Solo Recital · 2026 / 2027
Farewell, Absence, Return
Where farewell ends, the music begins
Les Adieux takes its title from Beethoven’s explicitly programmatic Op. 81a — but the evening it names reaches beyond farewell as event toward something less easily resolved. What this programme traces is the interior life of loss: the suspension that follows a parting, the slow displacement of familiar ground, the question of what, if anything, returns.
Each work marks a different moment in that arc. Beethoven appears twice on this programme — at the opening and the close — and the distance between the two works is one of the most instructive journeys in all of piano literature. Op. 81a, the so-called Les Adieux sonata, belongs to the composer’s heroic middle period: extrovert, formally transparent, emotionally legible. Op. 110, written a decade later by a man who was deaf, ill, and financially precarious, inhabits an entirely different register — inward, structurally radical, concerned with states of being that resist easy naming. To place these two works in the same evening is to ask a question about what experience does to a person, and to a musical language.
Between them, this programme places four works that might initially seem an unlikely constellation: a late Brahms intermezzo, Schumann’s final piano cycle, Janáček’s early modernist miniatures, and a student lullaby by the young Weinberg. What connects them is less a shared style or period than a shared preoccupation — with thresholds, with the interior life under pressure, with the kind of music that turns away from the public gesture and listens instead for something quieter and harder to locate.
Brahms and Schumann anchor the first half in the late Romantic world, though both pieces sit at its outer edges — written in states of withdrawal, valediction, or psychological extremity that push against the warmth and formal confidence we associate with that tradition. Janáček and Weinberg open the second half from a different angle entirely: a Czech composer whose language is rooted in speech rhythms and folk inflection, and a Polish-Jewish composer writing his very first opus at fifteen in interwar Warsaw. The juxtaposition is quietly startling. These are not works that belong together by any conventional logic of style or school. They belong together because of what they attend to.
The programme’s architecture moves from clarity toward complexity, from the nameable toward the unnameable, from farewell as an external event toward something more interior and less easily resolved. The recital closes with Beethoven’s Op. 110, whose finale remains one of the most searching in the piano repertoire: a fugue that collapses mid-course, falls silent, and rises again with its subject inverted — transformed by everything it has passed through — arriving not as a conclusion so much as a discovery: that continuation is possible, and that it looks nothing like what came before.
by the artist
From the beginning, it mattered to me that the Beethoven sonata "Les Adieux" should not be the theme of the evening, but its point of departure. It gives the programme its title — but it doesn't exhaust its meaning.
The meaning, for me, lies in transformation. Not in parting as an event. Not in farewell as a dramatic gesture. But in what happens to a person afterwards — what changes in us when we lose a familiar reality, a person, a place, a time, a former sense of who we are. What happens to memory. How what we thought was finished — said, endured, left behind — returns, and why it returns changed.
Departure, threshold, silence, return — a visual reading of the arc.
For presenters, press, and programme books.
On farewell as a state music can pass through.
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Piano Sonata No. 26 in E-flat major, Op. 81a, “Les Adieux” ca. 15 min
The biographical occasion for this sonata is well documented. In May 1809, as Napoleon’s forces advanced on Vienna, Archduke Rudolf — Beethoven’s most important patron and one of his few genuine friends — was compelled to leave the city. Beethoven marked the opening bars of the first movement with the words Le-be-wohl, syllable by syllable beneath the notes, and gave each of the three movements a title: Das Lebewohl, Abwesenheit, Das Wiedersehen. Farewell, Absence, Reunion.
It is one of the very few instances in Beethoven’s output where he attached a programme to an instrumental work, and he was characteristically particular about it: he objected to the French title Les Adieux on the grounds that adieux implied a formal public farewell, whereas Lebewohl — spoken from one person to another — was something altogether more personal.
The music bears this out. The famous opening motif, a falling three-note horn call, is not merely a theme but a kind of signature — it pervades the entire first movement, heard in different lights, at different distances. The central Abwesenheitis music of patient, aching suspension, time moving slowly through an absence that has no fixed duration. The finale’s energy, when it arrives, has the quality of something released rather than merely triumphant.
JOHANNES BRAHMS
Intermezzo in E-flat major, Op. 117, No. 1 ca. 5 min
By the early 1890s, Brahms had largely withdrawn from public life. He had stopped composing for several years following the completion of his Fourth Symphony in 1885, and when he returned to writing, it was in the most intimate possible forms — songs, and a series of short piano pieces that rank among the most concentrated music of the late nineteenth century.
The three intermezzi of Op. 117 were composed in the summer of 1892. Brahms told a friend they were “three lullabies of my grief,” and the first carries an epigraph drawn from a Scottish ballad translated into German by Herder: Schlaf sanft, mein Kind, schlaf sanft und schön — sleep softly, my child, sleep softly and well. The lullaby is addressed to a child who has been hurt; the mother who sings it can do nothing except hold the pain.
