Word: concerto
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Mozart: Violin Concerto No. 4; Mendelssohn: Violin Concerto in E Minor (Jascha Heifetz, Sir Thomas Beecham, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra: Seraphim). Although Heifetz could sometimes be showy in the exercise of a most prodigious violin technique, his tone never lost its radiant silkiness even in the most difficult music. In these two performances (dating, from 1947 and 1949 respectively), the breathtaking Heifetz sound profits from Sir Thomas Beecham's restraining influence...
Shostakovich: Piano Concertos Nos. 1 and 2 (Seraphim). The frisky First Concerto, written when Shostakovich was 27, remains one of his most disarming works-especially when he plays it himself, as in these performances recorded...
With such kinetic qualities, Ogdon could easily have gone on to a profitable life of barnstorming the world with war-horse concertos. Instead, after sharing first prize with Vladimir Ashkenazy in Moscow's 1962 Tchaikovsky Competition, he became an evangelist for music that few other major pianists would touch. One of his best LP albums is devoted entirely to some of the piano music of Carl Nielsen (RCA), another to Ferruccio Busoni's hour-long piano concerto (Angel), a woolly and wonderful specimen of Germanic post-romanticism that includes a resounding men's chorus in the finale...
...good reason is that Ogdon is something of an out-of-the-way composer himself. His output already includes 20 works for piano, a string quartet and a brass quintet. His major effort so far is the Piano Concerto No. 1, a three-movement, 25-minute work that he performed brilliantly late last year before an enthusiastic audience in London's Royal Festival Hall. At Christmastime he recorded it for E.M.I, with the Royal Philharmonic under Conductor Lawrence Foster; Angel will be issuing it in the U.S. next fall...
...concerto has the youthful fault of jumbling together too many influences, but reveals Ogdon as an impressively forceful and colorful composer who-like Ogdon the pianist-has a flair for handling big and complicated structures without losing what the pop world would call the big beat. His writing for the piano is flamboyant, excitingly splashy but tamed by good taste. The expertise of his orchestral writing is remarkable-bold blocks of brass sound, piquant wisps of woodwind, supple simplicity in the strings. Perhaps the most important thing about his composition is that he has dared to opt for tradition over...