Liao Hsin-Chiao piano recital's program note

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897): 

4 Klavierstücke, Op. 119 

1. Intermezzo in B Minor 

2. Intermezzo in E Minor 

3. Intermezzo in C Major 

4. Rhapsody in E-flat Major 

In the summer of 1893, during his holiday in Ischl, Brahms composed some of his final works for solo piano. The four Klavierstücke, Op. 119 belong to this late, inward world: music of great compression, where the smallest gesture can carry extraordinary emotional weight.

Brahms first shared these pieces privately with Clara Schumann, his lifelong friend and artistic confidante. In late May, he sent her the first Intermezzo, describing it memorably as “raining dissonances” — “an exceptionally melancholic little piece,” which had to be played “very slowly.” Clara responded with enthusiasm, and Brahms soon sent the next two Intermezzi and the final Rhapsodie, which he himself called “rude and raw.” 

The set moves from extreme intimacy to public force. The first Intermezzo seems almost to dissolve as it unfolds, its harmonies suspended between tenderness and unease. The second is warmer but still unsettled; the third, lighter and more elusive; and the final Rhapsodie breaks into a broader, more dramatic energy. Yet even at its most vigorous, Op. 119 remains deeply introspective. 

Brahms rejected more poetic titles for these late works, settling instead on the plain name Klavierstücke — “Piano Pieces.” But his contemporaries heard something far more personal in them. Eduard Hanslick described them as private monologues, music Brahms seemed to conduct “with himself and for himself.” In Op. 119, that private voice becomes one of Brahms’s last and most concentrated statements at the piano: melancholic, searching, and quietly radical. 

Robert Schumann (1810-1856): Waldszenen (Forest Scenes), Op. 82 

1. Eintritt (Entry)

2. Jäger auf der Lauer (Hunters on the Lookout)

3. Einsame Blumen (Lonely Flowers) 

4. Verrufene Stelle (Haunted Place) 

5. Freundliche Landschaft (Friendly Landscape) 

6. Herberge (Wayside Inn) 

7. Vogel als Prophet (Bird as Prophet) 

8. Jagdlied (Hunting Song)  

9. Abschied (Farewell) * 

For the German Romantics, the forest was never merely a landscape. It was a place of refuge, memory, solitude, mystery, and enchantment — a world where nature and inner feeling could meet. 

Schumann’s Waldszenen — “Forest Scenes” — belongs fully to this imagination. Composed rapidly between December 1848 and January 1849, the cycle followed soon after his opera Genoveva, whose final act is set largely in a forest. While working on the opera, Schumann reportedly surrounded himself with images of forests, stags, and hunting scenes to enter the right poetic atmosphere. That atmosphere seems to have remained with him, giving rise to these nine brief piano pieces. 

The cycle suggests an imagined walk through the woods: a gentle entrance, a hidden hunter, lonely flowers, a haunted place, a friendly inn, a hunting song, the strange and delicate Vogel als Prophet — “Bird as Prophet” — and finally a tender farewell. Though often idyllic, the forest here is never merely pretty; beneath its charm lies something mysterious and uncanny. 

Unlike Schumann’s more turbulent early piano cycles, Waldszenen speaks in a quieter, more intimate voice. Its difficulty is not technical brilliance, but poetic subtlety: rustling leaves, distant calls, half-heard songs, sudden shadows. The listener is invited not simply to observe the forest, but to enter it — and to hear how nature becomes a mirror of the inner life. 

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791): 

Fantasy in D Minor, K. 397 (385g) 

* 

Mozart composed the Fantasia in D minor, K. 397 in Vienna in 1782, soon after leaving Salzburg and beginning his new life as a freelance musician. It was a period of personal and artistic transformation: that same year, Die Entführung aus dem Serail brought him major success in Vienna, and he married Constanze Weber. 

The fantasia genre gave Mozart unusual freedom. Rather than following the fixed architecture of a sonata or dance movement, the music unfolds as if improvised: searching arpeggios, sudden pauses, dramatic outbursts, and abrupt changes of mood. This reflects Mozart the keyboard performer — a musician famous for astonishing listeners with spontaneous invention. 

The work also belongs to Mozart’s Viennese encounter with Baroque music. Through Baron van Swieten’s Sunday gatherings, Mozart immersed himself in Bach and Handel, absorbing their contrapuntal seriousness into his own dramatic language. In K. 397, however, the result is not academic: it is intensely personal, shadowed by the expressive world of D minor — a key Mozart would later associate with Don Giovanni and the Requiem.

Mozart left the piece unfinished, breaking off at an unresolved point; the ending commonly heard today was supplied after his death by August Eberhard Müller. Even so, the work has endured precisely because of its fragmentary, improvisatory power. It feels less like a polished object than a glimpse of Mozart thinking aloud at the keyboard — restless, theatrical, and hauntingly intimate. 

Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943): 

Variations on a Theme of Corelli, Op. 42 

* 

Rachmaninoff composed his Variations, Op. 42 in the summer of 1931, at a villa near Paris where he and his family often escaped the pressures of his concert career. Since leaving Russia after the upheavals of 1917, he had lived mainly as a touring pianist, and composition had become increasingly difficult. This work would become his final piece for solo piano. 

Despite its familiar title, the theme is not actually by Corelli. Rachmaninoff took it from Corelli’s famous violin sonata collection, Op. 5, where it appears as La Folia — an old Iberian harmonic pattern that had inspired countless composers for centuries. The title “Corelli Variations” therefore points less to the true origin of the theme than to the source through which Rachmaninoff likely encountered it. 

From this ancient pattern, Rachmaninoff creates a work of striking psychological range. The variations move between austerity, brilliance, turbulence, melancholy, and sudden lyric tenderness. At times the music seems almost classical in discipline; elsewhere it becomes unmistakably Rachmaninoffian, full of dark sonorities, restless momentum, and aching nostalgia. 

The piece also reflects Rachmaninoff the performer. He famously allowed pianists to omit several variations, and admitted that in concert he himself sometimes skipped sections depending on the audience’s coughing. Beneath that dry humor lies something revealing: Op. 42 is not a fixed monument, but a living, dramatic sequence. It transforms an old European theme into one of Rachmaninoff’s last deeply personal piano statements — severe, haunted, virtuosic, and profoundly expressive.