In Brahms’s hands the form becomes something stranger and more private than a lullaby conventionally is — less an act of soothing than a meditation on the limits of consolation. The middle section darkens considerably before the opening music returns, quieter and more distant than before. It is a piece that does not quite arrive anywhere, and knows it.
ROBERT SCHUMANN
Gesänge der Frühe, Op. 133 ca. 15 min
The circumstances surrounding the composition of the Gesänge der Frühe are among the most haunting in the Romantic repertoire. Schumann wrote the five pieces in October 1853, at a moment when his mental health had been deteriorating for some time. The following February he would attempt to throw himself from a bridge into the Rhine; within weeks he had asked to be admitted to a psychiatric clinic at Endenich, where he spent the remaining two years of his life. He never returned home.
He described the pieces as depicting “the feelings on the approach and advance of morning, but more as an expression of feeling than painting.” The title — Songs of Dawn — suggests something hopeful, or at least new. The music is more ambiguous. There is brightness in these pieces, even a kind of radiance, but it sits alongside something unsettled and not quite resolvable. The five movements vary considerably in character, from the still opening to the driven energy of the fourth, but a quality of suspension runs through all of them — the sense of a world caught between states, not yet fully arrived at the day it is moving toward.
Whether this reflects Schumann’s psychological condition or transcends it is a question the music leaves open. What is certain is that these are the last pieces he completed before the crisis that ended his creative life.
LEOŠ JANÁČEK
In the Mists ca. 15 min
Janáček was in his late fifties when he composed In the Mists in 1912, and still largely unknown outside Moravia. The international recognition that would eventually come — through the operas Jenůfa, Káťa Kabanová, The Cunning Little Vixen — was still more than a decade away. This was a period of personal loss and professional frustration, and something of that difficulty is audible in the music, though never in a programmatic or self-pitying way.
The four pieces are united by an atmosphere of tonal and rhythmic instability. Phrases begin and fail to complete themselves; harmonic resolutions are withheld or deflected; the barline asserts itself and then seems to dissolve. Janáček’s language here draws on his lifelong study of Moravian folk music and his distinctive approach to melodic speech — short, asymmetric fragments that accumulate meaning through repetition and variation rather than through conventional development. The result is music that feels genuinely exploratory, as though it is working something out rather than presenting a finished argument. The mist of the title is not a mood. It is a method.
MIECZYSŁAW WEINBERG
Lullaby, Op. 1 ca. 8 min
Weinberg wrote his Op. 1 in 1935, when he was fifteen years old and studying at the Warsaw Conservatory. It is student work in the most literal sense — an early exercise in a form with a long Romantic pedigree — and it would be misleading to read too much of what came later back into it. What came later was devastating: the Nazi invasion of 1939, flight on foot eastward into the Soviet Union, and the deaths of his parents and sister at the Trawniki concentration camp. Weinberg never saw any of them again.
The piece predates all of this. But it sits on this programme next to the Brahms Intermezzo for reasons that have nothing to do with biography. Both works are lullabies; both are written for solo piano; both carry the form’s characteristic rocking motion and its implied address to someone in need of comfort. The differences are just as instructive as the similarities. Where Brahms’s lullaby is suffused with late-Romantic harmonic warmth — however autumnal, however tinged with the knowledge that comfort is provisional — Weinberg’s is leaner, more exposed, less cushioned. Whether this reflects the composer’s youth, his particular musical inheritance, or something else entirely, the effect is of a kindred gesture heard from a greater distance, in cooler air.
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Piano Sonata in A-flat major, Op. 110 ca. 20 min
Beethoven completed Op. 110 on Christmas Day, 1821. He was fifty-one years old, completely deaf, in failing health, and in the middle of a period of creative activity — the late string quartets, the Missa Solemnis, the Ninth Symphony — that would prove to be among the most consequential in Western music. Op. 110 is the second of his three final piano sonatas, and in some respects the most intimate of the three: less monumental than Op. 106 (Hammerklavier), less concentrated and epigrammatic than Op. 111, it occupies a middle space that is entirely its own.
The first two movements establish contrasting worlds — a singing, improvisatory Moderato cantabile and a driven, almost grotesque Allegro molto — before the work arrives at its extraordinary finale, which unfolds as a single continuous structure across three marked sections. An Arioso dolente — a grieving song, marked ermattet, exhausted — gives way to a fugue that builds steadily before collapsing back into the arioso, now even more depleted. Then the fugue returns, but transformed: its subject is now inverted, turned upside down, and out of that inversion comes a gradual, cumulative brightening that carries the sonata to its close.
It is tempting to read this structure biographically, as the record of a man who had endured more than most and found, in the act of composition, some means of continuing. Beethoven himself left no record of his intentions. What the music makes audible is something more than personal circumstance in any case — a formal enactment of the idea that things can be worked through, that what has been broken can be reassembled differently, and that what emerges from that process, while it may bear no resemblance to what came before, can carry its own kind of authority.
LES ADIEUX · Live