When Kathryn Stott performed this programme at the Aldeburgh Festival in June 2024, it was billed as a concert of ‘Musical Postcards’. That’s a good description of a recital which explores the huge range of her repertoire, starting with the first prelude and fugue from The Well-Tempered Clavier by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) and ending with a brand-new piece by Graham Fitkin which was given its world premiere at the Aldeburgh concert on 21 June. Lili Boulanger (1893–1918) composed her Thème et variations in 1914 but the work remained unknown until its rediscovery led to its first performance (and publication) in 1993. The theme (marked ‘avec douleur, mais noble’) is presented without accompaniment and eight variations follow, each treating the theme (or part of it) in imaginative ways that are entirely characteristic of Boulanger.

Caroline Potter has noted that the work was modelled on the Thème et variations, Op. 73 by Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924) who was Boulanger’s teacher and a family friend. Fauré’s Barcarolle No. 4, Op. 44, was composed in 1886 and dedicated to Mme Ernest Chausson. Quietly poetic in mood, it is full of the rich harmonic surprises and fluid melodies that are so typical of Fauré’s music. Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) was one of Fauré’s most imaginative pupils and he wrote Jeux d’eau – among the most evocative and brilliant of all ‘water’ pieces for piano – in 1901, with a dedication ‘à mon cher maître Gabriel Fauré’.

Edvard Grieg (1843–1907) composed Wedding Day at Troldhaugen to celebrate his silver wedding anniversary with his wife Nina in 1896 and it was included in Book VIII of Grieg’s Lyric Pieces the following year, when it acquired its definitive title (Grieg has originally called it ‘The well-wishers are coming’). The Argentine Astor Piazzolla (1921–1992), creator of the nuevo tango which fused traditional tango with elements of jazz and classical styles, composed Milonga del Ángel in 1965, and it is heard here in a later piano transcription by the Japanese pianist Kyoko Yamamoto. Inspired by a visit to Leipzig in 1950 to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Bach’s death, Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–75) modelled his Preludes and Fugues Op. 87 on Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, even including some quotations as well as following Bach’s design of preludes and fugues in each of the major and minor keys. Completed on 23 February 1951, the D minor Prelude and Fugue ends the entire set with a stern prelude followed by a highly elaborate double fugue (which also includes allusions to Bach’s Art of Fugue) deploying a formidable array of contrapuntal techniques. The whole set was first performed in April and May 1951 at a private concert for the Soviet Union of Composers and heard in public in December 1952, played by Tatiana Nikolayeva, for whom the Preludes and Fugues had been composed.

Graham Fitikin (b. 1963) composed Scent in 2007, originally for the harpist Ruth Wall. The pianist Stephen Hough (b. 1961) included his hugely entertaining and ingenious transcription of ‘My Favorite Things’ from The Sound of Music by Richard Rodgers (1902–79) on one of his earliest recital discs, bringing Lisztian pyrotechnics to Broadway. When Caroline Shaw (b. 1982) composed Gustave Le Gray in 2012, she was inspired by Chopin’s Mazurka Op. 17 No. 4 – one of his most harmonically inventive earlier pieces – and included direct references to it in her own work. Shaw herself described it as ‘a multi-layered portrait of Op. 17 No. 4 using some of Chopin’s ingredients overlaid and hinged together with my own.’ The original Mazurka by Fryderyk Chopin (1810–49) was first published in Paris in 1834. It is a spellbinding kind of dance poem, full of ambiguity and quiet longing, some astonishingly daring harmonies and a trajectory which begins and ends in uncertain silence. Molly on the Shore by the Australian Percy Grainger (1882–1961) was based on two traditional Irish reels and written in 1907 as a birthday present for Grainger’s mother. He first composed it for strings, then made an orchestral version in 1914 and the present piano transcription in 1918. He later made further versions for military band (1920) and for two pianos (1947).

Carl Vine (b. 1954) is another Australian composer, and his Anne Landa Preludes were written in 2006 in memory of Anne Landa (who died in 2002 at the age of 55), particularly her passionate encouragement of young Australian pianists. The first of the preludes is ‘Short Story’ described by Vine as follows: ‘The prelude contains a story. But the drama emerges through its own internal logic rather than from a specific series of predetermined events’. Graham Fitkin composed Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly specifically for Kathryn Stott’s farewell recitals, taking his title from the euphemism used by Elon Musk’s SpaceX when its rockets blew up in 2015 and 2023 (though the phrase probably goes back to the 1960s when NASA used similar terminology to describe earlier explosions). As Stott said in a recent interview, ‘My one request to Graham was, this will be the last notes I play in public, so keep that in mind!’