PROGRAM NOTE
Ballade, a work of approximately 11 minutes, is a one-movement work, internally divided into three main parts that are played without significant break.
A pianist learning the work will be greeted, at the front of the printed score, by a Note to the Performer summing up much of what I would also hope for my listener to perceive, as follows:
My Ballade alternates sections where the performer is invited to apply great interpretive freedom, especially on the temporal plane, with contrasting sections that are quite precise and rhythmic. Although carefully notated, the “freer” sections (often marked Rubato) certainly allude at times to the kind of repertoire that is familiar to most concert pianists, doing so not by way of quotation but by the type of expressivity, affect, even passagework. Thus, the performer should think of the score as a “blueprint,” where the many descriptive words I have inserted throughout the score (ranging from sonorous, rubato, with great aplomb and resonance at the very top to with greater motion, in a series of ever-expanding “waves” in a later section) are intended to act as triggers for one’s sense of imagination and fantasy to take off and bring the music alive.
A further inscription on the score urges the pianist to
play fearlessly, exuberantly, but also tenderly!
—Shulamit Ran
INFORMATION
Commissioned by the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation
for Xiaohui Yang
World Premiere: January 21, 2020
Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall
New York City
Xiaohui Yang, pianist
Duration: c. 11’
SHEET MUSIC
Available from your favorite sheet music seller, or directly from Theodore Presser.