Programme Notes for
The Joy of Music Festival 2026
13 October 2026
GIUSEPPE ANDALORO, Piano
1st Prizewinner, Hong Kong International Piano Competition 2011
The first half of Giuseppe Andaloro’s concert comprises wholly original keyboard solos and transcriptions. It opens with Johann Sebastian Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy & Fugue (BWV.903), an astonishing keyboard work that displays remarkable freedom in the fantasy, referred to as stylus phantasticus, giving the idea of free improvisation. This is followed by a strict fugue on a chromatic theme, straying away from the original key of D minor but finally returning to it after an incredibly far-reaching journey of tseeming onal dereliction.
The Austrian pianist Friedrich Gulda (1930-2000) comfortably straddled the worlds of classical music and jazz improvisation, and was renowned for eccentricity. In 1999, he announced his own death before turning up at a concert claiming a resurrection. He died a year later, this time for real. As a composer, his preferred idiom was jazz, evident by his Prelude and Fugue in E flat minor from the 1960s. A highly syncopated series of arpeggios gives way to a free-flowing and groovily rhythmic fugue, which breaks off abruptly to allow the performer a cadenza ad libitum to complete the piece. This was later popularised in performances by progressive rock supergroup Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Keith Emerson, pianist of the band, also improvised a prelude and fugue of his own in The Endless Enigma, in two parts from the album Trilogy (1972), which Andaloro also performs.
King Crimson is another British progressive rock band, formed in 1968 and had numerous revivals up to the present decade. Frame By Frame is a popular number from the early 1980s, written by Andrew Belew, Bill Bruford, Robert Fripp and Tony Levin, and is the title of The Essential King Crimson 4 disc box-set released in 1991.
The Italian Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583-1643) was one of the most important virtuoso keyboardists of the late Renaissance and early Baroque periods. His Aria con Variazioni of 1627 was regarded as the first known set of variations based on an original theme. The said theme, a slow Aria in D minor, is subjected to a number of variations including baroque dances, the galliard and corrente, and some of pianist Giuseppe Andaloro own individual touches no doubt.
Next, the sounds of French impressionism in piano music are explored. Un reflet dans le vent (Reflection in the Wind) is the eighth and final prelude of the set composed by Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) in 1928-29, an example of his early work influenced by Debussy and Ravel. Poetry and violence run in volatile tandem, as does the flashily splashy Jeux d’eau of Maurice Ravel (1875-1937). Its evocation of fountains was in turn inspired by Franz Liszt’s famously fluid Les jeux d’eau a la Villa d’Este from his final book of Years of Pilgrimage.
When jazzy piano strains are heard in recitals and competitions, high chance these were composed by Ukraine-born Nikolai Kapustin (1937-2020). He was classically trained, having been a student of Alexander Goldenweiser (who also taught Grigori Ginzburg, Lazar Berman, Tatiana Nikolayeva and many others) at the Moscow Conservatory. There is no improvisation in Kapustin’s meticulously notated scores, which include 20 piano sonatas and innumerable shorter pieces. Among his most popular are the Eight Concert Etudes Op.40 from 1984. Its final four studies are a varied lot. Raillery or Shuitka (No.5) refers to playful banter or teasing, delighting in boogie-woogie and stride ostinatos on the left hand. Pastorale (No.6) has a constant rhythmic drone in B flat major over which flights of fancy take place. Intermezzo (No.7) conjures the indolent atmosphere of a cocktail lounge, its ragtime rhythm gets worked up to a full-blown Broadway ending. Finale (No.8) is a relentless Presto that does not let up before its final cascade of chords.
The Piano Quintet Op.81 by Antonin Dvorak is by far the better known of his two piano quintets. An earlier quintet (Op.5), also in A major, remains relatively obscure. While the earlier work has Wagnerian influences, Dvorak is very much his own man in the later work, unafraid of displaying his Czech nationalism.
Over a rocking piano accompaniment, the cello sings a typically Slavic plaint as the opening movement’s first subject. Faster music follows, with a contrasting and folksy theme on the viola, upon which the sonata form is built. The slow second movement is a dumka, the melancholic Slavic lament, with its episodic shifts in mood. After its wistful opening comes a playful pastoral duet of two violins and a third theme, song-like and imbued with a heart-rending nostalgic quality. The last is worked up to a vigorous climax before closing on a peaceable note.
The final two movements are lively and animated, much in the spirit of Dvorak’s Slavonic Dances. First is the furiant, a fast Bohemian dance (which has nothing to do with fury or being furious!) with a slower central section based on the same theme. The finale further ups the tempo for a jolly country dance, even managing to fashion a fugue based on the dance theme. As the music winds down, the chirpy dance makes one last flourish to close the work on a cheerful note.
Programme notes by Chang Tou Liang