Word: concerto
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Jascha Heifetz: Sibelius: Concerto in D Minor (plus Tchaikovsky: Concerto in D Major) (London Philharmonic Orchestra; Seraphim; $3.98). Heifetz's emotional impact remains undiminished over nearly four decades. His playing is dictated by the mind, not the fingers. Sweeping all technical obstacles out of the way-the double stops, steep runs and three-octave leaps of the Sibelius-he makes sense of it all, minimizing the acrobatics and revealing the music's architecture...
Bouncy Spirits. The pity of it is that Franz did have talent. Last week in New York at Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival (Wolfgang Sr., that is), listeners got a rare chance to hear Franz's Piano Concerto No. 2 in E Flat, Op. 25. The soloist was the eminent Gary Graffman, that master of diverse styles for whom the score was reconstructed and edited from the original edition by the New York composer and musicologist Douglas Townsend...
Apparently written in 1818, when Franz was 27, the work shows the unmistakable influence of the concertos written by the elder Mozart a generation before. But then so did most everything written in the post-Mozart era. What is interesting about Franz's concerto is the way it has absorbed some of the innovations of Beethoven and Weber and gone on to anticipate some of the expressive, warm-blooded styles that would be heard later from the leading German romantics. There is a point in the first movement, for example, when the piano becomes a discreet accompanist (arpeggios mostly...
Obviously, Franz knew his trade and all the latest trends. The Concerto in E Flat (one of his father's favorite key signatures, by the way) makes up for a certain lack of profundity with its bouncy good spirits and melodic charm. Franz performed it frequently as a concert pianist, and if he was able to bring it off as brilliantly as Graffman did last week, he must have had a first-rate keyboard technique. He also played (and revered) his father's music and quite clearly was burdened by the comparison. Finally he had to get away...
...head when he was growing up on Chicago's South Side in the 1940s. Because his best friend had one, Herbie asked for and got a piano at age seven. By age eleven, he was good enough to play the first movement of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 26 in D with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. In high school he got his first taste of jazz listening to the records of George Shearing and Oscar Peterson and trying to duplicate their sounds. At Iowa's Grinnell College he began arranging and composing, even gave a concert with...