Retrospective 2: Carl Banner, piano
House Concert at BannerArts, December 30, 2023
Allegro maestoso and Andante espressivo from the Sonata No. 3 in F minor by Johannes Brahms:
When I was 15, I competed in a piano competition in Texas. In the green room half a dozen pianists played for each other, and one guy, maybe from Ohio, played a piece that I couldn’t forget - the Andante from the Brahms Sonata Op. 5. I started looking at it as soon as I got home, and by the time I was 16 or 17, I had learned the whole sonata and performed it several times. Brahms wrote it when he was 20, and performed it for the Schumanns in 1853. It opens with a grand, quasi-symphonic, very Brahmsian explosion. The Andante is a tender, passionate love song. Poor Johannes! His love life was highly fraught. The following year brought Robert’s illness, his Werther-like infatuation with Clara, and thoughts of suicide. Fortunately, he survived and transmuted personal pain into a compassionate expression of the universal human experience.
Igor Stravinsky - Sonata in C (1923)
I was introduced to the Stravinsky Sonata by Leo Smit, a composer/pianist who had studied with both Stravinsky and Copland and was teaching at SUNY Buffalo. I was working on it in 1969, and in fact was playing it in a practise room at Queens College, when Marilyn emerged from her year-end critique and informed me that to her complete surprise and shock she had been thrown out of the Queens College MFA program that she had just entered that year. An all-male faculty said, literally, that she should go home, have babies, and teach grade school. Her proto-feminist works in torn paper, sawdust, and sewn canvas were considered un-serious and unprofessional. I invited her to come live with me in Buffalo, which she did. The following year, Leo Smit took a leave of absence, the SUNY campus was engulfed in riots and teargas, and I ended up drafted. We had to move back to Washington, where my draft board assigned me to alternate service as a hospital orderly. I didn’t get around to performing the Stravinsky Sonata until many years later.
Brahms - Ballade Op. 10 #4
The title page of the four Op. 10 Ballades bears the inscription “After the Scottish Ballad ‘Edward’”. This poem, which has a long and widespread folk history, is a bloody and Oedipal affair. Its relation to the music is conjectural, though one can summon images of heroism, courage, and conflict in the first three of the opus. When I first encountered the fourth Ballade, I was convinced that it was the saddest music I had ever heard. My perception of it has somewhat changed over the years, but I still hear it as the veiled revelation of some unspeakably tragic event, or the occluded image of some terrible trauma buried deep in the psyche.
Noam Faingold - Prelude: ‘The One for Whom the Song Dreams’
I asked Noam Faingold which of his pieces I should learn first, and he sent this Prelude. I was disappointed initially, because it had been written originally for cello and piano, and I would have loved to play it with Emma Johnson. But no, he insisted on the solo version. I have come to like it a lot - it is very lyrical, yet has some really gnarly harmonies that resolve into a satisfyingly affirmative conclusion.
John W. Work - Scuppernong Suite
Scuppernong is the name of a place in North Carolina, and of a variety of very large grape that grows there. John W. Work was an African American scholar, musicologist and composer. In this Suite he has distilled memories of the rural black church, children’s singing games, and the lure of the fast life in the sinful city.
Scott Joplin - Solace and Maple Leaf Rag
When I first tried to play a Joplin Rag for my parents, they said I should leave that music alone because only musicians with “style” should play those. They did not like jazz, but they thought they knew how it was supposed to go. I have come to think that at least for me, it is sufficient to just play these just like any other music.