Tomasz Lis | Saturday, October 4, 2025 · 7:30PM | Salon Piano Series | Concert in Madison, WI

The Tomasz Lis concert featured the creativity of composers whose lives spanned 212 years: Scarlatti, Bach, Brahms, and Chopin. We also enjoyed hearing the results of creative instruments designers, whose pianos debuted in the late 19th century and the early 20th.

Normally when one sees two pianos on stage side by side, one expects to see two pianists, But the October 4 concert presented one outstanding pianist, who chose a different instrument for each half.

“I am spoiled,” said Lis, as he stood beside an 1886 Steinway and a 1907 Mason & Hamlin, both lovingly restored by the team at Farley’s House of Pianos.

“When I practiced yesterday, he said, “It was a revelation to me to see these instruments, and to see all the work restoring these pianos, and tuning them in a most unusual way (A= 435, and A=457). “This is unusual. Very few pianists are as spoiled as this.”

So I said to Tim, ‘Why don’t we use them both, and use them for different composers?’

Both instruments rang like bells. Their crystalline resonance was sustained, yet the keyboards’ pinpoint articulation intensified Lis’s rapid grace notes, foregrounded in the Scarlatti Sonatas.

Scarlatti’s influences include Spanish folk music, elements of Islamic and Moorish art, accents, and strange harmonies, Lis said. “One can imagine he must have been greatly inspired by Spain.”

Of Bach’s Italian Concerto in F Major, Lis said that this was “one of the few pieces that were published in Bach’s lifetime and it was instantly successful. Everybody thought it was absolutely perfect.”

Musicologists report that Italian concertos feature the contrasting roles of different groups of instruments in an ensemble; Bach imitates this effect by creating contrasts, using the forte and piano manuals of a two-manual harpsichord throughout the piece. A pianist must further translate this music for a single-manual instrument.

The Opus 118 was Brahms’s penultimate set of pieces, Lis said. “They vary in mood. Some are more reflective, some are more dramatic, some are perfectly serene.” He mentioned that the second Intermezzo, in A major, has been considered a secret love letter to Clara Schumann.

Lis concluded his performance with music composed by his fellow countryman, Fredric Chopin, who left Poland to settle in Paris at age 20.

“When I think of Chopin and the quintessential genre that represents him, it’s probably the Mazurkas and Nocturnes,” Lis said. “The Mazurkas are the most intimate expressions of his inner being. But the Nocturnes typify his love for the opera, and bel canto, and the beautiful, sustained, singing-like line in the right hand.”

Chopin’s Number 3 Ballade “is the most elusive,” Lis said. “It doesn’t reveal its ideas too quickly; it leads us astray, until the final explosion in the last few pages.”

Chopin is said to have preferred performing in the intimate atmosphere of the salon to the spectacle of the concert stage. And tonight, the Farley’s audience experienced that same intimacy.

The performance leads one to conclude that creativity manifests itself across time in many parallel paths. Some inventors compose music; other inventors create musical instruments. Tomasz Lis exemplified that parallel progression.

–Paul Baker