Maestro Nurhan Arman and Sinfonia Toronto present Sunny’s Beethoven, a concert that puts pianist Sunny Ritter under the spotlight in her return to the city. The concert takes place on May 3 at George Weston Recital Hall.
Sunny will perform Beethoven’s 3rd Piano Concerto. Dmitri Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony Opus 73 will round out the program.
Pianist Sunny Ritter
Born in Vienna, Austria, Sunny Ritter won her first gold medal for piano performance at age five, and began professional level training at seven at the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien (MDW). After the family moved to Canada, she continued studying at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto with Dr. Michael Berkovsky under a full scholarship.
At the Kiwanis Festival, she broke Glenn Gould’s old record to become the Festival’s youngest ever first prize winner. She’s since gone on to take home first honours at more than 30 competitions in North America and across Europe.
These days, she’s back in Europe and studying with Pietro De Maria in the bachelor’s degree program at the Universität Mozarteum Salzburg.
Studies, of course, take place alongside a growing performing career that has taken her from Montréal’s Place des Arts and Toronto’s Meridian Arts Centre to the Laeiszhalle in Hamburg, the Wiener Konzerthaus and the Golden Hall of Wiener Musikverein.
Sunny Ritter (13) plays Bach Partita No. 2 in C-minor, BWV 826 on December 13, 2024:
The Music
Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor, Op. 37
Ludwig van Beethoven began working on his Piano Concerto No. 3 in 1797 or so. While he’d push to finish it during 1800, in the end, it wasn’t quite completed for the premiere in April 1803. Ludwig himself was the soloist for the performance, and his part wasn’t quite fully written out. His friend friend Ignaz von Seyfried served as page turner for the occasion, and he later wrote,
“I saw almost nothing but empty pages; at the most, on one page or another a few Egyptian hieroglyphs wholly unintelligible to me were scribbled down to serve as clues for him; for he played nearly all the solo part from memory since, as was so often the case, he had not had time to set it all down on paper.”
Beethoven also improvised a cadenza for the premiere; he’d later write one for posterity.
Musically, the work represents something of a turning point between his earlier and later compositional styles.
Dmitri Shostakovich: Chamber Symphony, Op. 73a
Dmitri Shostakovich wrote his String Quartet in F major, Op. 73, in 1946. It was a work heavily influenced by the terrors and uncertainties of war and its immediate aftermath. Although WWII was officially over, Russia experienced a drought that led to famine for the better part of two years. The work’s movements reflect his emotions and thoughts on the conflict: I. Blithe ignorance of the future cataclysm; II. Rumblings of unrest and anticipation; III. Forces of war unleashed; IV. In memory of the dead; V. The eternal question: why? and for what?
Along with the dismal aftermath of war, and the famine, the Soviet government was beginning to turn against the composer.
Much later, in 1990, prominent violist and conductor Rudolf Barshai arranged Shostakovich’s String Quartets Nos. 3 and 4 for a chamber orchestra. The result was a deepened perspective on the original works.The chamber orchestra arrangement emphasizes dramatic contrasts to underscore the sombre contemplation of war and its aftermath. Shostakovich himself was said to have declared that they “sounded better than the original”.
- Find more details about the concert, and tickets, [HERE].
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