Word: concertos
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...familiar concerto in sonata form, with balanced themes and brilliant solos, seems to be dead, but composers still wirte concertos in the original sense of the word: simple two tonial forces opposed to each other. Some recent releases showing the directions the concerto has taken in this century...
CARTER: PIANO CONCERTO (RCA Victor). Unlike many of his contemporaries, Elliott Carter writes music for standard instruments, eschewing electronic effects and aleatory experiments. What's more, he even provides a dramatic script for this concerto. An individual (the piano) is influenced by society (the orchestra), learns that it is being misled, and ends up alienated and alone. Piano and orchestra converse in different chords like different dialects and at different tempos; swatches of sound appear in what seem desultory then frantic patterns; and at times the script calls for practically the whole Boston Symphony to damp down the valiant...
SCHOENBERG: PIANO CONCERTO AND VIOLIN CONCERTO (Columbia). A new release bringing together two earlier performances of these ripe, satisfying examples of twelve-tone composition. With Robert Craft conducting the nadian Broadcasting Corporation Symphony Glenn Gould plays the rich, almost Brahms-like piano part in the first concerto, and Israel Baker tackles the difficult violin work in the second concerto. Both pieces demonstrate that the intricacies of the dodecaphonic scale in no way limit emotional expression. "If a composer does not write from the heart, said Schoenberg, "he simply cannot produce good music." Schoenberg did both...
Last week in Boston, he demonstrated with his new Piano Concerto No. 2 why it is that conductors, soloists and the public have only the kindest of words for him. He is not afraid of melo dy or tonality, and he has the courage to write in the familiar mainstream tra dition of Bartok and Prokofiev-the titters of twelve-tone, modified twelve-tone, post-Webern and electronic cliques notwithstanding. That is not to say he is old hat. Within the bounds of con ventional forms like the symphony, sonata, string quartet and concerto, Lees manages to be fascinatingly original...
...Second Concerto proves how well he has succeeded. Compounded of powerful short phrases, punchy accents and a kaleidoscopic array of rhythms, it motors through three movements and 22 minutes like an Orpheus in the underworld. The brilliant dialogue achieved by American Pianist Gary Graffman and Erich Leinsdorf's Boston Symphony showed that the trip was definitely worth the effort. "The simple fact," said Graffman, "is that Ben has written a major piano concerto, which extremely few people have done in the second half of the 20th century." With their hearty applause, Boston's audience agreed...