish Gaspard de la nuit of 1908 (another piece, and composer, much admired by Szymanowski at this time). Finally ‘Nausicaa’ – who helps, rather than hinders, Odysseus’s progress – is dancing and playful, full of passion and delicacy and with a decided spring in her step. Szymanowski completed the Metopy in 1915, describing them to a would-be publisher as ‘major piano pieces, technically interesting and “modern”.’

Joseph Haydn joined the employ of the Esterházy family in 1761, when he was twenty-nine (the same age as Szymanowski had been during that formative trip to Italy and Sicily). Johann Sebastian Bach had died only eleven years previously, when Haydn was a teenager, and musical tastes were changing rapidly. Symphonies rubbed shoulders with concertos that featured multiple soloists, in the old concerto grosso style. Pianos were still brand-new, and much keyboard music was issued with a joint designation for pianoforte or ‘cembalo’ for anyone not yet willing to cough up for such a new-fangled instrument – or who simply preferred the tone and feel of the harpsichord.

Haydn had already begun to write what we now refer to as piano sonatas; but the word ‘sonata’ did not appear at the head of his manuscripts until 1771. Before that time, he called such works either ‘divertimento’ or ‘partita’. Thus the piece we now know as the Sonata in G major Hob.XVI:6 was described by its composer, on its completion in 1766, as ‘Divertimento per il Cembalo Solo’. And it can be found in many places only under the title ‘Partita’, rather than ‘Sonata’. The Sonata’s four movement are pleasingly compact and full of colour. A lively Allegro, full of dancing decorations, opens the work and is followed by the elegant strut of the Menuetto. The Adagio, almost operatic in its singing lines and dramatic reversals of mood, is entirely in G minor, and it is up to the whirl and spin of the finale to return us – eventually! – to the firm ground of our home key.

By the time Franz Schubert was born in 1797, the piano sonata had become a genre long since established and codified not only by Haydn, but also the likes of Mozart, Beethoven, Hélène de Montgeroult and Václav Tomášek. And yet the last work on this disc is also a problem piece when it comes to the composer’s choice of title.

In 1826, Schubert was approached by the Swiss publisher Nägeli, which had been enjoying much success with the series Répertoire des Clavecinistes. Despite the old-fashioned implications of the ‘clavecin’ (not so different from the ‘cembalo’, in fact), Nägeli’s practice was to commission new works from leading composers under this banner, and everyone from Muzio Clementi and Johann Baptist Cramer to Beethoven was on the books. Schubert, whose music had only been issued thus far by Viennese publishers, must have realised the opportunity that this offer presented: to finally send his scores beyond the confines of his home city, which would potentially boost his reputation and open doors to other prestigious houses in Germany and beyond. And yet Nägeli’s fee was not generous, and Schubert needed money. Ultimately, when negotiations did not go as he had hoped, he sold the manuscript to a different publisher instead: Tobias Haslinger, a Viennese company he had worked with before. He would not succeed in getting his music published abroad until the year of his death.

Although we now refer to Schubert’s commission as his Sonata in G major D894, the first edition described it as ‘Fantasie, Andante, Menuetto und Allegretto’. This may have been the upshot, at least in part, of the seeming lack of balance across the four movements: the first is hugely longer than any other, lyrical and serene in a way that seems to foreshadow the broad canvases of Schubert’s final three sonatas of autumn 1828. The easy-going opening of the Andante gives way, with dramatic abruptness, to fortissimo chords that leap across the keyboard and hint at an orchestral grandeur and richness. Each time the opening melody returns, it is as if Schubert has coaxed the music back to this gentler place – now newly enhanced by the stormy episodes that have preceded it. A Ländler-like Menuetto follows, strident and singing by turns; and one has the sense that Schubert is seeking to incorporate all the moods, colours and rhythms that have come before in his sunny finale, to reconcile the whole and bring us to a peaceful conclusion. As the reviewer of the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung observed, this Sonata is ‘by no means an ordinary one… it comes from an artist who is still young and who has raised the most pleasurable hopes by several of his works.’ The piece was dedicated to one of Schubert’s most loyal and supportive friends, Joseph von Spaun.