Ukrainian-American pianist Dmytrenko began studying piano at age four. She has won multiple First Prizes in piano competitions and performed extensively throughout the United States and Europe, including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and Paris’s Salle Cortot. Her recently released debut album features works by Medtner, Rachmaninoff, and Barber. Having received musical training in the Ukraine, at Juilliard, and the Royal Academy of Music in London, she is completing a Master’s at the University of the Arts in Berlin, Germany.

1. F-sharp Minor (Largo)
2. B-flat Major (Maestoso)
3. D Minor (Tempo di minuetto)
4. D Major (Andante cantabile)
5. G Minor (Alla marcia)

1. Maestoso—Allegro con brio ed appassionato
2. Arietta: Adagio molto semplice e cantabile

Just as Brahms’s Variations on a Theme of Haydn are not really based on a theme by Haydn, so Rachmaninoff’s Variations on a Theme of Corelli are not really based on a theme by Corelli. The haunting melody made famous by Corelli was already several hundred years old when he used it in his violin sonata, Op. 5, No. 12, subtitled Follia, of 1700. That tune, more commonly known by its Spanish name, La Folía, appears to have originated in 15th-century Portugal. It was originally a fast dance in triple time and was danced so strenuously that the dancers seemed to have gone mad—the title folía meant “madness” or “empty-headedness” (it survives in our usage as “folly”). Over time, this dance slowed down and became the famous stately theme we know today; and as a basis for variations it has attracted many composers, Vivaldi, Marais, Bach, Lully, Geminiani, and Liszt among them.

Rachmaninoff composed the Variations on a Theme of Corelli, his final original work for solo piano, in Switzerland during the summer of 1931. Variation form seems to have been on Rachmaninoff’s mind during this period: his next work, composed three years later, was the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, a set of 24 variations for piano and orchestra on another quite famous theme. The Corelli Variations are extremely focused: Rachmaninoff offers 20 variations in the space of only 16 minutes. He opens with a straightforward statement of the theme in D minor (the key in which Corelli set his variations), and the variations proceed at different tempos and in different moods; something of the range of their variety can be made out from Rachmaninoff’s markings: misterioso, scherzando, agitato, cantabile. An unusual feature of this set is that three of the variations (Nos. 11, 12, and 19) are marked as optional, and Rachmaninoff himself sometimes omitted various others during performances, depending on his mood. Following Variation 13, Rachmaninoff offers an unnumbered variation that he calls “Intermezzo” and which functions somewhat like a cadenza in a concerto. Full of mordents, arpeggiated chords, and unmeasured runs, it effectively blurs a sense of tonality, so that Variation 14—a return to the original tune, now in the key of D-flat major—sounds chaste and pure. This and the following variation, marked dolcissimo, form a nocturnelike interlude before the vigorous final five variations. The ending is particularly effective. Rachmaninoff concludes not with a bravura display but with one further variation, which he marks simply Coda. This quiet Andante finally fades into silence on pianissimo D-minor chords.

Rachmaninoff dedicated the Variations on a Theme of Corelli to his good friend (and frequent recital partner), the violinist Fritz Kreisler.

When Bach composed the 24 preludes and fugues of his Well-Tempered Clavier, he could have had no premonition how that number would imprint itself on future composers. Two decades later Bach himself wrote another cycle of 24 preludes and fugues, a century later Chopin wrote precisely 24 piano preludes, and early in the 20th century Debussy composed two books of 12 preludes each. At midcentury Shostakovich wrote a set of 24 preludes and fugues.

Rachmaninoff also wrote 24 piano preludes in all the major and minor keys, but he spread their composition out a little more over his career. His Prelude in C-sharp Minor (1892) quickly became so popular that audiences wanted to hear nothing else, and Rachmaninoff waited 11 years before composing the 10 preludes, each in a different key, of his Opus 23 in 1903. He then paused for another seven years before completing his cycle of 24 preludes with 13 preludes in the remaining keys. He published that set as his Opus 32 in 1910.

Rachmaninoff first performed the 10 preludes of Opus 23 at a concert put on by the Ladies’ Charity Prison Committee in Moscow on February 10, 1903. The preludes are brief and are often carefully unified around a melodic or rhythmic cell; many are in ternary form, with a modified return of the opening material. These preludes can also be extremely difficult to perform, with the music ranging from the brilliant and exuberant to the dark and introspective. Rachmaninoff did not feel that these preludes had to be performed as a set, and he himself performed (and recorded) individual preludes from the opus. This recital offers the first five preludes of the set.

Prelude No. 1 in F-sharp Minor features a steady accompaniment in the left hand, while the wistful main melody is heard quietly in the right; the music builds to a fortissimo climax, then falls away to conclude in the quiet manner of the beginning. The very difficult No. 2 in B-flat Major unleashes an explosion of sound. Marked Maestoso (“majestic”), it offers a chordal melody in the right hand above turbulent sextuplets in the left, and along the way Rachmaninoff writes chords that are rolled across a span of almost three octaves. The prelude drives to its close in a flurry of hammered octaves. Rachmaninoff gives No. 3 in D Minor the marking Tempo di minuetto, though this hardly feels like a classical minuet. Instead, the subdued opening is somber and precise, yet full of rhythmic energy, much of it coiled within the triplet in the left hand; Rachmaninoff calls for a repeat of this opening section before the music plunges into its vigorous second section. No. 4 in D Major, which Rachmaninoff marks Andante cantabile, does indeed sing, with the grand right-hand melody flowing along above triplet accompaniment. The music grows more complex, and soon Rachmaninoff is developing three separate strands: accompanying lines frame a melody in the piano’s middle register. The prelude drives to a great climax on a shower of massive chords, then falls away to a quiet close. No. 5 in G Minor is one of Rachmaninoff’s most famous. Marked Alla marcia, it opens with an ominous vamp that is in fact the first subject; a dark and dreamy central episode leads to a gradual acceleration back to the opening tempo. The ending is particularly effective: the energy of the march dissipates, and the music vanishes in a wisp of sound.

