Wellington pianist Otis Prescott-Mason performs a recital at the Lewis Eady International Piano Festival 2023.
Otis Prescott-Mason Photo: Supplied / Otis Prescott-Mason
This was one of three concerts at the 2023 Lewis Eady International Piano Festival, which was held alongside the 2023 Lewis Eady National Junior Piano Competition.
Otis Prescott-Mason was the winner of the previous Junior Piano Competition in 2020 and then in 2022 he won the big sister event, the Lewis Eady National Piano Competition. He was born in Wellington and he studies at the New Zealand School of Music there.
Otis Prescott-Mason speaks with Bryan Crump
D SCARLATTI: Keyboard Sonatas in D minor Kk213 & D major Kk214
Sergei BORTKIEWICZ: Lamentations & Consolations, Nos 1-4
Sergei Eduardovich Bortkiewicz was born in 1877 in Kharkiv in what is now the troubled eastern part of Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire, although his parents were both Polish. This puts him just slightly younger than the other great Russian pianist composers Scriabin and Rachmaninov.
He studied piano and composition in St Petersburg and Leipzig. From 1904 he was living in Berlin, but the changing political landscape over the next half-century meant that he and his wife often had to shift their place of residence … back to Russia, escape to Constantinople after the Russian Revolution, Paris via Sofia and Belgrade, back again in Berlin between the wars and finally settling in Vienna for the last years of his life. He died in 1952.
His compositions are very much in the Romantic tradition after Chopin, Liszt and Tchaikovsky.
SCRIABIN: Four Preludes Op 22
SCRIABIN: Piano Sonata No 5
The Sonata No 5 is the first of Scriabin’s one-movement sonatas. He wrote it in 1907 having recently moved to Lausanne in Switzerland. His wife Tatyana wrote:
“We go out a little, having caught up on our sleep. We begin to look normal again. Sasha even has begun to compose – 5th Sonata!!! I cannot believe my ears. It is incredible! That sonata pours from him like a fountain. Everything you have heard up to now is as nothing. You cannot even tell it is a sonata. Nothing compares to it. He has played it through several times, and all he has to do is to write it down ...”
MOZART: Adagio in B minor K540
LISZT: Piano Sonata in B minor
Liszt's Sonata has attracted an incredible amount of commentary and musical analysis over the 170 years since it was written. It’s seen as being revolutionary in its form. It appears as one long movement without gaps but there are definite sections within that can be interpreted as movements within the whole... although there’s differing opinions on whether there are three or four of these movements ... depends on how you look at it. But Liszt’s ingenuity here was to cast it also as one large-scale sonata form with exposition, development and recapitulation.
That’s all for the more analytically-minded among you. For all of us, the work is breath-taking for its mix of beauty and power. One of the greats.
Recorded by RNZ Concert in the Lewis Eady Showroom, Auckland
Sound Engineer: Adrian Hollay
