Programme Notes for
The Joy of Music Festival 2026
14 October 2026
Pascal Rogé, Elena Font & Logos Chamber Group
The first half of this concert is devoted to three famous orchestral works performed in versions for two pianos. One should not consider these as mere reductions, rather detailed frameworks upon which opulent orchestral textures were later added. In the case of Stravinsky’s infamous Le sacre du printemps, both the composer and his friend Debussy had famously worked on a four-hands version in 1912, which became the first edition of the work that was published.
Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of the Fawn) exists in Claude Debussy’s own arrangement where the familiar opening flute solo is heard played with a single right hand. Even the harp glissandi is omitted in this threadbare treatment which focuses mainly on the melodic material and luxuriant accompanying harmonies. Here, one gets a better idea of the composer’s original intentions
Debussy also wrote a four-hands score of his La mer (The Sea), however we hear Pascal Rogé’s own edition which he co-wrote and recorded with ex-wife Ami in 2013 on the Onyx label. While Debussy’s orchestral colours are difficult to translate to just two pianos, this version succeeds by casting a laser-like focus on its melodic content and harmonic intricacies. Colours elucidated from both keyboards often surpass those of Debussy’s own monochromatic edition. Its three movements are titled De l'aube à midi sur la mer (From Dawn to Midday on the Sea), Jeux de vagues (Play of the Waves) and Dialogue du vent et de la mer (Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea).
Igor Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) was the third ballet commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev and his revolutionary Ballets Russes, following The Firebird and Petrushka. Rite was composed between 1911 and 1913, first in a version for piano four hands This was performed by Stravinsky and Debussy at a private reading, the Frenchman describing it as “a beautiful nightmare”. The ballet comprised two parts, Adoration of the Earth and The Sacrifice. Its story is set in the plains of primeval Central Asia, where the arrival of spring which was greeted with communal rituals of blood-letting in appeasement of the gods. The tribes gather in an elaborate procession, and from within the adolescents, a young female virgin is selected to be sacrificed.
The ballet was the last word in musical and theatrical savagery. Its first performance ended in utter chaos. Catcalls and jeers first erupted, then fistfights rained between rival factions in the audience, and hall lights were being turned on and off in an attempt to restore some semblance of order. The critics also had a field day with “The Massacre of Spring”. A concert performance a year later however saw it hailed as new music’s greatest hit, an unforgettable memoir of the turbulent and violent 20th century. The full orchestral score of Rite was not published until 1921. Performing on two pianos affords both performers the freedom of space and luxury of additional notes.
By the time French composer Gabriel Fauré’s First Piano Quintet in D minor was completed in 1906, he had adopted a more austere and seemingly elusive idiom in his compositions, far away from his earlier Belle Epoque creations. After a prolonged gestation of almost twenty years, it was premiered by the composer at the piano with the dedicatee Belgian violinist Eugene Ysaÿe’s string quartet. The work is in three movements, with the customary Scherzo omitted.
The first movement opens with a melancholic unison string melody heard over harp-like arpeggios on the piano. This is contrasted with a recurrent string motif and a more rustic melody played by the second violin and later the cello. All three interact in this sonata-form, which rises to an impassioned climax before calmly receding. The slow movement in G major establishes a gentle cantabile on the first violin which gradually builds up in intensity, but the overall mood never goes beyond that of uneasy repose. A spirit of levity possesses the Finale, where the piano begins a canon-like procession in D major. The strings open with pizzicatos and enter the fray in a myriad of ways as if in a series of variations. The restlessness gradually builds up in intensity before closing on an optimistic high.
Programme notes by Chang Tou Liang