ABOUT DANIEL HERSCOVITCH
Daniel Herscovitch studied with Alexander Sverjensky at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and Rosl Schmid in Munich. While based in Germany he performed extensively on the continent and in England and toured Australia three times. He also appeared at several international festivals including the Berlin Festival, the Zagreb Biennale and the Saarbrücken Tage der Neuen Musik.
Since returning to Australia he has been active in solo and chamber music, and has appeared at the Adelaide Festival of the Arts, the Mostly Mozart Festival, the New Directions Festival and the Festivals of Melbourne and Sydney. He was a regular guest artist at Roger Woodward’s Sydney Spring Festival and toured for Musica Viva and in New Zealand. He has appeared with Synergy, Flederman, the Song Company and the Australia Ensemble and has toured with The Seymour Group. He was a soloist in the first Australian performance of the Bartók Concerto for Two Pianos. He has appeared in concert with Jane Manning, Wanda Wilkomirska, Clemens Leske, Geoffrey Gartner, Vivian Choi, Carl Vine and Ole Böhn.
He has toured the USA four times, most recently performing Bach’s Art of Fugue. He visits Indonesia annually and his fifth European tour in 2019 took him to Singapore, the UK, Norway and Germany where he performed Hindemith’s Ludus Tonalis as well as Bach's Art of Fugue, and included a residency at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester.
His solo repertoire ranges from Purcell to Carter and beyond, and includes contemporary Australian, Asian, European and American works, several of which he commissioned and premiered, including works by Peter Dart and Brad Gill.
His recordings of repertoire from the 17 th to the 21 st centuries have been released on Tall Poppies, Toccata Classics, CSM, Continuum, Biodiversity, Move and ABC Classics labels. His recent CD on the Toccata Classics label of music by Roger Smalley was Editor’s Choice in the 2019 Awards issue of Gramophone. His recent CD of music by Peter Dart was praised in the US journal Fanfare as being “stunning” and “brilliant”. A further CD of music by Don Banks has just been released in the UK. He is currently Associate Professor of Piano at The University of Sydney Conservatorium of Music.
http://www.danielherscovitch.com/
CONCERTS 2024-2025
FRIDAY 15th NOVEMBER 8PM: BEETHOVEN
Having performed Bach’s monumental Art of Fugue last year in his first performance at Tempo Rubato, Daniel Herscovitch now turns his attention to Beethoven’s almost equally monumental Hammerklavier Sonata.
The opening half of this evening’s program features three of Beethoven’s most unusual works: the Funeral March Sonata is the first of his experimental sonatas, and uniquely begins with a set of variations. This work was one of Chopin’s favourites and influenced his own Funeral March Sonata. This will be followed by his jeu d’esprit, the 5 Variations on Rule Britannia, and finally that collection of exquisite miniatures, the 11 Bagatelles, Op.119.
The Everest in Beethoven’s sonata output, the Hammerklavier Sonata includes his most expansive and profound slow movement, which is followed by a blistering fugal finale. Regarded in Beethoven’s day as unplayable, this sonata still posits unique challenges to all who attempt a performance of this masterpiece.
PROGRAM
Ludwig van BEETHOVEN
Sonata in Ab Op.26 "Funeral March"
5 Variations on "Rule Britannia"
11 Bagatelles Op.119
Sonata in Bb major Op.106 "Hammerklavier"
TICKETS $30 | CONCESSION $20
Saturday 24th May 2025 8pm: INDONESIA, OUR NEIGHBOUR
In this program of music from our nearest neighbour Indonesia, Daniel Herscovitch performs piano music by Trisutji Kamal, Yazeed Djamin, Ananda Sukarlan and Soe Tjen, Marching together with Indonesia-influenced works by Claude Debussy, Bela Bartok, Anne Boyd and Gareth Farr.
TICKETS $30 | CONCESSION $20
PAST CONCERTS
SATURDAY 13TH APRIL 2024: STUDIES IN BLACK AND WHITE
Works for piano by three generations of Australian composers, Don Banks, Roger Smalley and Kate Moore.
PROGRAM
Roger SMALLEY (1943-2015)
Albumblatt (1990)
Morceau de Concours (2008)
Don BANKS (1923-1980)
Sonatina in C sharp minor (1948)
I. Allegro con spirito
II. Largo con espressione
III. Risoluto – Lamentevole
Kate MOORE (b.1979)
Prelude (2019)
Roger SMALLEY
Three Studies in Black and White (2002-04)
Gamelan: for the left hand alone
Moto perpetuo for the right hand
Dialogue: for both hands
- interval -
Kate MOORE
Zomer (2006)
Roger SMALLEY
Piano Pieces I-V (1963-65)
Barcarolle (1986)
Kate MOORE
Lucidity: Eyes of Hands (2018)
BACH’S ART OF FUGUE 29 JULY 2023
ABOUT THE ART OF FUGUE
Program notes from Daniel about the work.
“The Art of Fugue preserves the purest spirit of the highest form of baroque art. This work is a philosophical breviary every measure of which invites reflection and thought.” (Paul Henry Lang)
In the last decade of his life Bach concentrated his creative powers largely on just six works: the second volume of The Well-Tempered Clavier, the Goldberg Variations, the Canonic Variations on Vom Himmel Hoch, The Musical Offering, the B Minor Mass and finally The Art of Fugue. In these six works he not only encapsulated all the discoveries and achievements of the previous forty years, but he also extended to the outermost reaches of what was possible the musical language bequeathed to him.
