Chair of the UW piano program presents a program of works by French composers, including Fauré’s 6th Nocturne, Franck’s Prelude, Chorale and Fugue, Joël-François Durand’s Enfance: Quatre Tableaux, and works by Ravel, including Miroirs, and the two-piano version of La Valse. With guest pianist (and former student of Sheppard) ZeZe Xue.
Program
Nocturne, Opus 63 #6 in D flat (1894) - Gabriel Fauré
(1845-1924)
Enfance : Quatre Tableaux (Four Scenes of Childhood -2015) - Joël-François Durand (b. 1954)
Jeux (Games)
Rêves (Dreams)
Bataille (A Fight)
Les voyants (The Clairvoyants)
Prélude, Choral et Fugue (1884) - César Franck (1822-1890)
INTERMISSION
Miroirs (Mirrors - 1904-05) - Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)
Noctuelles (Night moths)
Oiseaux tristes (Sad birds)
Une barque sur l’océan (A boat on the ocean)
Alborada del gracioso (The court fool at dawn)
La vallée des cloches (The valley of bells)
La Valse (two-piano version – 1919-20)
with ZEZE XUE
Program Notes
This is the first all-French program that I’ve given in Meany since 2013, when I performed Debussy’s Études, Estampes, and Images I and II. The previous year, I had performed the two books of Debussy Préludes. For the present program, it has been fun to return after fifty-five years to my first (and only performances to date) of the Fauré Nocturne. Joël-François Durand’s Enfance is new to me, as is the Franck Prélude, Choral et Fugue. I performed Ravel’s Miroirs here in 2000, and I’ve done the two-piano version of La Valse more recently with my colleague, Robin McCabe, playing secondo piano. Tonight, with my former student, the brilliant ZeZe Xue, I will be playing primo piano, and thus will be able to say that I’ve finally learned the whole piece!
The Nocturne in D flat of Opus 63 is one of Gabriel Fauré’s most enduring works for solo piano. The legendary pianist, Alfred Cortot, waxed lyrical about it, as did Aaron Copland and, more recently, the well known piano critic, Bryce Morrison. The breadth and dignity of the opening theme is juxtaposed with a syncopated recitativo section, and intense harmonies portray recurring outpourings of passion throughout. The work comes full circle at the end - quietly, tenderly, and at peace.
Joel-François Durand’s Enfance is a delightful set of four pieces. In the first, Jeux, two kids are at play, each with an equal voice. They listen to one another, they cajole one another, they bicker, and in the end, they fight, until the lower voice has simply ‘had it’ and jumps to the lowest register of the piano. The upper voice follows, and they continue fighting until the lights go out! The dream world in Rêves is full of non-sequiturs, thoughts not quite completing themselves, minute variations in chordal progressions lending an uneasy feeling. Bataille brings the two kids back into battle, each one spouting seven-syllable iterations in major and minor seconds, all based on the well-known French nursery rhyme Ah! Vous dirai-je maman. The insistence in the upper voice is challenged by nagging staccati in the lower voice. The two voices begin to interrupt each other in sycopation, getting louder and faster as they grow further apart. Les voyants is a study in fleeting color, much of it in the upper register. A recurring D in the sixth octave mesmerizes the listener, and chordal anxiety at the end rises out of the mists.
César Franck was Belgian by birth and lived most of his life in Paris. Although trained as a pianist, he was better known as an organist and was associated for years with Sainte-Clotilde, a cathedral not far from the Invalides in the seventh arrondissement. The magnificent three-manual Cavaillé-Cort organ at Sainte-Clotilde undoubtedly played a role in his defining work for solo piano, the Prélude, Choral et Fugue of 1884, a period which also gave us his Variations symphoniques for piano and orchestra (1885) and the famous violin-piano sonata of 1886. The Prélude, Choral et Fugue includes many pages of improvisation for which Franck was well known. The grandeur of church music is heard in the chorale, the falling seconds in the fugue are redolent of moments in the great B minor Mass of J.S. Bach, and the combination of the opening and fugal themes in the final pages, orchestral in scope, might well have been inspired by the organ at Sainte-Clotilde’s. The dies irae is close at hand throughout, as is the augmented fourth, diavolus in musica. The work represents a stirring and intensely passionate monument to both the Baroque and the late Romantic.
Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy had an intense, if unrecognized, rivalry in the early years of the twentieth century. It is probably no coincidence that Miroirs appeared during the same decade as Debussy’s Estampes and Images I and II, although it is not for us to judge who ‘got there first’. Both were phenomenal colorists with enormous imaginations. Each of the tonal poems in Miroirs was dedicated to a different friend in his group of ‘artistic outcasts’ (their own description!) known as Les Apaches. Who can forget the Noctuelles flitting about, falling momentarily to the ground, subdued and sad but not defeated, then managing to revive themselves and flitting about a second time before vanishing into the night air? It is said that Oiseaux tristes was inspired by a blackbird at dawn in a forest close to Ravel’s house. The birds are frightened momentarily by an unknown source, then settle back into their mournful song. Une barque sur l’océan starts out benignly, but this boat must be pretty strong to withstand the intense storms at sea that are heard intermittently. Between storms, a distant voice cries out ‘Is anyone there?’ The work finishes with the same calm as it starts. Alborada del gracioso shows the Spanish court jester at his most capricious, a wild dancer at daybreak whose energy is both rigorous and boundless. La vallée des cloches juxtaposes layers of sound echoing from the surrounding hills, frequently through a shroud of mist.
