A work of searing Intensity and drama

One bite of a madeleine could transport the French author Marcel Proust across the decades to childhood afternoons savoring tea and cake with family. For composer Elena Kats-Chernin, it's the sound of Franz Liszt's music that summons the sights and sounds of youth — specifically her family's home outside of Moscow, where she often sat in rapt silence as her mother played the composer's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2.

Kats-Chernin was immediately drawn to the emotions Liszt conveyed in his hyper-expressive music, which she notes, "always reminds me of elements like wind, fire, and water." Those elemental forces are present in Big Rhap, commissioned and premiered by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in 2017, in which Kats-Chernin conjures the dramatic heights laced throughout Liszt's rhapsody. But the work is in no way a transcription or arrangement, as she's quick to point out.

"In writing this piece I am transferring my early memories of the spectacle, the merriness, and the hyperbole of what I saw and heard in my living room to paper. ... [it's] a sketch from my young self whose enthusiastic mind's ear was indeed seduced and enlivened by the high spirits of Liszt's vision."

With her signature mix of melancholy and lightheartedness, Kats-Chernin mirrors the emotional scope of Liszt's rhapsody, the way it evolves from grief to unbridled joy. In the swirling storms of sound conjured in Big Rhap, we can hear the obsessive music of motoric regularity in the Second Rhapsody that, to Kats-Chernin, has always suggested "both triumph and treachery" — as well as the sense of profound sorrow Liszt imbued in his work, which she likens to "the pain of a shivering and wounded heart."

The 27 piano concertos Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed over two decades proved a critical component of the Austrian's career. As a young piano prodigy, Mozart used his earliest concertos to showcase his unfathomable skills at the keyboard. And as demand for his music grew over the years, these works for solo piano and orchestra provided a key source of income — enough money that he could focus his efforts on his most beloved musical genre: opera. 

In fact, if you hear melodies of operatic grace and effortless lyricism while experiencing Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 22, there's a good reason: This music was circulating in his mind in 1785 while he simultaneously composed The Marriage of Figaro. Like the dramatic and musical innovations he brought to his operas, Mozart's 22nd Piano Concerto shows the composer digging beneath the surface of the instrumental concerto form — one primarily used in the 18th century as a vehicle for flashy technical virtuosity — to channel the human experience, to expose the beating heart of the music.  

The work's opening grabs the ear with a fanfare of pageantry and intrigue, setting the stage for the orchestra's exploration of two melodies of contrasting characters. But unlike traditional concertos of the time, where the pianist takes up the orchestra's themes, Mozart continues to introduce new ideas, as if to say, "I love the idea of traveling down this well-worn road, but what if we forged a new path instead?" It's these flashes of surprise that transform the movement into a rollercoaster ride of twists and turns. 

No moment in the concerto tugs at the heartstrings like the central Andante, as its melancholy song of longing slowly blossoms into a set of divine variations. Twice the woodwind instruments cut through the shadowy minor with shimmers of major-key light as they engage in intimate conversations with the solo piano, but the movement's brooding mood continues to dominate until the movement's final harmonies evaporate into silence.  

The Andante's deep midnight quickly gives way to the bright, galloping rhythms of the finale, where a theme reminiscent of horn calls alternates with a series of contrasting ideas. As we heard in the first movement, Mozart revels in delivering unexpected moments, and there are plenty to enjoy here — like when the vibrant, celebratory scene gives way to a dreamlike fantasy of delicate, glistening harmonies, or when the soloist embarks on not one but two cadenzas while the orchestra looks on in silence before calling everyone back to join the party. 

The months following Robert Schumann's marriage to Clara Wieck in September 1840 were prolific for the German composer. He completed three collections of art songs, began work on his Piano Concerto, received rave reviews following the premiere of his First Symphony, and finished the first draft of a mysterious "Symphony in D minor." In a diary entry from May 1841, Clara wrote about the new work her husband had begun:  

"Robert’s mind is very creative now, and he began a symphony yesterday which is to consist of one movement … I have heard nothing of it as yet, but from seeing Robert's doings, and from hearing a D minor echoing wildly in the distance, I know in advance that this will be another work emerging from the depths of his soul." 

