Pianist Jennifer Hayghe performs the first piece she ever heard

By Peter Alexander Jan. 30 at 9:45 p.m.

Pianist Jennifer Hayghe returns to one of the first pieces of music she ever heard when she performs Beethoven’ “Emperor” Concerto with the Boulder Chamber Orchestra and conductor Bahman Saless Saturday (7:30 p.m. Feb. 3; details below).

“My mother was an artist and she would stay home and paint, and listen to records,” she says. “The record that she listened to the most was Arthur Rubinstein playing the ‘Emperor’ Concerto. I have know it since I was in utero!”

In addition to the “Emperor”—Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major—the program features the Valse triste (Sad waltz) by Jean Sibelius, a melancholy piece that has often been used to create a mood for films and TV; and the only piece that Wagner wrote for small orchestra, his Siegfried Idyll.

While Hayghe admits that she doesn’t remember her earliest exposure to the concerto, she did study it in graduate school. “I think I’ve been playing this for over 30 years,” she says. “It’s very familiar to me, and it’s such a majestic piece. I’ve performed it both with chamber orchestra and with larger orchestras. I much prefer playing it with the smaller orchestra. It has a very different feel and a very different sound.

“As a pianist there are things that we have to do to project with full orchestra that you don’t have to do with chamber orchestra. So much of the piano part is really texture, as part of what the orchestra is doing. If you’re trying to create that texture with a larger orchestra, you’re playing very differently than you are if it’s a smaller orchestra and you’re able to blend in. I really enjoy playing it with the chamber orchestra.”

She particularly enjoys playing the concerto in Boulder, where she has so many friends. “I enjoy working with Bahman (Saless),” she says. “And the orchestra has lots of friends in it, so it will be a nice experience.”

One of Beethoven’s most popular pieces, the Fifth Piano Concerto has several unusual or unique aspects. “The remarkable thing in the first movement is that the piano starts, with fantastic virtuoso cadenzas, but never really gets to [play a cadenza] again,” Hayghe says. In most concertos, she explains, “the piano gets to do their big cadenza at the end of the first movement. But after [the opening cadenzas in the ‘Emperor’], the piano is reigned in, and much of the movement the piano is providing texture—all of that figuration up at the top of the piano.”

Continuing a description of the concerto, she points out that the second movement is a set of variations with some moments that sound improvised. It’s “very sublime,” she says, and “completely different from the first movement. Again, the piano is blending with the orchestra in this very textural way. The second movement then never really ends, it transitions with a half-step move into this joyful, joyous, energetic last movement.”

Finally, she says, “everybody has to watch out, and listen for that very unusual timpani and piano duet at the end of the last movement.

“I think one of the fantastic things about this piece is the way Beethoven deals with the dual nature of concerto, the fighting of the forces that concertos often are, and also the the ‘in concert’ part of it as well. You do hear a lot of moments of the piano and the orchestra playing against each other, and then those fantastic moments where they come together and the soloist is playing inside the orchestra, in a sense. I don’t think people are always aware of that.”

Sibelius wrote Valse triste as part of music he wrote to accompany the play Kuolema (Death) by his brother-in-law, Arvid Järnefelt. In the play, it accompanies the last dance among spectral figures by a dying woman that ends when a door flies open and death stands on the threshold. This one piece proved more popular than the other movements written for the play, and has been performed alone in concert and used in film and TV, from Charlie Chaplin’s Great Dictator in 1940 to an episode of Twin Peaks in 1992.

Wagner wrote Siegfried Idyll as a birthday gift for his wife Cosima. It was first performed on the steps of their villa in Switzerland on Christmas morning, 1870. It was written as a celebration also of the birth of their son, named Siegfried, and the music was later used in part of Wagner’s 1876 music drama Siegfried. The score includes pieces of personal meaning to Wagner and Cosima, including the German lullaby “Schlaf, Kinder, schlaf” (Sleep little child, sleep) that was associated with their daughter. Originally scored for 13 players, Wagner later arranged it for a small orchestra of 35 players for publication. 

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Boulder Chamber Orchestra, Bahman Saless, conductor
With Jennifer Hayghe, piano

• Sibelius: Valse triste
• Wagner: Siegfried Idyll
• Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major (“Emperor”)

7:30 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 3
Seventh Day Adventist Church, 345 Mapleton, Boulder

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