Between May and November 1803, Beethoven composed the Eroica, a symphony on a scale never before imagined. Nearly half an hour longer than his Second Symphony, Beethoven’s Third thrust the conception of the symphony—and sonata form—into a new world, a world in which music became heroic struggle and sonata form the stage for this drama rather than an end in itself. It was a world of new dimensions, new sonorities, and new possibilities of expression; and with the Eroica behind him Beethoven began to plan two new piano sonatas. These sonatas, later nicknamed the Waldstein and the Appassionata, would be governed by the same impulse that had shaped that symphony.

Beethoven began the Waldstein Sonata in November 1803, immediately after finishing the Eroica, and completed it in December. Proud of the new work, he played it to a friend. The friend replied that he thought the middle movement—a spacious Andante grazioso con moto—was too long. Beethoven exploded, as he often did in the face of such criticism, but once he calmed down, he began to sense that his friend was right. And so he pulled the Andante out of the sonata and replaced it with a new central movement marked Introduzione: Adagio molto. The new movement, quite short, functioned as an expectant bridge between the tense first movement and the powerful finale, and it helped make the Waldstein even more focused and compact. In its new (and final) form, the sonata was published in 1805 and was promptly recognized as the masterpiece that it is.

But Beethoven remained fond of the rejected slow movement from the sonata. He played it at social gatherings in Vienna and eventually published it under the title Andante favori (“favorite andante”). Hearing this Andante, we quickly recognize two things: first, that it was all wrong as the central movement of that powerful sonata, and second, that it is lovely music, fully worthy of Beethoven’s affection for it. His marking grazioso con moto is exactly right: this is indeed graceful music, and it needs to keep moving. The principal idea, a rocking, dotted little tune in 3/8, returns throughout, and Beethoven embellishes it as it proceeds. He introduces several subordinate ideas, but the gentle opening melody always returns in ever richer colors and accompaniment. The music remains in character throughout—it never turns animated or tense—and eventually it reaches a poised and nicely understated conclusion.

No wonder Beethoven liked to play this music at parties.

The years 1813–21 were exceptionally trying for Beethoven. Not only was he having financial difficulties, but this was also the period of his bitter legal struggle for custody of his nephew Karl. Under these stresses, and with the added burden of ill health, Beethoven virtually ceased composing in these years. Where the previous two decades had seen a great outpouring of music, now his creative powers flickered and were nearly extinguished; in 1817, for example, he composed almost nothing. To be sure, there was an occasional major work—the Hammerklavier Sonata occupied him throughout all of 1818—but it was not until 1820 that he put his troubles, both personal and creative, behind him and was able to marshal new energy as a composer.

When this energy returned, Beethoven took on several massive new projects, beginning work on the Missa Solemnis and making early sketches for the Ninth Symphony. And by the end of May 1820 he had committed himself to write three piano sonatas for the Berlin publisher Adolph Martin Schlesinger. Although Beethoven claimed that he wrote these three sonatas—his final piano sonatas—“in one breath,” their composition was actually spread out over a longer period than he expected when he agreed to write them. He finished the Sonata in E Major, Op. 109, immediately, but ill health postponed the other two. Notes in the manuscript indicate that Beethoven completed Op. 110 in December 1821 and Op. 111 in January 1822, but he was still revising them the next spring prior to their publication.

Beethoven’s final sonata is in only two movements: a powerful opening movement in two parts and a concluding movement in theme-and-variation form. Ernest Hutcheson notes that Beethoven’s performance markings for these three sections offer not just indications of speed but also the clearest possible suggestions about interpretation. The markings translate: “majestic,” “with energy and passion,” and “very simple and singing.”

The brief opening section—only 16 bars long—is largely static and serves to gather energy and prepare for the Allegro con brio ed appassionato, which leaps suddenly out of a quiet murmur of 32nd notes. The Allegro’s opening three-note figure sounds as if it must be the beginning of a fugue theme, but while there are fugal elements in its development, Beethoven never treats the theme as a strict fugue. This movement, built upon the continual recurrence of the opening three-note figure, seethes with an energy almost brutal and slashing.

By complete contrast, the final movement is all serenity. Beethoven marks it Arietta (“little aria”), and the lyric theme that will serve as the basis for variation is of the utmost simplicity and directness. The theme is followed by five variations, and these variations are not so much decorations of the theme as they are the organic development of it. Each variation seems slightly faster than the one before it (though the underlying tempo of the movement remains unchanged), and the final variation—long, shimmering, and serene—serves as an extended coda to the entire movement. This final variation employs trills that go on for pages. Can it be that Beethoven—who had been deaf for years when he wrote these works—made such heavy use of trills so that he could at least feel the music beneath his hands even if he could not hear it?

When Beethoven’s copyist sent this sonata to the publishers, they wrote back to ask if there was a movement missing—they could not believe that Beethoven would end a sonata like this. But this is exactly the form Beethoven wanted, and his final piano sonata ends not in triumph but in a mood of exalted peace.