Les Adieux
Les Adieux takes its title from Beethoven's explicitly programmatic Op. 81a — but the evening it names reaches beyond farewell as event toward something less easily resolved. What this programme traces is the interior life of loss: the suspension that follows a parting, the slow displacement of familiar ground, the question of what, if anything, returns.
Each work marks a different moment in that arc. Beethoven appears twice on this programme — at the opening and the close — and the distance between the two works is one of the most instructive journeys in all of piano literature. Op. 81a, the so-called Les Adieux sonata, belongs to the composer's heroic middle period: extrovert, formally transparent, emotionally legible. Op. 110, written a decade later by a man who was deaf, ill, and financially precarious, inhabits an entirely different register — inward, structurally radical, concerned with states of being that resist easy naming. To place these two works in the same evening is to ask a question about what experience does to a person, and to a musical language.
Between them, this programme places four works that might initially seem an unlikely constellation: a late Brahms intermezzo, Schumann's final piano cycle, Janáček's early modernist miniatures, and a student lullaby by the young Weinberg. What connects them is less a shared style or period than a shared preoccupation — with thresholds, with the interior life under pressure, with the kind of music that turns away from the public gesture and listens instead for something quieter and harder to locate.
Brahms and Schumann anchor the first half in the late Romantic world, though both pieces sit at its outer edges — written in states of withdrawal, valediction, or psychological extremity that push against the warmth and formal confidence we associate with that tradition. Janáček and Weinberg open the second half from a different angle entirely: a Czech composer whose language is rooted in speech rhythms and folk inflection, and a Polish-Jewish composer writing his very first opus at fifteen in interwar Warsaw. The juxtaposition is quietly startling. These are not works that belong together by any conventional logic of style or school. They belong together because of what they attend to.
The programme's architecture moves from clarity toward complexity, from the nameable toward the unnameable, from farewell as an external event toward something more interior and less easily resolved. The recital closes with Beethoven's Op. 110, whose finale remains one of the most searching in the piano repertoire: a fugue that collapses mid-course, falls silent, and rises again with its subject inverted — transformed by everything it has passed through — arriving not as a conclusion so much as a discovery: that continuation is possible, and that it looks nothing like what came before.
Programme
Part One
L. van Beethoven
Piano Sonata No. 26 in E-flat major, Op. 81a, “Les Adieux”
Das Lebewohl
Abwesenheit
Das Wiedersehen
J. Brahms
Intermezzo Op. 117, No. 1
R. Schumann
“Gesänge der Frühe” (“Songs of Dawn”), Op. 133
Im ruhigen Tempo
Belebt, nicht zu rasch
Lebhaft
Bewegt
Im Anfange ruhiges, im Verlauf bewegtes Tempo
Interval
Part Two
L. Janáček
“In the Mists”
Andante
Molto adagio
Andantino
Presto
M. Weinberg
Lullaby Op. 1
L. van Beethoven
Piano Sonata in A-flat major, Op. 110
Moderato cantabile molto espressivo
Allegro molto
Adagio ma non troppo
Arioso dolente
Fuga. Allegro ma non troppo
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More information
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Concert starts at 8 PM. Doors open at 7:30 PM.
Tickets can be purchased online or at the entrance. As seating is limited, we encourage you to book in advance or reserve your seat by email: [email protected]
As always, we will have a selection of fine wine, beer and other refreshments available for you before, during and after the concert. You are welcome to stay after the concert to chat with the artist and other guests!
Our doors will remain open until midnight!
PianoInsel • Martin-Luther-Straße 78, 10825 Berlin, Berlin, Germany
