Word: concerto
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...Intermezzi: he emphasizes inner (detractors would say "extraneous") voices, and takes unusually slow tempos. Still, taken on its own terms, the sonata is musically coherent and surprisingly lyrical, especially the Andante Molto second movement, which resembles more than faintly the slow movement of the composer's celebrated A-minor concerto...
...piano playing days then almost came to a halt, but an inspirational experience pushed Mia back to tinkling the ivories, this time for good. "One night I saw this 10-year-old performing a concerto with the Boston Pops: She was my age. That really struck home, and I was thinking, 'Boy, she is incredible.' She played a Haydn concerto, I remember distinctly. I was so impressed that right after that concert I started to practice and I said if someone at that age can be that good I really want to know how far I can push myself...
...Bolcom's concerto is indeed that. The composer is probably better known as the peerless accompanist for his wife Mezzo Joan Morris in their programs of American popular songs. But his spacious cantata on Blake poems, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, was in contention for 1985's Pulitzer Prize for Music and should have won. The concerto, although on a smaller, less ambitious scale, is typically eclectic in its welding of disparate musical materials into a distinctive, stylish whole. There is a vigorous first movement, which tips its hat to the opening of the Bartok Second Violin Concerto...
...that includes bongos, gongs, chimes, temple blocks, harp, amplified harpsichord and vibraphone but omits the orchestra's trumpet and violin sections. It is a felicitous concept, but, alas, the composer's rather dogged quality of invention is not up to his orchestration. Despite a sturdy reading from Carol, the concerto lacks the strong stylistic profile that might have made it memorable...
...20th century, says Stern, "is one of the richest periods in musical creativity." A discriminating advocate of contemporary violin music who has given premieres of concertos by William Schuman, George Rochberg and Krzysztof Penderecki, Stern has had a privileged view of modern musical history; in June he will premiere a work by Britain's iconoclastic Peter Maxwell Davies in Scotland. The phantasmagorical Dutilleux concerto was commissioned by Radio France in celebration of Stern's 60th birthday almost six years ago ("He had problems about coming to an end," says Stern, explaining the delay) and was first performed in Paris last...