La Valse was written at the end of World War I, during which Ravel lost several close friends. At times, it mirrors the cataclysm of the war itself and the collapse of the Old Order. It might also represent a night of debauchery, during which the guests become irremediably drunk and out of control. Perhaps it represents both. This is for the listener to decide!
—Program notes copyright Craig Sheppard 2025.
Biography
Craig Sheppard is Professor of Piano and Head of Keyboard at the School of Music of the University of Washington in Seattle. He is also Professor of the Advanced Innovation Center at the China Conservatory in Beijing, and his former students hold positions in conservatories and universities throughout the world.
A veteran of over fifty years on the international stage, in the past few seasons he has performed both Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes and Fugues and Bach’s The Art of Fugue in venues throughout the United States, as well as London, Manchester (UK), Jerusalem, Shanghai and Beijing’s Forbidden City Concert Hall, in addition to giving masterclasses at all of the above.
As recording artist, his LPs and CDs have appeared on the Sony, Chandos, Philips, EMI and AT-Berlin labels. He has published 26 CDs with Romeo Records (NY) since 2005, including the complete Beethoven sonatas (Beethoven: A Journey), the Six Bach Partitas, the Inventions and Sinfornias, both books of The Well Tempered Clavier, the last three Schubert sonatas, Liszt’s Années de Pèlerinage I and II, Debussy’s 24 Preludes and 12 Études (including both books of Images and Estampes), the 24 Preludes and Fugues of Shostakovich, Late Piano Works, Opus 116-19, of Johannes Brahms, and Bach’s Die Kunst der Fuge (The Art of Fugue).
Within the past two decades, he has traveled many times to the Far East for performances and masterclasses, including Japan, Korea, China, Hong Kong, and Singapore. He has performed at the Nehru Memorial Library in New Delhi, held a residency at the Melba Conservatory in Melbourne, Australia, and performed three times in New Zealand, including the first ever public performances of both books of Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier. Most recently, he performed the Complete Chopin Nocturnes at the Museu do Oriente in Lisbon.
Born in Philadelphia in November, 1947, Craig Sheppard graduated from both the Curtis Institute and the Juilliard School, studying with Eleanor Sokoloff and Sasha Gorodnitzki respectively. He also worked with Rudolf Serkin and Pablo Casals at the Marlboro Festival, and later with Ilona Kabos, Peter Feuchtwanger and Sir Clifford Curzon in London. During his early years, in addition to a successful début at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, he won top prizes in the Busoni, Ciani, and Rubinstein competitions. However, it was his Silver Medal at the Leeds International Piano Competition in 1972 that brought him to international attention. Moving to London in 1973 and living there for the next twenty years, Sheppard taught at Lancaster University, the Yehudi Menuhin School, and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. He also performed on multiple occasions with all the major British orchestras and with many on the European continent, under such conductors as Sir George Solti, Erich Leinsdorf, Kurt Sanderling, James Levine, Michael Tilson Thomas, Aaron Copland, Lord Yehudi Menuhin, Sir Charles Mackerras, Sir Andrew Davis, Sir John Pritchard, Esa-Pekka Salonen, David Zinman, and Leonard Slatkin. In the United States, he has performed with the orchestras of Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, San Francisco, Rochester and Seattle, and many others.
Craig Sheppard’s solo repertoire is eclectic, comprising nearly fifty solo recital programs and more than sixty concerti covering a wide spectrum within the Western canon. He also has a great love of chamber music and has collaborated with many great instrumentalists and singers, including Wynton Marsalis, José Carreras, Victoria de los Angeles, Irina Arkhipova, Ida Handel, Sylvia Rosenberg, Mayumi Fujikawa, the Cleveland, Emerson and Miró string quartets, and many musicians of the younger generation, including James Ehnes, Stefan Jackiw, Richard O’Neill, Edward Arron and Johannes Moser.
Sheppard is invited frequently to serve on the juries of distinguished international competitions, including most recently the Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition in Tel Aviv in May of 2021 and the National Society of Arts and Letters in Chicago in 2022. He also returns regularly to the Jerusalem Music Center to perform and teach, as well as the Chetham’s Summer School in Manchester, UK. With colleague Dr. Robin McCabe, Sheppard is Co-Founder and Artistic Director of the Seattle Piano Institute, a boot camp for aspiring young pianists held every July at the University of Washington, this summer celebrating its 14th anniversary.