The German-Australian composer Felix Werder once drily remarked that one cannot fully understand a work of art until one knows who paid for it, words we forget at our peril. Remarkably however, Bach was not paid for any of the above works, and indeed barely made any profit by personally financing the publication of four of them. Famously, scarcely forty copies of The Art of Fugue were bought and later the metal plates used for the printing were sold as scrap. So clearly Bach was driven by fierce personal inner necessity to the composition of these late works.
The Art of Fugue consists of fourteen fugues, including two invertible fugues as well as four canons, which in baroque times were classified as strict fugues (fuga ligata). There are various contentious issues surrounding this work but fortunately, unlike the Cello Suites for instance, textual issues are not among these. We have an almost complete autograph manuscript in Bach’s own hand, as well as a list of corrections also in Bach’s hand and the original edition of 1751, part of which Bach had supervised before his death, as well as the second printing of 1752 with minor corrections, supervised by CPE Bach.
In spite of the work’s title Die Kunst der Fuga (Bach preferred the Latin spelling) it is noteworthy that in this work the fugues are actually called Contrapunctus. The significance of this is disputed, but the most likely explanation is that this was a gesture of defiance on the composer’s part, who was well aware that the art of strict counterpoint, of which he was the supreme master, was by then regarded as hopelessly old-fashioned. (In 1739 Johann Mattheson had described counterpoint as “just a barbaric name for polyphony, this antiquated, enervating and incomprehensible style”.) But Bach might also have been harking back to the works of Buxtehude entitled Contrapuncti, which he had heard on his visit to Lübeck in 1705. What is certain is that the contrapuntal mastery he had by then attained led him to ever more daring harmonic exploration, such that we find here progressions worthy of Wagner and even Reger.
The entire work is based on a theme which consists of the two building blocks of tonal music: a triad and a scale. Nothing could be simpler, and it strains credulity that Bach is able to erect this massive edifice on such seemingly unpromising material. It should also be noted that various other themes are introduced as the work progresses, but they are all derived from this original theme.
Contrapunctus XIV is the last fugue he was to write, and even in its unfinished state already one of his longest. Although he had often hidden the BACH motif in his music, here for the first and only time he overtly uses it as the third subject of this massive fugue. (In German nomenclature the BACH motif consists of the notes B flat, A, C and B.) It is this fugue which has come down to us incomplete, and again the reasons for this are disputed. We can now be certain that it was not because of his final illness, so the question remains open whether after his death a final page went missing, or whether he had indeed composed it but not yet written it down, or even deliberately left it incomplete. What we do know is that there are a maximum of forty-seven bars missing, and most probably this is the exact length of the missing portion. Furthermore it would have been here that Bach would have combined the main theme of the entire work with the other three themes of this fugue. Its incomplete state creates a musical, aesthetic, philosophical and even moral quandary for the performer and every possible option is open to serious objection. Most recordings and live performances leave this final fugue incomplete, but the performance today concludes with a convincing completion by the American pianist Lenny Cavallaro, partly based on the researches of the New Zealand musicologist Indra Hughes.
A further contentious issue is for what instrument/s Bach composed this work. It is written in open score, that is, one stave for each polyphonic voice, and unlike almost every other work by Bach, no instrumentation is specified. Already in 1751 it was advertised as being arranged in such a way as to be playable by two hands on a keyboard instrument, and this has led nearly all scholars to the conclusion that it was conceived for the harpsichord. However to assert that it is playable on the harpsichord is very different from saying that it was conceived for that instrument. Charles Rosen has tellingly pointed out that the question for what instrument the work was composed is not one that would have occurred to a musician of Bach’s time. The few fortunate purchasers of the original print would have played it on whichever instrument/s they normally played at home.
The fact that the first complete performance of this work did not occur until 1922 has often been the subject of scandalised comment. But Bach would never have envisaged a public rendition of any of these fugues, much less a performance of the entire work, which in any case was unthinkable in the context of the performance practice of the time. This was a work, each component of which was to be painstakingly studied and slowly absorbed at home. So that while the work resembles a cycle (rather than an anthology like The Well-Tempered Clavier), with its principal ideas undergoing constant transformation, in Bach’s time the unity of the work would have been present to the mind in an atemporal quasi-metaphysical idealised way.
Consequently an issue that faces the contemporary performer is the order in which to present these twenty pieces. It appears that for the printed edition Bach had in mind grouping the four less complex fugues together, followed by those fugues featuring, often in stretto, the augmented and diminished versions of the theme. Next were the double fugues, then the triple fugues followed by the two invertible fugues. The four canons were to be printed together after the final quadruple fugue. This logical ordering of the twenty pieces is unsatisfactory in a performance of the complete work, so in this regard it is noteworthy that there are two authentic versions of his Canonic Variations on Vom Himmel Hoch. His autograph version is an idealised symmetrical construction with the centrepiece being the most complex canon, its contrapuntal energy radiating both backwards and forwards to the canons encircling it, whereas the earlier printed version is more suitable for a live performance, with the various canons leading inexorably to this final climactic canon. It is also noteworthy that in the Goldberg Variations the five final variations also drive inexorably to the final quodlibet, and that its nine canons are evenly distributed throughout the work. In this performance therefore the four canons are similarly distributed between the groupings of fugues outlined above.
Another question for the performer is the Affekt or character of each fugue. Die Kunst der Fuga is a work of high art of the utmost seriousness, but this does not mean that each individual fugue must be serious in its Affekt. Indeed, the late works of artists as diverse as Shakespeare, Beethoven and Goya demonstrate how pathos, humour, gravity, exuberance and tragedy are inextricably enmeshed in the deepest recesses of the human psyche.
DH
For further discussion of the various contentious issues surrounding this inexhaustible work see this article.