The reception Schumann's new symphony received later that year, however, was completely unlike that of his First Symphony. Not only was the work upstaged by a piano-duo performance from Clara and Franz Liszt — two of the most famous piano virtuosos of their time — but audiences were also left baffled by what they had heard. 

For while the instrumentation and expressive romanticism of Schumann's D minor symphony were standard for the time, its form was completely radical: four interconnected movements that chart an emotional journey from sorrow to ecstasy in one uninterrupted flow of music. According to one critic, the work's structure "embarrassed a number of concert-goers, for many believed the whole symphony was a somewhat extended first movement." 

To make matters worse, Schumann's publisher declined to publish the new symphony, fearing that adding a new work to the composer's catalog — especially one that hadn't won over audiences — could jeopardize sales of the First Symphony. Disheartened yet hopeful, Schumann wrote to a friend: "This symphony did not have the same great acclaim as the First. I know it stands in no way behind the First, and sooner or later it will make it on its own." 

It would take Schumann more than 10 years to bring that premonition to life. In 1851, he extensively revised the work, applying much of what he had learned about orchestral writing from composing two new symphonies in the intervening years (published as his Second and Third Symphonies). In its revised version, Schumann chose to maintain the work's dramatic emotional content while greatly strengthening its inventive structure. 

What Schumann didn't back away from was the way he wove a set of musical ideas throughout the symphony: the brooding slow introduction that opens the work reappears in the second movement Romanze, where a solo violin dances a series of florid arabesques based on the winding melody, which in turn is taken up again in the central section of the third movement. And in the finale's introduction, Schumann incorporates phrases from the main theme of the first movement, but at completely different speeds. 

Schumann felt that integrating specific material across the symphony's four movements would imbue the work with a sense of profound forward motion, akin to an epic novel that grabs your attention with its moments of cliffhanger suspense and baffling surprises. And he was right: the end result is a work of unrelenting momentum — a rhapsodic expression that allows listeners to interpret the symphony's abstract narrative in their own way. 

Schumann's work paid off. When the revised symphony premiered in May 1853 at the Lower Rhine Music Festival, it proved a triumphant success with audiences, critics, and even Schumann's publisher, who finally published the score as Schumann's Fourth Symphony.  

Although Franz Liszt has become synonymous with Hungarian music, he was hardly entrenched in the cultural traditions of his homeland as a child. His family lived in a part of the Kingdom of Hungary that had been ceded to the Austrian Empire, and only German was spoken in the Liszt household. In fact, when the composer left the country at nine years old to study in Vienna, he spoke not one word of Hungarian.  

But Liszt maintained a fervent patriotism all of his life, both on and off the concert stage, writing: "I am Hungarian and know no greater pleasure than to present honorably the first fruits of my development and education as an initial offering of the most sincere affection and gratitude ... perhaps [my hard work and travels] will place me in the fortunate position to have become a branch to adorn my beloved country." 

As an adult, Liszt traveled across Hungary to learn more about the folk music of his homeland. During these travels, he became familiar with the traditional tunes performed by the Romani people, transcribing what he heard into a collection of Magyar dallok (Hungarian National Melodies) many of which found their way into a series of 14 Hungarian Rhapsodies for solo piano he composed between 1846 and 1885. 

 Liszt derived the two-part structure of his rhapsodies from that of the verbunkos — a Hungarian dance used in military recruitment beginning in the 18th century — which contrasts an opening section of sorrow and drama, known as lassan (slow), with an ensuing friska (fresh), which offers only music of exhilarating joy.   

Of course Liszt, forever the progressive Romantic, wouldn't have been happy composing a typical verbunkos. Instead he chose to reimagine the dance's possibilities by including moments of breakneck improvisation, wild dance rhythms, and profound introspection that amplified the music's emotional contrast and structural freedom. These hallmarks of Liszt's style are all on display in the Hungarian Rhapsody No. 1 (an orchestral arrangement of Hungarian Rhapsody No. 14 for solo piano that Liszt completed with his student Franz Doppler) — from the opening funereal march that emerges from the depths of the orchestra, through a series of dazzling, high-flying solos for flute and clarinet, and the feverish intensity of the final dance that leads us to the work's breathless conclusion.